Dear Editor:
Thank you Marilyn Baer for your story on the closing of Biggie’s Madison St. location but there is a larger story missing from your piece.
When my wife and I moved to Hoboken in the mid 1980’s, we bought a small condo on Madison immediately next to Biggie’s which seemed to be the only place we could afford in Hoboken which was a far cry from the coddled, upper middle class city it is today. Third and Madison was described by old timers and the police as arguably the worst neighborhood in the City. Drugs were rampant and the area was marked by countless burned out building shells among graffiti littered walls and treeless, badly littered streets. Our friends and relatives thought we were nuts.
But in the center of this mess of a neighborhood was Biggie’s which has held on through the seventies and early eighties when police described riding down Madison Street with shot guns on their laps and older families were fleeing to Secaucus. Before the next generation had taken over, Brother and his wife tended shop, shucking clams, grilling sandwiches and serving thick red clam chowder from their “oasis”. Each night the place and sidewalks were scrubbed clean giving an air of respectability to an area sorely in need.
After City politics denied them the chance to expand to the forlorned restaurant space at Sinatra Park, Biggie’s eventually found a new location on Newark Street. Hoboken should forever be grateful to Brother and his family for their great contribution to the City and congratulated for their continued, hard earned success. May it continue for many years to come.
Hank Forrest