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Politics & Government

The Dead Sea Scrolls of Fort Lee

How the 1930 Fort Lee Mayor and Council minutes book found its way back to Borough Hall after missing for 82 Years .

The art deco of the municipality of Fort Lee opened in 1929, the same year as the wonderful architectural jewel that is the .  The clerk’s office in Borough Hall houses a history of our Borough's government that is second to none.

The borough maintains a yearly book of minutes of all Mayor and Council meetings. If you take the time to read these books, they tell the story of Fort Lee in all its glory. But a little know fact is that the minutes book from 1930 has been missing since 1931 – it's a mystery worthy of famed TV detective Columbo or even Sherlock Holmes.

1930 was one of the most important years in Fort Lee’s history as it was a year that would see the construction of the George Washington Bridge nearing its completion. The bridge would open in October of 1931. Our town fathers saw nothing but bright skies ahead – in translation that means a real estate boom in time to coincide with the opening of the GWB. 

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The 1930 minutes reflect a mayor and Borough Council that was so confident in the future that they appropriated tremendous amounts of funds for the creation of infrastructure such as new sewers and roads – this was interesting in that many of these sewers and roads were built where there were no homes, but rather empty lots that were being speculated for development.

But let’s take a step back at this point to tell you how we found the missing 1930 book of minutes.

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Recently the home of former Fort Lee Mayor Henry Hoebel on Jones Road was sold. A person was cleaning out the house and found the book and spoke to Fort Lee crossing guard Donna Medaglia about it. Donna was kind enough to call the Fort Lee Historical Society to see if we would be interested.

I received the book from Donna and immediately realized that it could be a missing piece of local history. I spoke to Borough Clerk Neil Grant, and he told me that in fact the minutes book was missing from the borough's files. We then planned to present the book back to the Borough and the clerk’s office at the Jan. 19 Mayor and Council meeting in memory of the Hoebel family. 

However before Jan. 19, we were able to read large portions of the book, and now we may have cracked the case of why the book was missing for so long.

Henry Hoebel passed away about 10 years ago, and his wife passed away last year. The family recently sold the home on Jones Road. Over the years, the Hoebel family have donated many historic items to the Fort Lee Historical Society for display in the . Among these items is a sword that dates back to the American Revolution that Henry Hoebel found as a young boy in the 1920s in the vicinity of the present day on Route 4 East.

Henry was playing in a tree and fell off a limb, landing atop a small sharp object protruding from the ground. He dug out what was later determined to be a  sword of a soldier of the American Revolution stationed in Fort Lee in 1776. The sword is on permanent display in the museum today. 

But this article is about a piece of borough and Hoebel family history that never made it to the museum. In fact, the family never found the book hidden away in the rafters of the house. It dates to the time when Henry Hoebel’s father, Louis Hoebel, was to be sworn in as the Mayor of Fort Lee in January 1930.

The 1930 minutes book opens with the reorganization meeting in January. Mayor Edward A. White presided over the meeting, and Louis F. Hoebel, who won the mayoral election the previous November, was still seated as a Fort Lee Councilman. Mayor-elect Hoebel refused to be seated as mayor at the January reorganization meeting, an act that allowed Mayor White to make all the appointments to borough boards with Hoebel able to cast his vote as a Councilman. 

Finally, after several January meetings, Hoebel was sworn in as Fort Lee Mayor. Why and how didthe book of the 1930 Mayor and Council minutes end up with Louis Hoebel in the house of his son Henry Hoebel only to resurface 82 years later? 

Well, I tend to believe that this was an important time in Fort Lee’s history, and that Mayor Hoebel brought the book home perhaps as a way to revisit the important year during his Mayoralty. As time passed on, the book was forgotten about and lost.

We brought it to a recent Fort Lee Historical Society meeting, and former Fort Lee Councilman and current Fort Lee Historical Society member Larry Goldberg read the it with interest. He claims - and rightly so I believe - that this book outlines how the Borough of Fort Lee went into receivership in the 1930s.

The borough had, after all, appropriated huge amounts of funds into infrastructure and the creation of roads around empty lots. When the bridge finally opened, the anticipated real estate boom in Fort Lee was a bust in large part due to the Great Depression that lingered from 1929 through the 1930s.  Fort Lee truly didn’t recover fiscally until the “real” real estate boom began in the 1960s, when high-rise construction started.

So tells the story of a piece of missing history that found its way back home to Borough Hall 82 years later.

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