REMEMBERING... "Upper Saddle River's Anona Park"

therecordarchivesCirca 1930: Bathers enjoying the sun, sand and some ice cream cones at Upper Saddle River’s Anona Park.🍦For a good part of the 20th century, residents and tourists who frequented Bergen County's sand-bottom pools enjoyed swimming, having a boxed lunch picnic, staying after dark to enjoy a family movie and listening to music and dancing on wooden-plank floors placed beneath a string of lights that swung in the summer breeze. 🎶 Some of the pools are gone, but several community-based sand-bottom pools still dot Bergen’s landscape. 🏖️👙

Kay Yeomans, historian for Upper Saddle River, has fond memories of Anona Lake, built by her husband's grandfather in 1929. anona was sold to a developer in 1968 and is now a part of a homeowner's association that has added tennis courts.

"REMEMBERING...ROSIE'S DINER"

     This picture of Rosie's Diner in Little Ferry was taken in the 1973. It originally opened in the 1940s as the Silver Dollar Diner and became the Farmland Diner in 1961. It was renamed Rosie's after Bounty paper towel commercials were filmed there in the 1970s. The diner has been relocated to Cedar Springs, Mich.

REMEMBERING..."FORT LEE'S SHOWCASE NIGHTCLUB"

     Frank Sinatra, “Old Blue-Eyes,” freshly shorn, stands next to Rocky Vitteta, the house barber. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis are on stage. So is Milton Berle. Dozens of others smile — from the walls and display cases, beside souvenir brochures and matchbooks. Beaming out from among lines of chorus girls and musicians are faces as recognizable as Pearl Bailey’s and Lena Horne’s. Or the Andrews Sisters’. Other faces, though perhaps instantly recognizable in their own day, serve today — for most of us, at least — as reminders of the fleeting nature of fame. 

     The tale of the Riviera began in 1931, the same year the George Washington Bridge first forged its link between the bright lights of Manhattan and the tree-shaded suburbs of Bergen County. In that year the renowned nightclub entrepreneur Ben Marden bought a cliff-top hotel in Fort Lee called the Villa Richard. Marden refurbished the Richard as a world-class club.

     Painted yellow, the art-deco building was shaped like the rounded transom of a great yacht berthed high above the Hudson (the windows were even shaped like portholes). At night a huge red neon sign could be read from miles away: Ben Marden’s Riviera. On warm evenings, the roof could be retracted to allow for dancing by starlight. The stage revolved so that one act could replace another without pause in the entertainment. And then there was the talk of hidden gambling rooms…

     As construction began on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, it became clear that the Riviera’s days were numbered. Miller fought against the closing, but it was a fight he was destined to lose. The building was eventually torn down, and only a few nondescript traces remain in the woods atop the cliffs. Many of the contents of the club were auctioned off, and some of these have found their way back to the exhibit that the Fort Lee Historical Society gathered together to display at the Fort Lee Museum.