It's not a far-fetched claim to say that the remains of Jimmy Hoffa, the historic union leader presumably assassinated in 1975, are found in Shrek's bog.
Or maybe under a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles roller coaster.
The Meadowlands wetland, in New Jersey, has been considered for years the resting place of the famous organized crime character, and today, in part, it is the space where characters from Dreamworks or Nickelodeon have their particular attractions within the American entertainment complex Dream, a gigantic enclosure with a shopping center enabled for 325 stores and restaurants, as well as several theme parks, movie theaters, theater, nightclubs and even a ski resort.
With its 28 hectares of extension (about 280 thousand square meters), American Dream -the American dream- has a name that sounds like a joke when the background to its long-suffering opening in stages is known, between 2019 and 2020, with new postponements due to the outbreak of the coronavirus finishing off a nightmarish succession of disasters.
The history of the center begins in the 1990s, when the Mills Corporation trust proposed a project in the administrative division of Carlstadt, in New Jersey, which quickly met with opposition from environmentalists and environmental conservationists in the area.
Despite the fact that Mills Corporation assures that the lands are already destroyed by the use of pesticides and the growth of invasive species such as the common cane, different groups and hundreds of people are organizing,
they collect signatures and wage a battle against the construction of the complex.
“Those swamps, as we called them as children, were the place where we went to play.
Suddenly, they began to occupy everything, they turned it into private property and they took it away from us,” Bill Sheehan, a resident of the place involved in the protests, recalled a few years ago in an interview with the local media.
North Jersey
.
View of the empty parking lot of the American Dream.TIMOTHY A. CLARY (AFP via Getty Images)
David defeated Goliath and the land where the Mills Corporation intended to establish its complex was protected by natural area status.
The company set its sights elsewhere in the Meadowlands: the East Rutherford area, where the State of New Jersey offered alternative territory to build on.
But they weren't the only ones interested.
NASCAR, organizer of the famous series car competition, proposed to set up a racing circuit.
A consortium of which the actor Paul Newman was a member, meanwhile, went further and proposed a project that, in addition to the racing circuit, included an amusement park, both interconnected by a monorail.
But finally Mills Corporation took the cat to the water in an operation later investigated by the payments of 1,
7 million dollars made to politician Joe Ferriero (according to the company, as a consultant).
No crime could be proven in Mills' case, although Ferreiro was convicted of other bribery and extortion charges and jailed.
When Xanadú ceased to be evocative
“In Xanadu Kubla Khan had a marvelous dome of pleasure built;
where Alf, the sacred river, flowed through chains immeasurable to man into a sunless sea”, began the writer and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his great poem
Kubla Khan
(1797).
Xanadú, the name of the Mongol emperor's summer residence, was the concept with which Mills Corporation worked as a trademark to define its project vision.
The trust had already baptized the shopping center that opened in 2003 in Spain with the name of that lost paradise: Madrid Xanadú, also with a ski slope and currently Intu Xanadú due to its acquisition years later by the Intu group.
Following the model of the Arroyomolinos center, the company decided that its gargantuan project in New Jersey would also have the name Xanadú.
And, similarly continuing in the footsteps of its Spanish experience, Mills Corporation would end up losing ownership of the building when it went bankrupt.
The Xanadu of New Jersey was purchased in 2006 for $500 million by another real estate investment trust, Colony Capital, which held it for a brief but well-remembered period of time.
“It is an offense to the eyes.
By far the ugliest building in all of New Jersey, maybe in the entire United States," Gov. Chris Christie would say.
"It's gross-looking," then-New Jersey Senate President Richard Codey ruled.
In the colorful facade proposed by the managers of Colony Capital, who, faced with the avalanche of criticism, asked for patience and recalled that the center was still unfinished, the tensions and the growing collective hostility towards a monstrous uprising that showed no sign of ever ending crystallized. .
Especially when,
The ski slope of the American Dream.
The opening kept being postponed and the name kept going around: from the initial Xanadú it had gone on to a Meadowlands Xanadú, which would later become simply The Meadowlands, until reaching the definitive American Dream, which would be the brand that the Canadian conglomerate would grant it. Triple Five Group, new owners of the project after obtaining a loan of 700 million dollars from Deutsche Bank.
They seemed to be the definitive ones, who would give him the final push.
And they began with a very goodwill gesture: confirming that they would paint the façade again.
The Meadowlands Curse
But the good will collided with superior forces.
Just one week after Triple Five Group expressed to the State of New Jersey its intentions to complete construction and develop the project, the heaviest snowfall ever recorded in the history of the Meadowlands area began and partially destroyed the ski area.
The Canadians reconfigured the project and set the opening date for 2014, on the occasion of the celebration of the Superbowl, the final match of the American football league that year would take place at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
Two teams, however, joined local protests over the traffic collapse that American Dream could cause when it was up and running and coincided with games at the stadium.
The dispute in court (finally resolved through a private agreement), the complexity of the construction and the successive redesigns make the dream of operating in 2014 vanish.
In the midst of so much delay, the conglomerate ensures the viability of the project by adding all the alliances it can.
In this way, a water park from Dreamworks, the animation studio for films such as
Shrek
,
Madagascar
or
Kung Fu Panda.
Other investors entering to finish tipping the balance of the complex towards leisure are Nickelodeon —which also hosts its own theme park, using the rights to its animated series, such as
SpongeBob SquarePants
,
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
or
Paw Patrol—
or LEGO, that installs a Legoland.
In the stores section, giants such as Zara, H&M, Tiffany & Co., Dolce & Gabbana, Primark, an H Mart of almost 11,000 square meters or a Toys'r'us of 6,000 are incorporated.
In addition, the New Jersey Walk of Fame and the first Oreo cafeteria in history are installed in American Dream.
In 2022, Sea Life, another park, opens its doors.
It seems that the project is no longer an ominous vortex of hardship and everyone signs up.
Only the public is missing.
From the initial Xanadú it had passed to a Meadowlands Xanadú, which would later become simply The Meadowlands, until reaching the definitive American Dream.
With a full opening aborted for the umpteenth time as a result of the pandemic, American Dream is finally a reality and operational.
However, the figures are far from making up for the tortuous road.
According to the local media NJ, during September 2021, just over 400,000 people attended.
The goal that its owners had set was 40 million visitors a year.
The prices are also not very popular, the day ticket to the Dreamworks water park costs 89 dollars (85.26 euros).
The leisure part, which occupies 55% of the premises, is the one that has had the most commercial pull at the moment.
It is estimated that throughout 2021, the center had losses of 60 million dollars, which are added to the debts of 1,200 million dollars accumulated from the construction, despite the fact that the State of New Jersey has forgiven more than 1.
With investors still far from recovering from the crisis caused by the coronavirus and the not encouraging analysis by Credit Suisse, which ensures that 25% of shopping centers in the United States are doomed to disappear in the first half of the 2020s, American Dream, valued at 5,000 million, needs several financial miracles to be profitable.
“If you're looking for a mall experience, a little shopping and a drink, any of New Jersey's dozens of other malls will fit your needs much better.
And if you are looking for entertainment, you can find it better, cheaper and open anywhere else”, said a devastating opinion column by journalist Katie Kausch in NJ, where she made particular emphasis on how, two years after its opening,
most of the complex still seemed to be non-operational, even though its managers claimed that between 80 and 90% of the store space was rented.
The reality is not at all rosy for American Dream.
Although, when it comes to talking about the American dream, reality is often overrated.
