Category: Woodcliff Lake

Sunset on Woodcliff Lake.

Posted in Uncategorized, Woodcliff LakeTagged , Leave a comment

Even now, just days after I helped my parents pack up their home of almost 30 years, it is still painful to contemplate the loss of the house and the community.

I shot the photograph on this page, one evening, as we drove across the lake. The reservoir sits there peacefully, a calming body of water in an increasingly frenetic world.

Just along the eastern side, the Pascack Valley train blows its whistle as it enters the station, a place where I once disembarked in the days when I commuted from here to New York City.

Somehow something immeasurable and profound seems to have been stolen. A quiet place with reassuring routines, those days that one spent reading under the large trees or watching the rain from the front porch. Gone for eternity.

Two old movies come to mind when I think of losing Woodcliff Lake. One is “Mildred Pierce” when little Kay dies of pneumonia and Mildred busies herself by working hard to open the restaurant. Another is “An Affair to Remember” when vacationing Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, cruise ship in port, visit his grandmother in her small French port town. After a day of togetherness with the old lady, they hear the ship’s whistle blow, a low groan that stands for separation, loss and dwindling time.

So the real places, those towns of brick and wood, with four seasons and good food, farms and open lawns, and that enormous city built on bedrock with the beacon of liberty in its harbor, these locales now are airy memories.

Los Angeles, you welcome us! Here we come, crippled, exhausted and sad….

The future of happiness is a lie built on a promise that is built in a digital edit bay, on a seismically shaky phoenix whose very existence is a sham. But we smile, as we must, because tomorrow is a sunny day, and life must go on, and a thousand other cliches to recite ad nauseum, but deep down we know what our heart tells us is true.

What car can we lease?

The Tag Sale.

Posted in Uncategorized, Woodcliff LakeTagged 3 Comments







This past Friday, a company named Leighton Galleries held a tag sale at 25 Birchwood Drive to sell the contents of a home that has belonged to my parents since 1979.

The cars started lining up at 6am. The old, cigarette smoking man in suspenders made his way around back and peered in the sliding glass window at 6:30am as I drank my morning coffee. The doors opened at 10am. We brought my parents out, my dad in wheelchair, and went across the street to wait at Dr. Cantor’s home until the sale was over.

All day long the vehicles pulled up and walked out with bed frames, watercolors, lamps, mirrors and a dust buster. One cop, in a pickup truck with Passaic County stickers, was impatient to get his treadmill. He backed up on the lawn and gunned his accelerator for the front entrance. Two fat dudes carried the treadmill out, loaded it on to the flatbed, and the truck tore up the lawn and drove off. Someone stole the bird-feeder, or maybe it was sold.

My dad couldn’t really look at the sale while it was happening. He said to me, in stroke accented English, “It’s like my life is being torn up…” We took a short ride, to the pleasantly antiseptic Tice Corner, and used the restroom in the Senior Center, which is located inside the farmhouse that once belonged to the farmers whom the mall is named after.

We went back to the house after the “guests” had left and I grabbed a corn husk broom that I had locked up in “the safe room”. I swept up the wrappers, leaves and dirt on the wood floors. Many bargain hunters had walked around the house that day, more guests on one day than have probably ever been inside. They were all strangers, none of them friends, and they plundered and purchased so many memories and so many items of no small measurable emotional value.

Now we are here for just a few more days, in a large and elegant home which everyone here still loves and wishes to continue living in. But time, age and illness have converged to end the story of the Hurvitz Family in Woodcliff Lake, NJ.

The Two Birchwoods.

Posted in Uncategorized, Woodcliff LakeTagged 1 Comment


When we moved to Birchwood Drive in 1979, there were only six houses on the whole street. It dead ended at six acres of woods, and coming from flat Chicago, I marveled at giant old trees.

Inside those woods one could swing on an enormous vine. There was an azalea farm next to it and more acres of property including an old lady inside an old Victorian house.

When it rained, we would sit on the covered front porch and watch sheets of water slice across the street. The enormous branches would bend and the air smelled of electricity, wet leaves and damp earth.

The neighbors on our street were comprised of doctors, small business owners, a financial executive and an architect. They lived in quaint “Dutch” houses and I don’t remember anyone driving expensive cars. Their bedrooms were small, some of the houses lacked air conditioning and the luxury consisted of living on big pieces of land surrounded by nature. Privacy and discretion intermingled with self-denial and self-improvement. The kids went off to college while the old folks stayed behind.

When the street and historic forest was bulldozed, to create a world of moonscape McMansions, I predicted that the new residents would drive up and down in SUVs. Back and forth, they would speed, to enter three car garages while hardly interacting with each other. My premonitions have now materialized, and to quote Hillary, “If I knew then what I knew now, I would have voted against…..”

An architectural metaphor exists in a new super-sized house buried below grade, an obese dwelling dying under the weight of too much debt, too many cars. It seems sad to think that even this inferior lot had to be maximized to please the developer builder investors. Nature has its revenge, it always wins…..

The destruction began in 2003, and now it is 2008, and the old Birchwood Drive is changing. We are selling, the two other neighbors are selling, and we live on a road where the way of life is exiting to be seen and heard from no more.

Tragedy in Lush Surroundings.

Posted in Uncategorized, Woodcliff LakeTagged , , 4 Comments

For the past 30 years, my parents and some of us children, have lived in Bergen County, NJ. We moved here from Chicago into an area of small towns, woods, farms, and historic homes.

Some of the charm that once existed here has been replaced by the sweep of corporate headquarters or in the robotic commercialism of strip malls. But there is still an old fashioned human feeling in the day-to-day interactions.

I have come back here from Los Angeles, almost yearly, and now the reasons that I return have to do with medical emergencies. The latest has been my mother breaking her hip. My father is disabled, so I flew in to oversee his care. And most heartbreaking to me, to put their house up for sale and move them to the “safer” confines of the badly named “Golden State”.

I wish that Northern New Jersey were not so lovely. I drive my father to physical therapy past vast green lawns and little towns with flag draped streets. I pass the barn where he once sat in art class; I stop at the Ridgewood Library to return a book; I take him for a walk in the park. We cut through country lanes and those suburban roads where one still may see the occasional horse and where vast forests of maple and birchwood keep homes cool even when the humidity is 80%.

Once upon a time this region was my promise of a glorious future. I would live in Manhattan, and when it got too stressful, I could come back to Woodcliff Lake and my parents would barbecue on the back deck, surrounded by hundreds of trees…never planted but spontaneously growing and enveloping the house. Down there, along the property line, an old stone wall stood as a border.

I guess I am one of those who went West, more out of escape than adventure, and landed in Los Angeles as one lands in a prison. I tried to convince myself that the friends who never showed up for lunch and the hours I sat on the 405, were somehow just small inconveniences and not evidence of a larger pathology, a geographical cancer that grows and grows each year and devours more of America and the world and calls itself…Hollywood.

Here in the waning days of the New Jersey chapter, the neighbors are still here to wave hello; the local handyman is working on three different houses on this street; and someone at the Town Hall owes my mother $100 as reimbursement for joining another town’s library since this one is too small to have its own.

Was I spoiled? Yes, I think I have been. I haven’t yet bought into Charles Phoenix and his paens to the junk and kitsch of the Southland. I still admire the stone houses of the Dutch settlers, and think it looks nice when men in gray flannel suits board a train to go work in the city. I love a thunderstorm and look forward to waking up everyday in New Jersey and knowing that the weather is unknowable. I don’t need sun everyday.

But mostly what I need now is what’s gone. I dream of a restoration of a lost time, but each day this summer is one step closer to the end of the best years of our lives.</p