Seventy-five years ago the world came to the Nutley Velodrome as a premier venue for the grand sport of international bicycle racing. The greatest bike riders from around the world traveled to Nutley during the 1930s to compete at the wooden “saucer” built by businessman and cycling enthusiast Joseph Miele.
There are places in Nutley where you can really feel the past. But of them all, one of the richest is lower Park Avenue near the Passaic River, where some very important events took place.
Back in the 1930s, the area behind the Parks and Recreation Building was the site of the Nutley
Velodrome, one of the world’s capitals of bicycle racing at the time. In the 1950s, the land across the street that is now Glotzbach Park was the location of an artillery base, (Battery A of the 98th AAA Air Defense Battalion) called Camp Nutley, where more than 100 artillerymen manned the guns and radar to protect New York from attack by Soviet planes.
