Better this time (From a story in The Secaucus Reporter)

Jan. 7, 1999

They say when it rains it pours, but this time of year, you would think that we would get snow, not almost four inches of rain over night, filling up the river like a shallow tea cup

Town officials kept telling themselves how lucky they were, how when a winter storm like this strikes during a full moon, you get hit hard when you live this close to a river like the Hackensack, and we did get hit, water flowing over the banks and through the reeds, and yes even into the streets, where people drive and children ride their bicycles and unlucky dogs wander looking for refuge.

What if the town had not made so many improvements over the years, especially in the soup bowl center of the town on streets with names like Humboldt, Golden, and Chestnut all might have been the name of ponds, not streets, and people needed boats not cars to get too and from their front doors.

New curbs, new drains, new sidewalks are the ammunition towns use to fight back against Mother Nature these days, as if life along any river anywhere in this part of the world could ever see victory in such a dispute.

But town officials keep calling it progress or an improvement, even though all know it is a battle that will be waged through generations, not merely years, and that in the end, storms will grow worse and more powerful, the full moon they fear will continue to wink through the thickening clouds as if laughing at these futile efforts, saying that all the flood control efforts will not keep back the tides, and all the sand bags and berms and the drains will only enrage nature more and in the end, water will still flow through the streets and people’s lives will be altered.

Secaucus is a maze of ditches and retention basins, opening and closing tide gates, and prayers of residents who hope this storm will like the angel of death pass over them this time, leaving them dry for a change.

“If not for the high tide, I think we would have controlled it nearly completely," Councilman Michael Grecco said, one of those brave souls who struggled to contain disaster in a town surrounded by water. Seven years ago, when I first started working here, reporting on the day to day battle here, storms roared through this world leaving people homeless in its wake, and during those years, DPW employees took to boats and backhoes and installed berms on those roads where water had ruined lives, roads with old names like Farm Road, or Acorn Road or Mill Ridge Road, all snug this time when the water came – not all, some still got wet, but not as bad, roads over which the lapping river still made its intrusion and still raised complaints, residents calling in a panic over the rising tides, seeing the brown water of the Hackensack creep slowly through their yards, if not the same burglar that stole their possession in the past, then near enough to scare them into thinking it might happen again, all praying that the dykes would hold back the worst and the pumps would put a brake to the slow, inch by inch advance.

For the most part, they did, so that when the rain stopped and people came out of their houses, they were grateful to God and to the more localized Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission, who had given the town the money to buy the pumps and build the dykes, but also had done so much to pave over this part of the world that the river had no place else to go but into the streets and yes, into people’s homes, and that maybe the town was spared this time, but what about the next time, when more gets paved over, and the water has even less place to go?

Town officials said frozen ground made absorbing a problem, but so did asphalt and concrete over places that were once meadows, where ditches cut through narrow gaps, but can’t handle everything running into them.

"Given the amount of rain that fell in such a short period of

time onto frozen ground, I expected a much worse situation," said Michael Gonnelli, head of the DPW here, taking note that some parts of town were not so lucky, especially those places were the drains into which the rain was supposed drain were below the level of the river, and that water came up out of them not into them, one more trick Mother Nature pulled, and will likely pull again: full moon, high tides, and over development.

First blush of winter

Nov. 15, 1980

It is a cold and sluggish world here today, unrushed by the insane urgency of cars on River Driver and the Outwater Lane Bridge into Clifton.

The river water laps lazily on the shore, stirring up bits of moist leaves. The catfish gravel in the mud for their last meals before seeking deep water, although this year that water is sparse, and the ever-hungry gulls swoop down often and rarely rise empty-beaked.

Even those who survive this hunt may not survive the deep freeze with the water so low so as to leave fewer rise to rise up with the coming of spring.

Yet, despite the cold the freeze here has barely started, easing in at the edges in an early season frost we all know won’t last, painting wrinkles on the face of the old river other seasons hide.

A car horn blares from the middle of the bridge, its echo resounding up and down stream like an alarm, soon duplicated by the insane need for drivers to catch the River Drive light before it turns.

The bridge walls drip rust, brown tears from exposed bolts that keeps civilization hinged, the low river exposing its underbelly other years could not, the brown rot at the bottom of those stanchions cracking from years of temperature changes, algae and pollution, giving evidence as to why the state needs to replace the bridge and widen it, to let more horns honk to get through the same light.

This is the most dreary time for me and the river, the brown time, the moment when the flush of fall fades before the chill of winter comes with too few reminders of the glory days behind, a handful of red berries, a smattering of yellow leaves, highlight perhaps by gray clouds over head.

It is at times like these that I feel brown inside and out, and chilled deeper even when the deep water comes, needing some deep water to settle in until the worst of winter passes.

New bridge; old memories

Nov. 17, 1980

Trolls don’t live under the new Wall Street Bridge, but it appears some of the homeless do – now that the county has finally put on the road deck and drought has made room by lowering the river.

Technically open, the bridge is hardly finished six months after the county said it would be.

It looks the way new houses look when a family is forced to move in before all the small details are complete, the ribs beneath the deck, long exposed on top and gone rusty for lack of cover have been pained green, through spots of rush still show through, and bring on a time when the county will have to replace the bridge again.

Everything else has a temporary feel, such as the lamp posts – which replaced the line of old posts – clamped onto the bridge on top of four by four pieces of wood, no double installed because the metal posts got backordered – so shaky a construction even the wrens won’t perch on them long, flying away each time a stiff wind blows and causes the whole thing to rattle. The gulls don’t perch on them at all.

The river hasn’t changed much except to grow even lower with the drought than before, exposing the cables at the bottom that look as slippery and deadly as eels – as if someone has sliced open a body’s muscles to expose the tendons – the slow trickle of remaining water like blood stained green by the endless deposit of poison from the chemical plant just up stream near the Monroe Street Bridge.

Strangely, I miss seeing the workmen who in the dead of winter huddled around oil can fire the way the homeless do now, bitching about the snow as they sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes and stamp their feet to keep their toes from freezing.

I stand at the new rail and feel their loss, as if some member of my family has just died – and this puzzles me. I even miss their mocking me as I jogged across the open walkway each morning – they gone on to build other bridges elsewhere while I remain married to this bridge and this river, perhaps forever.

Tony’s Old Mill

 (From The Secaucus Reporter, Apirl, 2000)

For more years than most people can remember, people used to come to Tony’s Old Mill to eat, drink and talk. Tony’s Old Mill Inn and Restaurant was a haunt of fisherman, boaters and old-timers, all of whom could still recall a far wilder life on the Hackensack River, when generations of children wandered the wetlands to fish, hunt and trap.

Long after the hunting ceased and the fish turned poisonous due to pollution, many still told tales of old exploits over meals and drinks, pointing to the nearby meadows and the waters of Mill Creek and the Hackensack River as if to pinpoint the exact location.

Surrounded on three sides by water and reeds, with a single long road leading to it from the area of Schmidt’s Woods,

Old Mill has always been a place of local secrets, where longtime residents used to celebrate holidays or just go for dinner.

While the building still stands among the ruins of boats, old tires, a boat launch and cat tails, no one has dined here since the management closed its doors nearly two years ago. Yet long before the doors closed and its kitchen stove grew cold, people like Captain Bill Sheehan and Emily Cattuna of the town’s Environmental Committee eyed the site as a possible historic landmark.

Cattuna was particularly anxious in 1996 to have the town purchase the property in order to preserve one of the few monuments left in Secaucus’ history,

“Too often, in our community, irreplaceable history is lost and/or buried, along with our most valuable wetlands, under mountains of trash or cement in the name of progress,” Cattuna said at the time.

Last week, the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission moved to make at least part of Cattuna’s dream a reality by joining Secaucus officials in an effort to restore the site and transform it to a viable recreation facility.

Last May – under the urging of then Mayor Anthony Just – the town passed a $5 million bond ordinance that put aside $850,000 for the purchase and possible preservation of open space.

“That was a figure negotiated by the previous administration,” said Town Administrator Anthony Iacono.

Last month, the Secaucus Town Council voted to appropriate $85,000 as a down payment on the Old Mill property. The  sale is contingent upon the property’s passing two levels of environmental contamination tests.

Although the town amended its open space ordinance earlier this year to include the purchase of property in the north end near Huber Street School for parking, making it seem as though the town was shifting its focus, the Old Mill deal was still on the horizon.

“When we amended the ordinance, we did not shift our focus from what we set out to do as far as open space is concerned,” said Mayor Dennis Elwell. “We are still committed to that idea, and the Old Mill is one of the places we had in mind.”

Historic location

The Old Mill is perhaps one of the few remaining historic sites left in Secaucus. Sawmills and gristmills operated in Secaucus since the 1760s, and one of the gristmills built in 1840 stood on the left bank of Mill Creek. By 1860, the mill was in ruins, and Cattuna said she could not determined whether the mill had ground wheat or was used then as a flywheel for the saw mills. Maybe both. The mill, however, was marked on a map from 1900, showing that the restaurant now occupies the original site.

Howard Elwell and Tony Calderone built the existing building in 1947. At the time, the area was largely desolate, flouting hopes that some of the original building remained as part of the existing structure.

When Arthur Treacy purchased the property in 1965, now-mayor Dennis Elwell worked there. Elwell said Treacy did some interior work, changed the front door and repainted the building. A large section of the millstone, which had been quarried as a single piece and shipped to Secaucus from Virginia, was found in a ditch near the mill in 1970 and was placed in the restaurant’s lobby. It was 44 inches in diameter. A few scattered pieces were found at the Stonewall Lane.

A satellite HMDC

Under the proposed agreement, the town is asking the HMDC for $530,000 from the HMDC’s Environmental Initiative Bond fund to pay for architectural design and construction management services on the project.

The new proposal for the 1.8-acre site would convert the Old Mill into a satellite HMDC Environment Center that will expand upon the HMDC’s school activities and complement wetland restoration work currently ongoing just up Mill Creek near Secaucus High School.

The project, if it becomes a reality, would fulfill – in part – some of the wishes expressed by the Secaucus Environmental Committee four years ago. They had stressed the need for greater access to the river, envisioning a walkway, park area and benches along the riverfront.

The committee has also recommended applying to the state and national registry for historic preservation and applying for grants to restore and rehabilitate the “Old Mill” building. This would be in conjunction with dedicating the Old Mill as a historic site, with a commemorative plague proclaiming it.

“What (the HMDC) is proposing, we proposed four years ago,” Sheehan said. “It is nice to see that the HMDC has finally come around to our way of thinking.”

Mike Gonnelli, who wears two hats, one as the superintendent of Secaucus Public Works and the other as a commissioner on the HMDC, was instrumental in forging the agreement. He said the location of the property makes it ideal spot for water front recreation.

“The Old Mill is the gateway to the Mill Creek area and future plans we have for the area around the high school,” he said. “While the proposed facility will be an asset for Secaucus students, it will also be available to other students throughout the district.”

Gonnelli said the town of Secaucus took the first step when it set aside the money to buy the property, and the HMDC will help in developing the site.

“The town is purchasing the property, and once that is done, then we’ll use the money from the HMDC to proceed in the direction of waterfront recreational use,” Iacono said.

Under the HMDC’s plan, the original Old Mill building would be renovated, and in that way, would maintain this small piece of Secaucus history as Sheehan and Cattuna once envisione

The place where the Old Mill once stood.

Thursday, May 02, 2013

I miss the old place, that rat trap everybody went to on New Year’s Eve called “Tony’s Mill,” a place now more than a decade demolished though when I last stood here – before anybody made it over into a park – the remnants of the Old Mill remained – a single chimney connected to a fire place which had done little to warm anybody when it was contained in a building, but let out in the open looked more than a little ridiculous – as if preserving that actually preserved the spirit of the place when that era had long passed, and the place once icon to old Secaucus ceased to have real meaning.

People went to the mall for food instead, if not for atmosphere.

Everything has changed, even the water, which when the place served as a kind of hunter’s lodge was fresh, filled with cattails and fresh water fish, to a brackish back water victim of tides that have brought in new fish and new plants to feed on, and after decades of pollution, killed off any sense of wilderness.

Kids still skim stones over the water, but as one of the few signs of real progress, all these kids are girls – not Tom Boys to be mocked, but Tom Sawyers in their own right, laughing at the watch the pieces of flint skip over the brown surface of the Hackensack and plop into the center.

A young woman in a beach chair sunbathes where the pistol range once stood, head down, eyes closed as Mother Nature floats above in the guise of seagulls and cormorants.

While boat ramp still slants down into the mouth of Mill Creek, the old boat yard is gone, along with its parade of parts and its out of water boats, waiting to make their launch, and like the hunters who no longer warm their hands around the fire, the old boat men are gone, too, their craggy voices silenced and their tall tales of nearly caught fish part of other tales of duck filled skies and muskrats.

The giggle of children playing in the plastic playground seem a pathetic replacement, as does the rattle of bicycle chains as kids make their way up from the sport fields and across the half mile footbridge spanning the wide and still wild meadows between this place and where the high school stands.

The gulls and other birds still perch on the posts to the old wooden docks, who planks have long drifted away. I stand on the cracked concrete where other men, hunters and fishermen once stood, staring out at the moving water, a different river, coming back to life, but for what purpose – if there is no real life on the shore to take part in it.

Maybe it is better off being a park, better fitting the change in society where people are more passive, coming here to look at, but not take part in nature, as if their lives and the natural world have no connection, and it all is just one big computer image, without the computer or the screen, where we sit and look out at something, but never touch it, and it never touches us, the sadness growing on me as I recall the men who spent their lives here, the generations who celebrated the dark nights here, all waiting for the spring to come to they could dive back into what they saw as a valuable part of their lives.

The kids giggle. Lear Jets bound for Teterboro roar over head. I turn back to my car for the drive back into the heart of the city, leaving a bit of myself to float away from this place along with the tidbits of the Old Mill that once stood here in place of the park.

My mistress Aratusa

My mistress Aratusa

I used to see the boat docked at the foot of the highway bridge each time I took the bus back from New York City, curious at first by glimpses of it over the side, and then later, I deliberately sat on that side to make certain I could see it, as if having it there was like having an old friend I could see but never touch, but always counted on being there.

The Aratusa was original constructed for the Maine Central Railroad in 1913, part of the Rangely class of ships, I learned much later. She did coastal passenger trade out of Portland, Maine, and took the elite and famous to their summer places off the coast of Maine.

Perhaps because my grandfather had become a boat builder late in life and I was always his little helper tightening screws in those tight places his massive build could not reach I came to love boats and those silly statistics boat owners always toss around.

So when exploring later the details of my invisible friend on the river, I found that the 185-foot long craft had a 1,200 horsepower, single crew engine.

But more importantly, like many of those who I loved even at a distance, the ship seemed prone to disaster. During her initial test trials, she struck and uncharted ledge, and while the craft sustained only minor damage, it seemed a premonition of what she could expect.

Hank, my best friend with whom I frequently traveled to the city in hunt of girls, never understood my love for lost causes, and always complained when I hogged the bus window seat on our way back and certainly didn’t share my love of the old ship or even the vast meadowlands that stretched out around it, a place I would later come to embrace more fully when I became a reporter there.

The boat always brought back tender feelings for my grandfather, who by 1977 was already dead more than ten years, as if I could not look at her and fail to think of him.

As a reporter, I learned more about my mythical friend though by that time, it was too late for me to walk her decks or glimpse inside, things I ached most to do when viewing her from the bus.

I learned later that in 1925, the railroad sold the ship to the Hudson River Day Line, at which time it was renamed Chauncey M. Depew after the U.S. Senator from New York, for its run to Indian Point as the fleet’s luxury yacht.

In 1940, with the war looming over the Atlantic coast, the ship was drafted for service by the U.S. Navy for World War II as a transport for men and supplies between New York City and Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey.

After the war, the ship was sold to Benjamin B. Willis of Washington, D.C. and used as an excursion and transfer boat in Bermuda, serving as a port ferry and cruise ship.

She returned to the United States in 1970 and was sold to private interests. On her way up the coast to what was supposed to be her retirement in 1971, she was nearly lost on the breakwater in the Chesapeake Bay as a storm came up suddenly. For three years, she lay on her side, half-submerged in mud.

She was rescued as salvage by a man named David Cory. Under U.S. law, anyone can lay claim to an abandoned ship. Cory had a vision of transforming the ship into an elegant restaurant, and he leased land in Secaucus on the banks of the Hackensack River. The ship was renamed the Aratusa supper club, and it operated from 1977 to 1987.

Although we both drove by that time, Hank and I still took the bus in and out of the city and so glimpsed the boat huddled under the highway arches. At night, when doing my deliveries for cosmetic company until I got myself fired in mid 1978, I used to see her aglow, the lights from her windows sparkling on the water at night. During those years, I made frequent trips to the Jersey shore where my family had moved, always making a point to cross the bridge and glimpse the ship before taking the Turnpike south. For some reason, I even remember looking down with satisfaction the day the first shuttle exploded in the skies above Florida 1,500 miles to the south, as if I needed the comfort of this friend on the river to keep me moored.

 In 1987, she was struck by another vessel, and it broke my heart.

Witnesses on the scene at the time claim diners eating in the Aratusa hardly noticed the hit, and had to be escorted off the vessel when it became clear she had begun to sink. The hull had cracked, making the ship uninhabitable, and she would no longer rise and fall with the tide.

For the latter part of the 1980s, people driving over the Hackensack River Bridge could see the odd site along the banks just off Meadowlands Parkway, among whom I was one, always more and more heart broken each time I passed and saw her decline, knowing that I would never get to walk her decks or sit behind the wheel. Over the next few years, the boat began to decline – sinking slowly into the mud, until it became a concern of local officials.

At one point in late 1988, a group from Maine, the Rangely Foundation, expressed interest in purchasing the boat, raising it, and moving to Maine where it was slated to become part of the Rangely Museum. The group, however, needed to get the U.S. Department of the Interior to declare the boat a national monument so they could seek funding for the project.

The owner, David Cory, did not have the funds to raise the ship or repair it, but managed to fence in the property – at the town’s request.

While the ship was not considered a navigational hazard, officials feared it might become one if it began to break up. The 75-year old ship was eventually demolished.

Since then, the land that once served as parking lot has remained vacant, the object of some speculation over the years, but also the victim of a sagging economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and more than once I walked through that lot, stepping over piles of debris and over the clumps of dog shit left by local residents who largely walked their dogs there. I stepped over bits of grass and often settled near the piers where the boat had stood, thinking of her, and thinking of my grandfather, missing both.

(A modified version of what appeared in The Secaucus Reporter in January, 2001)

Stripped Fruit

June 8, 1980

Someone ripped the leaves off the mulberry tree branches that over hangs this forgotten dock – a dock just up stream from the Outwater Lane Bridge near Dunkin Donuts.
I always thought of this place as secret because no one could see if from the road, branches blocking the narrow path down the back. But I knew in my heart someone else came here, and now I have evidence that it’s true.
I feel as bad seeing this destruction as when a burglar broke into my apartment on Passaic Street, violating the place, leaving it to feel less safe.
This was no random act – each branch has been cleared so that none overhang the dock.
Perhaps they did it because the tree routinely dumped its purple berries onto the surface, staining the wood so that anybody coming here would find it difficult to sit or stand without getting stained, too.
Now, no berries are left, although they still have several weeks of fruit bearing left.
I know of other trees I can go to along the river and still feed my face full, but I feel cheated by this.
I always wondered why the river had so many of these trees, and an old fisherman named Ben told me.
They were planted deliberately as a 19th century get rich quick scheme after Paterson became the capital of silk mills and area residents thought they could help supply the silk by feeding silk worms that feed on mulberry leaves.
“Silk worms feed on mulberry leaves,” Ben said.
The Passaic River has routinely suffered such schemes.
Local tribes of Native Americans used to feed on fresh water oysters, some of which grew so large in these waters that their shells were the sizes of dinner plates.
I thought Ben was pulling my leg when he told me this since me and Dave had wandered these waters since just after we could walk and never saw one oyster in them or any size.
Ben said greedy white settlers harvested the oysters to extinction, not because they wanted them for food, or even to use the shells for jewelry or money the way Native Americans did. Most of the time, they dug up the oysters, opened them, and then left them to rot in much the same way their families would later do with the Buffalo out west.
Some fool claimed to have found a pearl in one which started a frenzy that did not end until all of the oysters were gone.
Some people come to the riverside for mushrooms, harvesting them all. Some it seems have come to strip the trees of mulberries, too, maybe the homeless men, down on Dundee Island, I think, most likely spoiled Garfield kids, seeking simply to cause destruction.
I hope it was the homeless.
I clean the leaves from the dock for a place to sit and then I sit, sending the leaves down into the fast moving water below, a kind of sailor’s funeral, with me as the only mourner.