At 78 years old, Al McClure, the Secaucus Animal Control officer, still manages to makes the trip to the town’s animal shelter at least twice a day, seven days a week.
He feeds the cats and dogs inside, cleans their cages, sometimes letting some of the dogs out for exercise. He also feeds the outside cats that suddenly appear out of the foxtails and other plants that border the nearby river.
McClure is a small, wiry and energetic man, and 50 years after winning a Bronze Star for duty in the South Pacific, he still dresses like a sailor, wearing his crisp blue Animal Control uniform as if expecting a military inspection. His hat is only slightly tilted to one side, giving him an official air even as he carries dishes of cat food from the shelter to feed the wild cats.
The Secaucus Animal Shelter is a small metal-sided building located on Meadowlands Parkway in the southwestern corner of Secaucus near Castle Road, next to a building that had once served as the sewerage treatment plant for Hartz Mountain Industries. The animal shelter, which is overflowing with about 40 cats and dogs, was relocated here in 1989 from the town garage on Centre Avenue, after Richard Manney, then the town’s health official, complained about the truck fumes. Although a vast improvement from 123 Centre Ave., the current shelter is only marginally larger than the sheds people buy from Home Depot. While it has a concrete floor, and is supplied with heat and electricity, cages for the animals are stacked in such a way that two people struggle to stand side by side.
“There’s just about enough room for me to turn around in,” McClure says.
The dogs in the larger cages at the rear of the room bark as strangers enter, while others seem to seek attention, nuzzling up to the closely placed wire walls of their cars as if seeking a petting.
One dog that McClure picked up the day before just had puppies, 12 groping infants struggling to feed off their weary mother in the largest cage of all. Not counting the 12 new arrivals, McClure has about a dozen dogs and double or triple that number of cats. In one cage, three cross-eyed Siamese cats mew, as a host of other cats cry for attention and possibly food.
While some of these animals were found during McClure’s tours through town, some are abandoned cats that he found near the shelter. The Secaucus Animal Hospital on Paterson Plank Road routinely offers such animals up for adoption. But there are always more animals than there are good homes, and so some wind up here.
Wild cats
McClure has a collection of other cats, too, wild cats from the meadows who flock to him when he comes outside, some tame enough to brush up against his hands as he puts down boxes and plates of food. Because he cannot always catch these cats – or because of their location in a non-residential part of Secaucus – he lets them wander where they will, keeping track of their current condition. One cat has an open wound on its side, which McClure has been treating with an ointment.
“He either tangled with another animal or a piece of barbed wire,” McClure says, reaching down as the gray cat converged on his hand, pressing its head against his callused fingers and purring.
All these wild cats don’t always come out when he comes, but wait until he leaves and then come for the food.
Because he has no room in the shelter, he couldn’t take many of them in even if he could catch them all. So he leaves the garage door to the former sewerage treatment building open just enough so that the animals can crawl in during extreme cold or foul weather.
“Some nights, they fill up the place,” he says.
Hartz proposes to provide a new home
Six months ago, Hartz offered to convert the unused sewerage treatment building, which is next door to the present shelter, for use as an animal shelter.
“A Woman from Hartz came down to look over the place,” McClure says. “She looked at our shelter then looked at the old sewage plant building and asked what we were doing with it. When I says nothing, she wondered if it could be used as a shelter. That’s what started the ball rolling.”
McClure takes a tour of the proposed shelter. Just how many pets the new shelter will be able to hold has not yet been determined, although the physical space of the building is nearly 10 times the size of the existing shelter. The fate of the old shelter has not yet been determined. It could be knocked down or used for storage.
McClure shows off the rooms as he imagines them to be, the first room through the door, which he calls the cat room, and he waves his hand to show how there will be racks and cages, and room enough for people to come in and look at the animals – with hopes they will adopt one or two.
The cat room along is nearly twice the size of the existing shelter.
He also shows off samples of automatic air fresher, spray cans timed to go off at intervals in order to reduce the unavoidable smell of animal.
Existing windows in this room will be sealed, he says.
McClure details each change as if it already had happened, as if he could see each thing in his head, everything in its proper place with more than enough room for what he needs to make the animals comfortable and safe.
Traveling through a door just off the cat room, McClure enters an even larger room where dogs will be kept.
The dog room – the floor still showing the marks where the pumps once stood, and one wall still covered with the meters and dials that once indicate the flow of sewerage – will have kennels for the doors, separate cages for each with concrete walls between he says will keep them from spraying each in a competition over territory.
Although the floor has been cleared of the larger obstacles, the places where the pumps stood and other instrumental panels still have small platforms upon which electrician units stood, platforms that kept the instrument dry during those times when high tide on the near by Hackensack river flooded the wetlands on a dozen yards from the building.
He waves his hand at one wall, where he says a washing station will stand. He says the building is being reconstructed to provide a comfortable environment for the animals. Adequate heat and electricity will cover all their needs.
Yet another room, even less finished than the rest, will provide the shelter with a storage area. McClure says he gets numerous donations of food, which currently take up shelf space in the existing shelter – although he has moved some of this into the new building despite the construction.,
The storage room is a pile of concrete and a half-broken slab of still-to-be-demolished concrete. A jack hammer sits astride the slab as if a worker had just stepped out for lunch.
The only room that will retain its original use will be the toilet area, but even that will be upgraded, McClure says.
A deal with Hartz
Outside, the landscape has already undergone a dramatic transformation.
Two huge sewage treatment tanks were removed in early March. They have been a kind of landmark in the area, recalling the days before the state Department of Environmental Protection outlawed many of the smaller sewerage treatment plants in order to curb pollution into the river.
The Hackensack Meadowlands Development Commission took them down and sold off their metal for scrap, leaving behind the concrete base upon which they stood, and the numerous connections to the brick building which once monitored the flow of sewerage from 700 acres of Hartz-owned land.
Piles of dirt dug up from the parking lot of Huber Street School for the expansion there now stand in a corner of the yard, waiting to help level the land around the new facility. The existing fence that marks the perimeter of the property will be repaired or replaced allowing dogs inside the facility a place to run without danger that they might flee into the reeds.
Most of the cost of the project is being picked up by Hartz Mountain, part of an agreement worked out with the town of Secaucus last November. Although DPW Superintendent Mike Gonnelli says some of the funding for the project may come from a Geraldine Dodge Foundation Grant.
“We applied for a $15,000 grant to help offset some of the costs,” Gonnelli says.
Members of the foundation toured the site on March 19, and if they approve of the application, the town could see the money as early as June.
The cost of conversion is estimated at $100,000 with the town and Hartz doing portions of the work. Hartz has already brought in two or three contractors for different aspects of the project, according to Gonnelli.
Hartz will likely install the concrete pad outside as well as the chain link fence for the dog runs. The company has agreed to do some of the plumbing, masonry, painting, and fencing as well as the installation of heating and air-conditioning units as various doorframes and doors.
Department of Public Works employees will repair the building’s toilet, install concrete walks outside, repair and upgrade electrical systems, roofing, windows, ceilings and various patch-work. The DPW will also do most of the demolition of concrete pads and other items inside the building.
The sewerage facility located just off Meadowlands Parkway, south of Seaview Drive, was taken over by the town in the 1980s after the state DEP set new standards for water purity that the facility could not meet.
Mayor Dennis Elwell says the town asked Hartz to help with the project because of Hartz’ numerous years of experience as a pet food provider.
Elwell says the Secaucus shelter is not a long-term facility. Many of the animals recovered are pets that have wandered off, and Secaucus needs to provide a humane place to hold these animals until their owners can come to recover them. Elwell says troubles with shelters elsewhere in the county made the town look at its own facility and decide to provide better accommodations.
“We want to see all animals treated humanely,” he said.
A dog walking club?
A l McClure sees the dog owners walking into the Hartz Mountain baseball fields around 7 a.m.
“They don’t come every morning, but on weekends they almost always do,” McClure said last week, grinning a little as he put down food for the stray cats that hang around the Secaucus Animal Shelter, only about 50 yards away from the ball fields. “Most of the people come from Harmon Cove. They have dogs they need to exercise, and they want to let them loose. I leave them alone. They don’t bother any body and they always clean up after they are through.”
Third Ward Councilman John Reilly called it a kind of club, residents gathering together to run their dogs without leashes in a part of town where no one will get annoyed.
Reilly said that a few years ago, he proposed setting up a dog run in one of the parks because he felt there might be an interest, yet the public did not respond, and the county – from whom he sought permission for a run at Laurel Hill Park – did not get back to him.
Now, however, people seem interest and he asked the town council at the Feb 27 meeting to consider starting up a dog run on town property.
McClure said the residents group their dogs together and then set up people around the field to keep the dogs from running off.
“The dogs need the exercise,” McClure said, noting that he sometimes released the better behaved dogs in the shelter for the same reason.
Reilly, however, said the town has an area nearby that it can utilize as a dog pound, a space where dogs might be allow to run free, a contained area that could be maintained by those using the area.
Reilly suggested that the town make an official dog run on a section of property the DPW formerly used to store equipment. This is not far from where the people gather now, near the town’s dog shelter.
He said it would take very little to convert the area since it is already fenced in, and he noted that the area where the people take their dogs now will soon be taken over by the railroad.