For about 20 minutes, Tony Calderone just walked around the spot where Tony’s Old Mill once stood, looking over the land that been bulldozed to make way for an environmental center.
Except for a single chimney, Tony’s Old Mill had vanished and much of the landscape that had given the place its remarkable character was gone as well, flattened in a way that made the place unrecognizable.
At 87 years old, Calderone remembered a time when he took walks in the meadows and didn’t know how to get home again.
“That was before I was ten,” he recalled
The Old Mill – which he built in 1947 – now demolished except for the chimney and fire place, the boat lift and shooting range.
“I built everything that was here, the pistol range, the building, I planted the trees, I even put in the road,” he said.
At the height of his business in the early 1960s, Calderone housed over 100 boats here.
In a brief tour of the site, Calderone, however, debunked some of the myths about the place.
“People say there was a mill here, and there was, but it was a saw mill, not a mill for wheat.”
Sawmills and gristmills operated in Secaucus since the 1760s. And while one of these mills, built in 1840, stood on the left bank of Mill Creek and was marked on the maps as late as 1900, Calderone said only an old boat house existed when he came here in the 1920s.
“And that burned down during World War II,” he said.
A glorious past
Some of his most vivid memories are from those days when he and his best friend, Howie Elwell, wandered the banks of Mill Creek. There was no road and the nearest house – Shriever’s Farm – was nearly a half-mile away.
Calderone said the water was still fresh and cedar woods stood along a region where the turnpike now runs. He said that when he started building on the site, he used to travel across the creek to get wood. There was also a cedar woods across the Hackensack river where Giant stadium stands.
“We called it the Seven Days Woods because a guy died in a suck hole and it took seven days for anyone to find his body,” Calderone said. A suck hole, he explained, is something like quick sand, except it is made out of mud. “Once it gets a grip on you, you can’t get out.”
The meadowlands were a different place then, with different kinds of plants and different kinds of wild life. Instead of foxtail, a kind of reed that grows here now, cattail grew here. Wild rice grew in the water drawing birds, and flowers decorated the water with bright yellow and bright blue. He remembered when he and other kids used to pick them and bring them to their teachers in school.
“That was before the water got polluted,” he said. “You could nearly drink it. We swam in it, we stood in the mud. We didn’t have to worry about stepping on bottles.”
Not many people came up to that part of town in those days, but Calderone recalled a handful of hunters, people who made their living off the land. He called them river rats with names like Jim Ludlow and Old Man Doyle.
“They came here early in the morning and stayed out all day, trapping and hunting,” he said.
Calderone laughed at talk suggesting anyone might bring back the wildlife.
“Those are people who don’t know what it was like here back then,” he said. “There were so many birds, ducks and geese that when they rose, they sometimes blacked out the sky.”
Calderone said the Meadowland had plenty of game including muskrat, mink, weasel, opossum, raccoon, and pheasant. “It was heaven for hunters,” he said.
Howie Elwell, when interviewed by telephone, said he and Calderone spent a great deal of time wandering the meadows as kids.
“We used to go crabbing and duck hunting,” Elwell said. “The original Mill had burned down.”
The area around the boathouse had a more sinister reputation during Prohibition.
“Before 1933, people supposedly went up there to by whiskey and home-made beer,” Elwell said.
Hit with the reality of the Great Depression
Even though he was deeply in love with nature, Calderone, at 15, began working after school as a mechanic. “That meant I got to wash parts,” he said.
At 17, as the Great Depression hit, he quit school to work full time to help out his family and eventually became a mechanic and then quit to become a tool and dye maker. He earned $12 a week. He also worked for a company that was building dikes along the river in 1931-32. He later rebuilt some of the same dikes in 1960.
Yet for all the hard work, he couldn’t keep his mind from wandering back to that special piece of property in the north end of town. So in love with the area, Calderone wanted to by the land, and even offered a woman money before the war. “I wanted to spend the rest of my life hunting duck,” he said.
But the war intervened and he went off to work in Africa as a mechanic.
Although someone had purchased the property before he got back, Calderone managed to buy the property in 1947 for $600. (The town paid $800,000 for the property in the year 2000). Then, he began to fix the place up. He and Howie Elwell carted in shingles from a roofing plant in East Rutherford and laid them down so as to allow cars to get into the sight.
“People called it Shingle Boulevard,” he said. “But it was Stonewall Lane back then. Millridge road didn’t exist.”
Then, he constructed the building that later came to be known as Tony’s old Mill. He said it took him about six months to build. While Howie Elwell helped some, it was his father and younger brother who helped him most. He was particularly proud of the fireplace and the chimney, and remembers he and his wife working on it. She mixed the concrete as he set the bricks. Elwell remembered Calderone installing kerosene lamps until the power company brought in an electrical connection. Calderone said he had a hard time getting the company to agree.
“They asked me how much electric would sell out here,” Calderone said with a laugh.
He also constructed the travel lift, which allowed him to put boats into the water and take them out again. He did a fair amount of boating in those days, sometimes rowing out into the creek and river, sometimes taking out a boat with a small outboard motor.
He said he learned a lot about boats but much more about the river, and he probably knows more about the Meadowlands than anyone else alive.
A real success story
Tony’s Old Mill became – among other things – a restaurant and tavern.
“It was a good place,” he said. “I didn’t allow people to curse. I didn’t allow men to pick up women at the bar.”
Over the 20 years of operation, the police never had to come up to the tavern to stop a fight. But Tony’s Old Mill was more than that. As the years passed, the place became one of the more popular spots, not just for drinking and dinning, but for boating and hunting too. He had a shooting range as well as other gun-related activities, and hundreds of people used to come to take part in the many events held there, from shooting competitions to professional boat races on the river.
“But for the first 10 years, we starved,” he said. “I had to drive a truck in winter.”
He said the remote location seemed to make people nervous about coming to the tavern. Yet eventually he won them over, and the place became a local landmark.
During the construction of the turnpike in the early 1950s, Tony’s Old Mill rented boats and floats to the state. Commercial fishing ships came to this part of the river during the early days to harvest millions of shrimp that were transported south and sold to fishermen as bait.
The restaurant, Calderone said, served the best clam chowder in the area.
“People used to come from New York to get it,” he said.
The whole world changed
Remarkably, the construction of the Oradell Dam and the breaking of dikes in the Meadowlands in 1950 started a dramatic change in the meadowlands, turning the fresh water into salt water as the tides made their way further up stream. The trees died off and the fresh water plants were replaced by varieties native to salt water.
“The reservoir dried up the sweet water tributaries into the Hackensack,” Elwell said. “The salt water pushed up, changed all the vegetation, change fish, changed everything.”
But along with this was the spread of pollution. Calderone recalled the huge ships that sailed up the Hackensack, bearing oil and gasoline, cleaning out their tanks after unloading with water from the river.
“There were times when the whole river turned black with oil,” he said.
Although over the last few years the meadows have become cleaner, he said they will never return to their former glory. “I once saw this as the most beautiful place on earth,” he said. “But people have turned it into a swamp. It can never be the same again.”
In 1965, Calderone sold the place. He had made enough money for he and his wife to live well, and he was closing in on 60 years old and wanted to kick back a little.
“I thought I would bum around, but I found I was never able to bum around, not even in the Depression, so I went and became a contractor building houses.”
Yet, staring out in the altered landscape, Calderone admitted he missed the place as it once was, the world in which he grew up and wandered in the wild.
“Yes, I miss it,” he said, nodding slowly. “But I miss what it used to be.”
Tony’s Old Mill demolished
Last year, when the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission and the town of Secaucus proposed to develop the Old Mill property as a park, officials thought they would be able to preserve what some believe is the oldest remaining building in Secaucus. But as bulldozers frolicked over the 1.8 acres in an attempt to clear them of the collection of junk, officials came to understand that they could not save the historic structure.
“It was just in too poor shape,” said Michael Gonnelli, among whose multiple duties are Superintendent of the Secaucus Department of Public Works and a commissioner on the Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission.
Many people wanted to preserve the building, but as workers took a better look at the sun bleached wood and nearly rotted electrical systems, the more they came to understand that the building had to be demolished to make way for the new recreational and educational facility. Under the proposed agreement, the town got $530,000 from the HMDC’s Environmental Initiative Bond fund to pay for architectural design and construction management services on the project.