We Get Email

POST SCRIPT - We get a random email every so often from some transplanted Brookdale Soda drinker who wants to know if the beverage is still available. WE welcome your emails. In fact, someone offered us two cases of empties whether or not there's a deposit available.

The last time this story - Memories of Brookdale Soda - was published, in 1996, for the second time in The Independent Press of Bloomfield, the soda pop distributor had been shuttered for several years. Brookdale was also the name of a neighborhood bordering Bloomfield and Clifton.

The site of the Brookdale soda depot at the Allwood Circle in Clifton is now a car parts store. The depot site on No. Sixth Street in Newark has been abandoned. In fact, you can see the back of the building from the Newark City Subway. The Home Liquors and Heller/Heller stores don't carry it either.

The Sinisi depot on Montgomery Street in Bloomfield has no sodas. And lastly, the Brookdale soda depot in Bloomfield near High Street and East Passaic Avenue has been converted to housing.

Anyway, 28 years ago, who would have conceived of a world without Brookdale Soda?

-- (July 16, 2004)

Uncle Owned Brookdale Soda Co.

My uncle Joe owned Brookdale. My father Angelo built the company as its general manager. My brother Anthony made the soda in the lab. I worked there when I was 11 at the store behind my uncle’s house in Bloomfield on Sylvan Way where the original plant was. The worked at the cash and carry store in Clifton down the street from the plant (now a Home Depot). I worked a few summers with my brother in the lab making the soda. I share many of the same memories of Brookdale soda growing up as well. Don’t forget the coco cream! Let me know if you want more words, I have a few to offer. Thank you for bringing back the memories.

Thomas A. L.