This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

From the Archives: Summers on the Fort Lee's Hazards Beach

This weekend marks the unofficial end of the summer of 2013.  Soon the humidity of August will seem like a distant memory as we welcome the crispness of September and ready ourselves for the Hobgoblins of Halloween come October.  So let us enjoy the final days of our summer in the sun as Labor Day weekend descends upon Fort Lee.  

 

Some may head down to the Jersey shore, others may stay closer to home to enjoy their backyard or apartment building pools and barbecue the traditional bill of fare of hot dogs and hamburgers or perhaps something more exotic.  As for me, I am carrying on a tradition I started three years ago that coincides more or less with my nephew Jack's birthday in late August.  As a kid born and raised in Fort Lee in the 1960s-70's part of the magic of those long ago boyhood days in Fort Lee were trips my pals and I would take down to the Hudson River on almost a daily basis.  Growing up in the Coytesville section of Fort Lee in that period of time in the 20th century meant our summers were our own and other than our daily paper routes – morning Hudson Dispatch and afternoon Record, and our once a week evening collections for said publications, we were free in every sense of that word. 

Find out what's happening in Fort Leewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

 

Our parks were not fancy or manicured, or fenced in for that matter.  You didn’t have to belong to a league to play at Holy Trinity Field as we called it, currently known by the more formal name “General Van Fleet Park” on the end of Third Street in the Coytesville section of town.  That field / park was probably the most neglected in the borough up until the 1990s, and yet I couldn’t imagine any kids in town having more fun than we did on that gravelly field with the sewer cover at second base, the stairs leading up to Maple Street in right field, the swamp in dead center and the decrepit basketball court and stickball wall in left field.  Here parts of our summers, and other seasons, and in fact the times of our youth were played out and now are stored in the archives of our collective minds.

Find out what's happening in Fort Leewith free, real-time updates from Patch.

 

Yes Holy Trinity Field, the Faraday’s back yard on Second Street which served as a sort of Wrigley Field whiffle ball paradise with the large hedges in the outfield, Gus Becker’s aka Rambo’s Saloon where we could sit on bar stools and knock back RC Colas as Gus tended bar telling us stories of the glorious time when Fort Lee was the film center of America and Rambo’s had a star turn in that nascent industry, our swimming hole at 6th Street Park (now Coytesville Park) and Cardboard Hill on the dead end of Fifth Street near the Palisade Interstate Parkway where we spent many an afternoon sliding down the hill on a large refrigerator delivery boxes we found.  All of this at our fingertips to be enjoyed, yet none of us realized how fleeting those moments would be in reality.

 

These locations were integral in our childhood summers but the location of our deepest connection to our past was along the banks of the Hudson River under the George Washington Bridge.  Many mornings we woke early, put on our PF Flyers or Converse high tops and rode on our Schwinn Typhoons to the old bait store on Bigler Street near Main Street.  Here we would pick up some mossbunker for bait.  Our crab nets were tied to our handlebars and our lunch stowed in paper bags in the nets along with our bait and a burlap sack for our catch.  We then raced at warp speed down lower Main Street turning left on the Palisade Interstate Park Henry Hudson Drive near the Edgewater Camps.  The August breezes slowly became cooler as we flew into Ross Dock and headed  to our crabbing spot just south of the GWB near Bunty’s dock. 

 

 

Up until his death in 1974, Fort Lee’s legendary lifeguard Bunty Hill would greet us from his dock most every summer day.  Bunty taught many of us how to swim as we jumped off his dock into the murky and salty depths of the Hudson.  Bunty was a young life guard at this spot called Hazard Beach before and after World War One and up until the GWB was opened in 1931.  Thereafter Bunty was chief lifeguard at the world’s largest saltwater pool up at Palisades Amusement Park.  Bunty not only taught us how to swim but also how to cast our nets in his secret spot about 200 yards south of his dock.  We would climb through bramble and sticker bushes and throw our nets and lunch ahead of us onto the rocks south of the remnants of the beach called Hazards.  Here Bunty would tell us to look for some driftwood and then lodge the wood between the rocks so we could tie off our nets.  Once this job was complete we baited our traps and tossed them into the river as Bunty judged our tosses.  Some days we caught large blue claws, and truth be told I have never seen any larger blue claw crabs than those denizens of the Hudson.  Other days we caught eels and not so many crabs.  No matter, because unbeknownst to us, Bunty was giving us a gift given to him in the early 1900s, a love of the Hudson River and a tradition of crabbing along Fort Lee’s Hazard's Beach. 

 

 

So this weekend I will take my 11-year-old nephew down those same trails, with a stop at Bunty’s dock to remind him of that Fort Lee legend as big in our eyes as Paul Bunyan, and then head south along those same trails Bunty led us on, and I will teach him how to toss his nets into the Hudson as Bunty taught me some 40 plus years ago.  
We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?