Hackensack, NJ Community Message Boards
General Category => Hackensack History => Online Auctions/Local Images (Moderated by BLeafe) => Topic started by: BLeafe on December 29, 2010, 12:47:39 AM
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http://cgi.ebay.com/OLD-POSTCARD-ANDERSON-ST-BRIDGE-HACKENSACK-NJ-1904-/220715544052?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item3363abedf4
You'd think the photographer would have come back at high tide to take a better picture.
There's one of these in the database, but this is a better image.
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Back before the construction of the Oradell Dam, there was enough downstream flow in the river to clear out the silt. There was a sandy bottom, not a mudflat like it is today. So probably it didn't look as unsightly as it does now.
That's a black-and-white photo, but if you look at the waters edge, that sure looks like light-colored sand, not the black muck that we have today.
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I don't care what's on the bottom. Photographically, a river always looks better at high tide than low. This is hardly the mighty Hackensack with all that downstream flow you mentioned.
Happy Merry, jw.
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the last remnant of that wall visible in the photo is still there, in the river at Johnson Park. more of it used to be visible above the water and it used to form an L, but the water level is slightly higher than it was when we used to catch eels and sunnies sitting in front of it(in 1980).
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Related Post: Johnson Park Gazebo (http://www.hackensacknow.org/index.php?topic=612.msg1645#msg1645)
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In the original photo, you can also see the Johnson Estate in the background. When Johnson Park was part of the gigantic estate, and River Street either didn't exist, or was just a one or two-lane dirt road. Not the highway it is today.
The pastoral nature of the area, whether high tide or low tide, is just amazing. Especially when compared to what it is today. When that picture was taken, all of Teaneck was rural and with very few roads. Maybe just River Road, Teaneck Road, Cedar Lane, and barely any others. And the Hackensack Ave area going north was rural. And if fact, everything surrounding the "village" of old Hackensack was rural terrain. Farms, woods, pasture land, fallow fields, marshlands and wetlands, and some large estates. That was most of Bergen County. The villages were few and far between.