Saturday, February 9, 2013
Growing up in Fort Lee, where did you and your friends use to take your Red Flexible Flyers?
Fort Lee is a town, unlike any other Bergen County town, bifurcated by a bridge. Not just any bridge--the George Washington Bridge. Growing up in Fort Lee, your geography was defined by whether you lived north of the bridge or south of the bridge. It also defined where you played, strayed and misbehaved. For a small town, there were enclaves of even smaller communities--Coytesville, The Hollow, Lower Main Street...and many more. And each had their own place to go sledding. Growing up in Coytesville, east of Lemoine, the place to sled was Interstate Park, behind Fort Lee High School, known by my generation as Sunny Park. Back then, (did I really just say back then?) Sunny Park had an ice skating rink that was guarded (trust me, guard is the…
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The strip of stores once anchored by Mr. Feiler's iconic Five and Ten are soon to be demolished to make way for a street.
There is no doubt that the landscape of Fort Lee has changed considerably over the course of the last 40 years. It is about to change again. The strip of stores once anchored by Mr. Feiler's Five and Ten Store are scheduled to be demolished. The building, sold to the developer of Redevelopment Area 5, was best known to generations of Fort Lee folks as the home of the Five and Ten. Specifically, Mr. Helmut Feiler's Five and Ten. In the days before malls, this was a store that had aisles of 'stuff' to serve all your household needs. There was the toy aisle; the sewing, knitting, crotcheting, yarn aisle; the make-up aisle; the arts and crafts aisle; the card aisle; the kitchen aisle; the housecoat aisle and so much more. It was, from the eye…
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
"I Grew Up In Fort Lee" shares memories of St. Rocco.
The grandmothers are gone. So are the aunts who wore the house dresses (called house coats when they ventured outside). Gone are the grandfathers whose homemade wines completed the Sunday family dinner. Gone are the neighborhoods of lower Main Street and the laughter of all who ran through its side streets and climbed its cliffs. From the bait shop to the Five and Dime, little is left that is recognizable of the little town called Fort Lee, whose tallest steeples were once Madonna Church and the George Washington Bridge. What survives is memory. A memory so strong that each year it draws more and more of its past to return to the Feast of St. Rocco--a lower Main Street tradition since 1929. Now in its 83rd year, St. Rocco continues to draw…
Monday, August 8, 2011
The annual running of the statue of Saint Rocco
The skies were kind as the Feast of Saint Rocco came to a close on Sunday. Although the weight of rain hung heavy in the air, the sun shone brightly as members of the Society of Saint Rocco approached lower Main Street making their way toward the final leg of their march around West Fort Lee. Led by the Society band and a cordon of motorcycle police, the older Society members positioned themselves around the statue while the younger members hoisted the statue of Saint Rocco upon their backs and carried him through the heat on their way to the chapel that sits just on the edge of lower Main Street. As the parade reached Firehouse No. 1, the statue of Saint Rocco was lowered to the ground so that those who were carrying him could take a …
Joni
12:36 pm on Saturday, February 23, 2013
We always went sledding in the Linwood Apt complex - I remember a few sledders hitting the garages - OUCH! If there was enough snow we would start in Linwood, go down the side of Grandview Place, across "hippie Hill" (the last house on Grandview located in Englewood) onto Westview Place and end near the Polise's house. Now that was a run! more ›