East New York, Did It Work?

The 2026 FIFA World Cup kicks off next month, with eight games played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. This story is part of Gothamist's ongoing coverage of how local communities are experiencing the games.

The list of Kearny, New Jersey’s soccer achievements could fill an entire night of bar trivia.

Which local team won the country's first three national championships in the mid-1880s? Clark O.N.T.

What year was the town's legendary Scots American Club founded? 1931.

Which Kearny High School star would go on to captain the Men's National Team in 1994, the last time the FIFA World Cup came to the United States? The renowned goalkeeper Tony Meola.

A large framed photograph of Meola and the rest of that year's U.S. team hangs in the Scots American Club's trophy-filled bar room on Patterson Street in Kearny. Playmaking midfielder Tab Ramos and winger John Harkes also stare out from the picture in red-and-white-striped jerseys. They all grew up playing here.

“Three of them from this club were in that team,” beams Alice Duffy, a bartender at the Scots club for the past 25 years and a big-time soccer booster since moving to Kearny from Scotland nearly half a century ago. “They were amazing.”

For Duffy and other Kearny residents, the World Cup's kickoff at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium next month marks a kind of homecoming for American soccer. The sport gained one of its first U.S. footholds over 150 years ago in this industrial Hudson County town of 40,000 on the edge of the swampy Meadowlands.

That legacy has earned Kearny the nickname "Soccer Town USA," a moniker emblazoned on a scarf hanging near the Scots club entrance.

“It’s the cradle of American soccer,” said historian Tom McCabe, a professor at the University of Notre Dame whose documentary details Kearny’s legacy and impact on the sport.  "It came with the immigrants and it planted its roots and they've been here since.”

Those roots stretch back to the 1870s, when Scottish immigrants, drawn by plentiful factory jobs at the hulking Clark Thread Company mills along the Passaic River, joined company teams and formed clubs that played on scrappy fields wedged among the smokestacks — a sporting revolution amid the industrial one taking place in North Jersey.

The new game of “soccer” — a term derived by pulling “soc” out of its more formal name, "association football” —became the sport of choice among Kearny's immigrants, even as other pastimes, like baseball, American football, basketball and rugby flourished elsewhere in the Northeast.

In 1885, a U.S. national team played its first-ever international match near what is now the border of Kearny and neighboring East Newark. The site of the field is now a parking lot for the beloved Tops Diner. The old factories across the street are being converted into riverfront apartments.

Kearny later produced the first president of the original soccer governing body in the United States and multiple national team players. The town fielded more mid-20th century champions, including the Scots, who won five straight titles in the 1930s and 1940s.

Through the decades, the sport remained popular in Kearny and other nearby towns, like neighboring Harrison — a longtime rival.

“Kearny has been constant,” McCabe said. “There's no ruptures or disconnections. It was always there. You could always find a game. You could always find a team.”

Same streets where legends walked

Duffy never lost her native Glaswegian accent. On a warm April afternoon, she scrubbed the wooden bar and cleaned glasses at the Scots-American Club about an hour before the first rush of members arrived for a beer. Every inch of the walls is covered in historic photos, plaques and jerseys, providing comfort for regulars and curiosity for visitors.

She described one out-of-towner who recently visited the club after hearing for years about his great-grandfather’s playing days.

“ I was in here cleaning up,” Duffy said. “He goes, ‘I'm flying to California, going home, but my flight’s been delayed. I figured I’d come out the airport and I see a sign for Kearny.’”

Duffy said she had recently received photos of Scots club players from the 1930s from the local library, and he spotted his great-grandfather in the images.

“ He burst out crying,” she recalled. “I go, ‘Are you OK?’ He says, ‘I've never seen him playing. I can't believe it.’”

Nearly a century after those photos were taken, soccer still unites generations of Kearny residents, even as the town’s demographics have changed. U.S. Census data shows the majority of Kearny residents are now Hispanic.

Gone are the Scottish fish and chips shops. Today, a Brazilian hamburger joint, a Peruvian restaurant and a Colombian bar surround the Soccer Post, a shop selling bags, balls and boots — also known as cleats outside the United Kingdom and this corner of North Jersey — on Kearny Avenue, the town’s main thoroughfare.

Cristian Escandon, 21, works at the Soccer Post and also coaches in the town’s vaunted youth program.

He said his own Kearny soccer story traces back over a decade ago, when, at 9, he and his family moved to town from Cuenca, Ecuador.

A few years later, he and his older brother Jose played at Kearny High School, just like Meola and Harkes. His brother won a state championship with the school in 2017, later earning state Player of the Year honors from NJ.com.

Escandon was a ballboy for that title-winning team and four years later won a state championship of his own after a dramatic come-from-behind victory in the 2021 tournament semifinals.

He said the town’s soccer culture is unlike anything he has encountered elsewhere, and that he now regales younger players with tales of Kearny’s traveling fan army and the intense, winner-stays-on asphalt pickup games that older generations recounted to him.

“I talk the same way they talked to me about Kearny,” Escandon said.

He recited the local stars’ names from the 1994 national team — Meola, Ramos and Harkes.

“I'm walking in the same streets that they used to walk years back,” Escandon said. “Kearny is just different."

‘Rough and tumble’

Today, as in decades past, kids and adults still pack local fields, mostly refurbished since their days as roughshod patches of torn-up grass where players kicked up dust as they dribbled.

But the surroundings still retain their grittiness. Gunnel Oval, a multisport complex, sits on the banks of the Hackensack River, down a hill from a row of autobody shops. The patch of turf at Harvey Field is surrounded by trucking depots, industrial warehouses and mountains of rock and construction debris from the nearby stone and recycling facilities.

It’s a far cry from the glass-encrusted Manhattan skyscrapers visibly shimmering in the distance and the wealthier suburbs of Essex and Bergen counties a short drive away.

“It has a kind of rough-and-tumble aspect to it,” said Michael Mara, a Kearny soccer lifer who opened the Soccer Post in 2022 and also leads the town’s youth program. “It's quite funny when you're playing teams from ritzier areas and they come down to Kearny and there’s a scrap metal yard back here.”

“We love that. We wear it like a badge of honor,” he added.

It’s a testament to Kearny’s no-frills soccer culture, and a kind of Jersey toughness, embodied by the Garden State’s ongoing fight with FIFA over tournament planning and payments for transportation to and from MetLife Stadium on eight match days, including the final on July 19. And, even though no games are taking place in New York, Jersey residents have still had to fight for recognition after getting second-billing to the Empire State in World Cup promotional materials. FIFA has insisted on calling the venue New York New Jersey Stadium.

Kearny soccer has remained a key part of Mara’s life, even if he took a meandering path to the center of the city’s modern-day scene. After graduating from Fordham University, Mara, now 46, began a career on Wall Street. But he said he ditched the finance gig in 2020, weeks before the pandemic lockdown, to spend more time with his two sons and build a career around soccer.

In 2022, he opened the Soccer Post, where Escandon works, and took over the youth program, Thistle FC for boys and Paisley Athletic for girls, following in the footsteps of his father, who co-founded and led the club.

He was 14 during the last World Cup on U.S. soil, where he saw his own Kearny soccer idols take the field. He said he hopes the current generation of players can have the same experience — though this year’s team won’t include Kearny stars.

“It can be life-changing when the kids are seeing it, feeling it,” Mara said. “It leaves a lasting impact.”

This column originally appeared in The Politics Brief, our weekly newsletter on the people, power and policies that shape New Yorkers' lives.

Sign up to get the full version where you can ask questions, share news tips and weigh in on the conversation. Hits inboxes on Wednesdays.

When Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked whether he planned to ride the entire 40-mile route of the Five Boro Bike Tour, he seemed almost offended.

“Come on now,” he told Gothamist reporter Liam Quigley, who pedaled over to interview him on Sunday. “Can you imagine?”

Mamdani finished the ride, becoming the first New York City mayor to participate in the nearly 50-year-old annual event featuring more than 32,000 cyclists riding on car-free roads across the city. He was joined by many other cycling politicians, including Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, state Sen. John Liu, and former city Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s in a competitive congressional race.

For the first time, New York City has a mayor who has made riding a bike a seemingly genuine part of his political identity. On the campaign trail, the 34-year-old democratic socialist famously corrected a heckler who called him a communist by grabbing a Citi Bike and saying, “It’s pronounced cyclist.”

“I think it's taken a long time, but I think the politics have really caught up with the people,” said Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Not so long ago, a lot of these ideas seemed like they were crazy, and today, a mayor who rides a bike for fun and for transportation is just another part of New York.”

She said she recently spotted Mamdani, who has racked up over 3,000 miles on Citi Bike, “riding his bike like no one was watching.”

“He's riding everywhere every day, and even when people aren't looking,” she said.

Even the most hardened drivers concede that the streetscape now belongs to cyclists, too.

“They can pry my steering wheel from my cold dead hands, but even I have to admit that there is now an unavoidable proliferation of bike lanes,” said Joe Borelli, a former city councilmember from Staten Island. “Where it makes sense, it’s great. We just need to be thoughtful to the trade-offs, and there are always trade-offs.”

For years, mayors seemed convinced that the trade-offs for drivers were too great. In 1980, then-Mayor Ed Koch ripped out his own newly installed Midtown bike lanes after public outcry. Koch later tried to ban bikes in parts of Manhattan, triggering a backlash that unified cyclists and mobilized advocacy groups.

Bloomberg — not a cyclist but a helicopter-flying billionaire — took the first steps toward creating the current streetscape. Over his three terms, the city built more than 400 miles of bike lanes and introduced Citi Bike, the largest bike share program in the country. Mayor Bill de Blasio faced criticism for only moving quickly on street safety improvements after someone was killed. Mayor Eric Adams took office calling himself the “bike mayor,” but then slow-walked or reversed an array of projects.

Although cycling makes up a small piece of the city’s transportation pie, the addition of new bike-friendly infrastructure has led to a boom in its popularity. More than 28,000 daily bike trips were taken across the East River bridges last year, up from roughly 3,000 a day 25 years ago.

Randy Mastro, the former first deputy mayor under Adams, defended Adams’ decisions and said the administration expanded the number of bike lanes “by a lot.” According to Transportation Alternatives, Adams built more than 100 miles of protected bike lanes, far less than the 250 miles required under law.

“It’s a false construct to talk about who's pro-bike lane and who isn't,” Mastro argued.

He dismissed the new mayor’s bike riding as “Kabuki theater,” adding, “As if that means you're more committed to bikes than people who you know don't ride bikes.” (For the record, Mastro does not ride a bike, but he said he takes the bus every day. “Does that make me pro-bus or anti-bus?” he asked, smirking.)

Mamdani’s cycling bona fides will be tested as he weighs calls to expand the city’s network of protected bike lanes while contending with more and more e-bikes and scooters.

Five months into his administration, Mamdani has revived a protected bike lane along a stretch of McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn that prosecutors say had been tabled due to a bribery scandal in the Adams administration.

Several other redesign announcements from the Mamdani administration might be catnip for street safety types, but lack key details. The administration hasn’t said when it will begin work on the redesign of Grand Army Plaza. The start date for an overhaul of Park Avenue also hasn’t been disclosed (city officials said they’re still picking a final design). On Wednesday Mamdani hopped on a bike with kids on the way to school on Bergen Street to announce it will be upgraded into a “bike boulevard.” But plans aren’t coming until later this year, so it’s unclear what that redesign will actually look like.

Jon Orcutt, a former policy director for the city’s Department of Transportation and longtime biking advocate, said Mamdani needs to put bike lanes in places “where he has to actually put some political capital into it.”

For longtime city cyclists, the holy grail is Bedford Avenue, which winds through the Hasidic Jewish section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Last year, Adams removed protected bike lanes on Bedford after residents voiced safety concerns. It was political déjà vu: Bloomberg reversed course on a stretch of Bedford Avenue in 2009.

“We have a mayor who's a great communicator,” Orcutt said. “So let's use that on the hard problems, not the easy ones.”

Listen

We want to hear from you

This week, we’re wondering: Are bike lanes now a winning political issue?

We'll share responses in next week's newsletter. (Sign up!)

This week in New York politics

• President Donald Trump’s border czar is warning New York state officials that there will be consequences if they pass new laws to protect immigrants across the state. Here’s what he said.
• Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman is taking credit for resolving a controversy in Brighton Beach over an Uzbek pop star’s concert. Here’s the story.
• Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is pushing New York to join the national redistricting fight. Here’s who he recruited to help.
• Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani has been in the hospital dealing with a case of pneumonia. Here’s what else his spokesperson said.
• Recreational soccer players are asking the parks department to allow for more late night game permits. Here’s why.
• State Sen. Pat Fahy, a Democrat from Albany, wants to allow other local governments outside of New York City to opt into the pied-à-terre tax. Here’s why.
• A progressive candidate for Hudson County, New Jersey’s board of commissioners has the backing of an influential Democratic organization. Here’s why that’s so surprising.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Thursday announced a framework deal on a $268 billion state budget that includes money to help New York City and other municipalities close their deficits, adds limits on local police cooperating with federal immigration authorities and creates new rebate checks to help defray the cost of utility bills.

What Hochul described as a “general agreement” with legislative leaders would also roll back the state’s climate change mandates, reshape the state’s auto-insurance laws and eliminate an income tax on tips, she said.

But details on many areas still are not settled, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said soon after Hochul’s Thursday morning announcement. The Democratic speaker said Hochul spoke prematurely, and that nearly 50 items remain unresolved.

“There’s no budget deal,” he said. “We have a list of requests that we talked about last night when I left the leader's meeting. I said, ‘I'm fine if you say to the press things are close,’ but … I don't have a final (financial) picture.”

He said even the $268 billion total spending figure wasn’t settled.

Despite her projected $10 billion increase in spending from the previous year, the governor said the budget would make New York more affordable for its citizens.

“We're delivering on affordability, on safety, on childcare, on the environment and on housing,” Hochul said Thursday at the state Capitol. “This budget is the culmination of an ambitious agenda I laid out in January.”

Hochul hoped her announcement would break what’s been a weekslong stalemate over a final spending plan, which was due April 1. Heastie said he was sending rank-and-file members away from the Capitol, perhaps complicating negotiations on what is already the latest spending plan of Hochul’s tenure.

Even if there are no major changes to what Hochul announced, final details still need to be ironed out before the terms are written into legislation and put to a vote. Should lawmakers approve the bills as expected, it will be the most delayed New York state budget since 2010, when negotiations dragged into the summer.

Here is the status of what has been agreed to, according to Hochul.

Money for municipalities

Under the deal, the state will make billions of dollars available to New York City and tens of millions of dollars available to other cities to help them deal with ongoing financial struggles.

In New York City, that means $1.5 billion in additional aid and $1.2 billion for a childcare expansion. It also includes a tax on pricey unoccupied second homes that state officials expect to bring in $500 million a year for the city.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist and unlikely ally of the moderate governor, had sought steeper income and corporate tax hikes to fund even more programs. Hochul pared back that ambition, backing the so-called pied-à-terre tax instead.

But the final details of how the tax will be implemented still haven’t been hammered out, despite Hochul’s announcement Thursday.

State and city finance officials have struggled to come up with a reliable method for determining which second homes have an actual market value of $5 million or more, the threshold for qualifying for the tax.

The governor’s hometown of Buffalo is slated to receive at least $40 million. Albany, Rochester and Syracuse are also in line for additional funding, though final details have not yet been released.

Limiting immigration cooperation

Under the budget, state and local police agencies would be prohibited by law from contacting federal immigration authorities about people they encounter during noncriminal enforcement, like traffic stops.

Places with stricter sanctuary policies, including New York City, would continue to restrict a broader subset of coordination.

The deal also bans formal 287(g) cooperation agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and bars county jails from renting space to the agency.

Lawmakers agreed to versions of Hochul’s proposals to expand sanctuary locations, including schools and hospitals, where civil immigration enforcement is barred.

The immigration-related measures drew a threat earlier this week from Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s border czar. Homan threatened to send additional immigration enforcers to New York if state policymakers followed through with legislation to limit cooperation with ICE.

Utility rebates, climate change and more

Hochul first introduced her budget proposal in January, painting several of her priorities as a way to reduce costs for New Yorkers, or at least stem their growth.

As part of the budget agreement, she was able to convince legislative leaders to get on board with changes to the state’s auto-insurance laws that will limit payouts to people found mostly responsible for a wreck. But she agreed to tighter rules for insurance companies, who will have to seek prior state approval before implementing any rate hikes and face stricter limits on profits — both of which were priorities for lawmakers.

The insurance changes mark a major win for Uber, the ride-hailing app that spent more than $9 million on an advertising campaign urging lawmakers to get on board.

The New York State Trial Lawyers Association opposed the changes, arguing that they would take legal rights away from crash victims.

Lawmakers, meanwhile, got Hochul on board with rebate checks for New Yorkers dealing with soaring gas and electric costs. The idea to send $1 billion in checks to utility-paying households, depending on their income, was first proposed by the state Assembly and embraced by the state Senate.

Hochul and lawmakers are also set to eliminate a lengthy environmental review for some housing projects in New York in hopes of getting apartments and condos built more quickly, a move backed by Mamdani.

On climate change, Hochul insisted on scaling back a 2019 mandate that requires the state to cut its carbon emissions 40% by 2030, a goal the state was on track to miss. A separate mandate of cutting emissions 85% by 2050 will remain in place.

The move put Hochul at odds with environmental groups angered by her about-face on the climate mandates, which the governor had previously touted.

But Hochul’s administration warned that complying with the 2030 mandate had the potential to hike utility rates and gasoline prices, which ran afoul of her re-election campaign's affordability agenda.

“New York has led and will continue to lead on clean energy and climate. But reality is harsh," she said. "We can not meet the current timelines without driving energy costs higher. The facts bear that out, and I cannot let that happen."

Next steps

Hochul’s office and legislative staff will now work to write the deal into a series of nine bills that lawmakers will put to a vote over the course of multiple days.

Even before the deal was struck, legislative leaders expressed confidence that voting would take place next week.

”We're nearing the beginning of the end,” Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said Tuesday. “I really do believe that.”

This story has been updated to reflect Heastie's comments that a budget deal has not yet been reached.