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In the 1970s, a Dorchester kid named Donnie Wahlberg rode a bus more than half an hour each way across a city at war with itself over school desegregation, to a mostly Black elementary school in Roxbury. On those rides and in that school he fell for soul and rap. A few years later a Boston producer built a group around his rapping, and by 1991 Forbes was calling that group the highest-paid entertainers in America. This vintage New Kids on the Block pinback button carries a ©1989 date on its rim, the year it all broke open: five kids from busing-era Boston in front of a blue sky, one of them with a baseball bat on his shoulder.
The front is a color group photograph of all five New Kids. The one at left, in a red-and-black striped jacket, rests a yellow baseball bat across his shoulder; the one behind him wears a chain with a peace-sign pendant; the one standing at right has a small round badge pinned to his gray jacket lapel. The band name runs across the bottom in red capitals, NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK, with the O in BLOCK drawn as an open ring.
Two lines are printed in red around the cream rim:
The first is the maker's street address, 2011 Austin in Troy, Michigan, not a year. The second is the copyright line that dates the design. The back is cream plastic with a steel bar pin and clasp, and the button measures 1.5 inches across. It is new old stock, never worn.
That ©1989 line is the same copyright that runs across the New Kids' merchandise boom. Big Step Productions put its name on the 1989 NKOTB trading cards, an 88-card base set, on the 1990 New Kids fashion figures and on an official New Kids scrapbook. It also co-produced, with DIC Animation City, the New Kids on the Block cartoon series that ran on ABC from September 8 to December 14, 1990: 15 episodes in which the band appeared in live-action clips while other actors voiced their animated selves, each show ending on a moral lesson. Disney Channel reran it from October 12, 1991.
The maker printed its own address on the rim: 2011 Austin, Troy, Michigan 48083. The same Button-Up of Troy, Michigan name turns up on other novelties of the era, from an "Over the Hill" birthday button to California Raisins keyrings marked Applause/Button-Up. Troy grew from a crossroads called Troy Corners, which took shape after land purchases began in 1819, when Johnson Niles bought 160 acres; its settlers, many from New York, named it after Troy, New York and the ancient city of Troy. It was organized as Troy Township in 1827 and stayed a township for more than a century, until residents incorporated it as a city in 1955, largely to keep neighboring towns from annexing it. About 15 miles north of downtown Detroit in Oakland County, it boomed as a suburb, from 19,402 people in 1960 to 67,102 in 1980, and Kmart kept its headquarters there until 2005.
Producer Maurice Starr and his partner Mary Alford started the group in Boston in 1984, after Starr's split from New Edition, the teen group he had built before. Starr had built New Edition and was dismissed by that group in a dispute over money. Fifteen-year-old Donnie Wahlberg's rapping won Starr over first. Donnie's younger brother Mark came in and soon left, and so did Jamie Kelly. Donnie's friends Jordan Knight and Danny Wood came in, Danny earning Starr's approval by breakdancing, and Jordan's brother Jonathan Knight joined later. To fill Jamie Kelly's spot, Starr wanted a kid who could sing and hold a stage like a young Michael Jackson, and he found him in twelve-year-old Joey McIntyre of Jamaica Plain, who at first did not want to join because the others were all buddies and Dorchester felt too far from home. The older boys gave him a hard time until Donnie told him the group wanted him to shine.
Starr first called them Nynuk, pronounced "na-nook." Columbia Records wanted something else, and in 1986 they became New Kids on the Block, after a rap song Donnie had co-written for their first album.
Nynuk took any stage it could get: talent shows, social halls, retirement homes. The story the band tells is that they even played a men's prison where one of the Wahlberg brothers was locked up, and won the inmates over by throwing them cigarettes. At the Franklin Park Kite Festival in Boston it went the other way; the crowd started throwing things at them, and Danny Wood's face was cut. Donnie insisted they get back up and finish, later saying it was about believing in themselves and standing their ground.
Their 1986 debut album flopped. What turned it around was a pop station in Florida that started playing "Please Don't Go Girl," from the September 1988 album Hangin' Tough. The single climbed to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, and "I'll Be Loving You (Forever)" hit No. 1 in June 1989. "You Got It (The Right Stuff)" climbed to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Hangin' Tough went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, was certified eight-times platinum in the U.S., and has sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide.
On June 21, 1974, in Morgan v. Hennigan, federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that Boston's public schools were unconstitutionally segregated. Busing began that September. On the first day, only 13 of the 550 South Boston juniors ordered to Roxbury High showed up, state troopers were stationed at South Boston High for three years, and at least 40 riots broke out in the city between September 1974 and the fall of 1976. The courts kept control of the schools until 1988, by which time enrollment had fallen from 93,000 to 57,000.
The Wahlbergs, Danny Wood and the Knight brothers were all bused out of Dorchester as elementary-school kids. Donnie's route went to the William Monroe Trotter School in Roxbury, where he fell for the soul and rap his friends there loved, years before he rapped for Maurice Starr.
"Step by Step," written and produced by Starr, came out May 10, 1990 and spent three weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, also reaching No. 1 in Canada and No. 2 in the UK. It became the group's biggest-selling single, with each member singing one "step": Danny Wood the first, Donnie the second, Jordan the third, Joey the fourth and Jonathan the fifth. Starr had first recorded the song in 1987 with another of his groups, the Superiors, on Motown, where it went nowhere.
New Kids on the Block have sold more than 80 million records worldwide. The band won American Music Awards in 1990, and that summer's Magic Summer Tour grossed $74 million from 3.2 million fans. Their merchandise brought in an estimated $400 million in 1991, the year Forbes put them at the top of its highest-paid entertainers list, ahead of Michael Jackson and Madonna. The Official NKOTB Hotline, 1-900-909-5KID, took roughly 100,000 calls a week, and the fan club passed 200,000 members. Buttons like this one were part of that flood.
The fall came fast. In 1992 a music teacher accused them of lip-syncing; they answered on The Arsenio Hall Show, and he retracted the claim that April. After Face the Music sold poorly, the group broke up in 1994. Jonathan Knight, the oldest New Kid, was the first to leave, in 1994 during the Face the Music tour, and the other four disbanded shortly after. After the split Donnie Wahlberg followed his younger brother Mark into acting, and Joey McIntyre and Jordan Knight both recorded solo albums in 1999. They reunited in 2007 to record a comeback album, confirmed the reunion publicly in April 2008, and went back on tour that year. The Block debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, and the band released Still Kids in May 2024 and opened a Las Vegas residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM on June 20, 2025. New Kids on the Block are often credited with paving the way for the boy bands that followed, such as Take That, the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC.
The format goes back to Newark, New Jersey, where Benjamin S. Whitehead and Chester R. Hoag founded Whitehead & Hoag in 1892. On July 21, 1896, the company was granted the last in the series of patents that set the design still used today: a printed picture sealed under a clear cover over a metal shell, with a pin on the back. That same year William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan fought the first presidential race to lean heavily on campaign pins, and Whitehead & Hoag turned out more than 2,000 designs for them. The favorite story from that race: after a solar eclipse, McKinley's pins showed him eclipsing Bryan, and Bryan's side answered with pins promising to do the same to McKinley. It wasn't only politics, either. Right alongside the campaign pins, Whitehead & Hoag landed an order from the American Tobacco Company for millions of buttons to tuck into product packages, and made the first advertising buttons for national brands like Heinz Baked Beans, King Arthur Flour, Wilbur's Cocoa and Gold Medal Flour. The pins and back papers still went in by hand, so the company paid children and families around the Newark factory to do it, and kids would stop by after school to pick up a box of work. Ninety-three years after that 1896 patent, the pinback button was carrying five kids from Boston.
Is there a date on this button?
Yes. The rim is printed ©1989 BIG STEP PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Is "2011" on the rim a year?
No. 2011 Austin is the street address of the maker, Button-Up, in Troy, Michigan.
How big is it?
1.5 inches across.
What is the yellow object in the photo?
A baseball bat, resting on the shoulder of the member at left.
Who were Big Step Productions?
The company whose copyright appears on New Kids trading cards, fashion figures and scrapbooks of 1989-1990, and a co-producer of the band's 1990 ABC cartoon.
Where did New Kids on the Block come from?
Dorchester and Boston, where Maurice Starr and Mary Alford put the group together in 1984.
Has it been worn?
No. It is new old stock.
📌 Pin it on a jean jacket the way it was made to be worn, or set it in a shadow box with a cassette single or a ticket stub.
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