Ист-Ратерфорд дэлхийн хөлбөмбөгийн төвд

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The call came into the municipal office one day in 2020. An East Rutherford resident reported that an opossum was loose in her garage and that she wanted the new mayor to do something about it.

Jeffrey Lahullier did not go one-on-one with the invading marsupial, but he did not dismiss the caller’s concern. Lahullier always understood that his small-town job requires a willingness to address the trivial hassles that might impact only one constituent.

Even in a place that, six years later, is notarizing its decades-long run in the big leagues by hosting what FIFA calls “the largest sporting event in history.”

In advance of Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and Spain — the eighth World Cup match staged at MetLife Stadium (New York New Jersey Stadium in FIFA parlance) over the past five weeks — it should be noted that East Rutherford is not your typical borough, with 10,000-plus residents living on less than 4 square miles of land.

It is the home of the New York Giants, the New York Jets, the most prestigious leg of the Trotting Triple Crown (the Hambletonian), the second-biggest mall in the country (American Dream), and the former home of the New Jersey Devils, New Jersey Nets and Pelé’s New York Cosmos. It has hosted the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup Final, the Final Four, a Pope John Paul II Mass, an endless parade of iconic entertainers and bands, and a 1994 World Cup quarterfinal and semifinal.

The stakes are raised even higher Sunday afternoon, when East Rutherford will become the tiniest site, by far, to host the heavyweight championship of the planet’s most popular sport, a game expected to be watched by an estimated 1.6 billion people.

Fans around the globe might be somewhat familiar with the dateline, East Rutherford’s proximity to Manhattan, and its swamplands, once regarded as the nation’s largest and most toxic garbage dump and still linked to its Dante’s Inferno-like sights around the turnpike.

“At night,” the Atlantic wrote last summer, “the New Jersey Meadowlands can look like the entrance to hell.”

But during a sun-splashed day this week, East Rutherford, the community, looked a lot more Rockwellian than any potential Jimmy Hoffa burial ground. Streets of modest, well-appointed homes and shops. A father and his toddler on the playground. Children on their bikes. American flags here and lamppost portraits of local war veterans there.

Lahullier cites four family members among those veterans and speaks proudly of a hometown that gets lost in the shadows of New York and the chaotic tangle of major thoroughfares that transport tens of thousands of commuters through East Rutherford every day. The mayor would prefer that you see a place that the TV cameras forever ignore.

“Sometimes you’re watching a Giants or Jets game, and they’ll show you a shot of Manhattan, and the average person has no idea the game is being played in East Rutherford,” Lahullier said. “They think the game is taking place in New York City.

“We’re like that old Rodney Dangerfield line — I get no respect.”

This much is certain about the borough at the southern tip of Bergen County that is about to become the temporary center of the world:

It is worthy of everyone’s respect.

Celebrated citizens

Dick Vitale, East Rutherford High Class of 1958, coached the Wildcats to back-to-back state basketball championships in 1970 and ’71. His 6-foot-10 all-American, Les Cason, scored 45 points and grabbed 30 rebounds in a one-point comeback victory over Burlington Township in the ’70 final, and his point guard, Dwight Hall, scored on a fast-break layup in the final seconds of a one-point victory over Gloucester City in the ’71 final, punctuating a 28-0 season that helped land Vitale an assistant’s job at Rutgers.

He helped put East Rutherford on the sports map five years before the Giants played their first game in the Meadowlands.

As one of the most significant sports broadcasters of all time, and as a one-man juggernaut who all but created March Madness and has helped raise $126 million in the fight against pediatric cancer, the 87-year-old Vitale remains the most famous advocate of a town he sums up this way:

“Blue-collar people who work hard every day to bring home a check and put three meals on the table. East Rutherford people represent the fabric of America.”

Recently diagnosed with cancer for a fifth time, Vitale, the son of Garfield, N.J., factory workers with fifth-grade educations, grew emotional when discussing his fortune and fame. It all started, Dickie V said, with his East Rutherford ballplayers and his trusted assistant Bob Stolarz, and with a speech he gave after his second championship at the famed Candlewyck Diner on Paterson Avenue, where Howard Garfinkel, the founder of Five-Star Basketball Camp, sat in the crowd.

“Garf came up to me and said: ‘You don’t belong in high school. I’m going to get you a college job,’” Vitale recalled. “He got me that job at Rutgers and changed my life. I’ve exceeded every dream I ever had at East Rutherford.”

ESPN college basketball analyst Dick Vitale, an East Rutherford native, feels a deep pride in his hometown. (Grant Halverson/Getty Images)

The same can be said for E.J. Barthel, the 41-year-old running backs coach at Nebraska who has worked for the Carolina Panthers, Rutgers, Penn State and UConn. Barthel grew up in East Rutherford, with reminders all around him to think big.

“It’s a working-class community, and everyone has a sense of pride in it, even though you’re like a little brother to New York,” Barthel said. “East Rutherford is on a hill, and you wake up to see the New York City skyline every day. You see the biggest city in the world right in front of you … and there’s a sense of, ‘I can do this.’”

While playing his college ball at Rutgers and UMass, Barthel’s goal was to someday make a New York Giants team he jokingly referred to as “the East Rutherford Giants.” Sure enough, right after they won Super Bowl XLII, the Giants brought him in for a tryout in the spring of 2008 and again in 2009. Barthel didn’t make the team but made a play in that first camp that caught the head coach’s eye.

“Hey, Barthel,” Tom Coughlin barked in the cafeteria.

The kid could not believe Coughlin knew his name.

“That was a heck of a catch you had yesterday in one-on-ones,” he said before asking his prospective rookie where he was from. Barthel identified himself as a product of East Rutherford and Becton Regional, which was near the store where Coughlin got his coffee.

“I didn’t know that was a damn high school,” Coughlin said.

Barthel still laughs over the memory. Now he dreams of becoming a head coach successful enough to rival Vitale as East Rutherford’s most celebrated proponent.

“People don’t know this town exists where all these amazing things like the World Cup final happen,” said Barthel, who attended the Austria-Algeria match in Kansas City, Mo. “But I think it’s actually fitting that we have that underdog mindset, as a blue-collar town where we don’t need any flashy recognition.

“East Rutherford is the most unique town I’ve ever been to because we’re a gateway to the biggest and best city in the world, with so much opportunity eight miles away. I’m very proud to be from there.”

New Jersey first

Coby Hall was wearing a Hogan-style golf cap while lunching in the New Park Tavern, an East Rutherford institution known for its thin-crust bar pies. The nephew of Dwight Hall, the Vitale local legend, Coby has spent all of his 53 years in this borough with no intention of ever leaving.

“It’s a tight-knit community where I don’t want to say everybody knows everybody, but they kinda do,” Hall said. “Great policing and a great volunteer fire department make us a great community. Most people who grow up here don’t leave.

“This is a melting-pot area where we have all ethnic groups and races, and that makes it a great place to raise kids.”

Hall is very happy that the World Cup came to his sports-crazed backyard and that many visitors from overseas publicly expressed their love for an America they didn’t know existed. But he is not happy that general parking was shut down for the MetLife matches, hurting East Rutherford establishments counting on increased pre- and postgame business, and that FIFA didn’t engage more with soccer-playing kids in the area.

“And I hate when it’s New York, and then New Jersey,” said Hall, a former Giants locker room attendant. “Even if they just said New Jersey first on the stadium, it would’ve helped. I wished it would’ve had nothing to do with New York at all.”

Meadowlands misses

I was 12 years old when I first visited the Meadowlands to watch Pelé in 1977. After so many years as a fan and a sportswriter who covered NFL, NBA and college basketball games, practices and news conferences at Giants Stadium/MetLife and the old Brendan Byrne Arena/Continental Airlines Arena/Izod Center, I feel like I’ve spent half my life in East Rutherford over the past half century.

And yet my focus has always been in East Rutherford, not on East Rutherford. Until this week.

I didn’t know that this old industrial town wedged between the Passaic and Hackensack rivers was once home to a substantial bleachery that opened before the Civil War, or that it was named Boiling Springs Township in the late 19thcentury, or that syringe manufacturing was big business here in the 1900s.

I didn’t know that Steve Hamas, East Rutherford High grad, had split two fights with former heavyweight champ Max Schmeling in the 1930s before Joe Louis did the same, or that Carolyn Mezzadri, a lifelong English teacher and Knicks fan, saw the 1966 fire that destroyed half of East Rutherford High and forced students to use Lodi High for afternoon and evening classes.

I didn’t know that former Villanova star Tom Sienkiewicz was the son of a longshoreman and a ballboy for Vitale’s dynastic teams who learned how to shoot on a small slab of cement in his East Rutherford backyard, against a wood backboard, sometimes firing over a clothesline from the deep grass.

I didn’t know that Mychal Judge, the heroic New York City Fire Department chaplain killed at the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks, had been a priest at East Rutherford’s St. Joseph’s Church, or that the outgoing Federal Reserve Bank’s operations center a mile away on Orchard Street — scheduled to move to Warren, N.J. — was such a large and intentionally intimidating structure designed to protect the billions that regularly flow through there.

For the past four decades, I made the short drive south on Route 17, passed the Satin Dolls strip club that dutifully played the role of Bada Bing in “The Sopranos,” and took the Paterson Plank Road exit to go work somewhere on property run by the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority before turning around hours later and heading home.

In the rush, I missed out on treasures such as the Candlewyck Diner, still mobbed on football Sundays after 57 years in the game.

“It’s just our connection to the community,” Yanni Logothetis, representing a third generation of family ownership, said on my visit. “Obviously, we serve a great product, and we have our regulars we know by name, and we become friends with them.”

Bill Clinton made a campaign stop at the Candlewyck during his successful 1992 White House run. Coughlin used to hold meetings there in a private room in the back. Daniel Jones stopped in a lot as a rookie Giants quarterback.

But as Yanni’s mother, Vasilia, pointed out, the diner is just like the community it serves. It’s not about celebrity.

“This is a no-BS kind of town, nothing egotistical, just down-to-Earth people,” Yanni said.

“It’s a small town with a strong sense of pride, but I don’t get upset when they show the New York skyline on TV during games. I get it. I feel part of the metropolitan area, but maybe on TV they should occasionally go into the local pubs and restaurants and engage with the fans before games on Park Avenue.”

Park Avenue in East Rutherford, he meant.

The New York skyline is visible from MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford. (Angela Weiss/ AFP via Getty Images)

All worth it

Not New York. Mayor Lahullier attended MetLife’s first World Cup match — Brazil-Morocco on June 13 — and was seated next to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on his left and IShowSpeed on his right. When IShowSpeed was informed by followers that he was in Mamdani’s company, the stunned influencer and streamer introduced himself to the mayor, who graciously introduced him to Lahullier, who later laughed that he wasn’t exactly familiar with the young man’s work.

A good night ended with a not-so-good look outside the building as traffic came to a halt and scores of fans searching for their booked rideshares were left stranded. It looked like Uber-geddon. Well, East Rutherford had nothing to do with it, and things got better over the ensuing six matches.

All in all, Lahullier believes his 41-person police force has met the moment and then some. “The first thing I asked my police chief before the World Cup was, ‘What are we going to do for jail space?’” he recalled. “And it was never an issue.”

There have been headaches, of course, because it wouldn’t be the World Cup without them. Lahullier still worries about the safety of people trying to walk around the stadium in places they’re not supposed to walk and, of course, about the safety of his officers who will provide perimeter support Sunday to the state police working a massive sports and entertainment event to be attended by President Donald Trump.

The mayor also has to cover a $100,000 bill in overtime pay for his cops. “People ask me if the town benefits financially with a big windfall, and in the end, this will cost the town money,” Lahullier said. “But I don’t think we could’ve sat on our hands and done nothing.

“I want one child who’s been to East Rutherford to look back 25 years from now and remember they went to the World Cup final or a prelim game with their parents and saw this player or team score a goal and have that memory burned into the kid’s mind for the rest of his life.”

East Rutherford mayor Jeffrey Lahullier is guiding his town through the World Cup. (Ian O’Connor / The Athletic)

Lahullier has lived in East Rutherford since 1981. He spent 14 years as a councilman before winning his mayoral seat by six votes in 2019 and then winning again in 2023. He makes a salary of $8,000 to run the borough while also serving as president of the historical society and running his own mechanical construction and design company.

It’s all worth it, Lahullier said, when someone in the grocery store approaches to say thanks for a job well done.

“I’ll have a lot of pride when the World Cup is over,” he said, “knowing we pulled off what we did over these eight games.”

Fifty years ago, when Giants Stadium opened, former New Jersey governor Robert Meyner told The New York Times: “Even from the time of William Penn and Ben Franklin, we were considered a state between New York and Philadelphia. I’m pleased to see it’s worked out, and it augurs well for the identity of New Jersey.”

East Rutherford, the long-standing home office of that identity, is worthy of respect as a tiny town that has handled big-league pressure with the best of them.