“The 40 room mansion was built in 1888 by Gottfried Krueger (1837–1926), founder of Newark’s Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company and owner of several other breweries.[4] The construction cost at the time was $250,000. The mansion was sold to the Valley of Newark Scottish Rite Freemasons in 1926 for $100,000. A 700-seat auditorium was added to the mansion to accommodate for various meetings. The mansion was purchased in 1958 by Louise Scott for $85,000. Scott operated a beauty school out of the first floor of the mansion while keeping the upper levels as her private residence. The mansion was added to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic places in 1972. Scott died in 1982 and ownership of the mansion passed to the city of Newark.[5] In 1991, the New Jersey Historic Trust funded a bond for $625,812 to stabilize the exterior of the building.[6] The city of Newark matched that amount, and over the years devoted more than $4 million to turning the home into a center focusing on the black contribution to Newark’s development. The federal government contributed an additional $1.5 million.,[7] but afterer a decade of work, plans to turn the house into an African-American cultural center were frozen by the city’s Municipal Council, which refused to allocate any more money for the project.[8]”
