On May 7, when dozens of local kids flock to the “duck pond” for the 21st Annual Secaucus Fishing Derby, they’ll probably be more concerned with winning a prize for “biggest catfish” or “most fish caught” than the history of the pond itself.
But the pond, today a picturesque body of water surrounded by greenery and picnic tables, has a colorful past that includes illegal dumping, giant turtles, butcher poultry, and the ire of one local kid.
“When my brother Kenneth was about 11 or 13, he went to the Town Council to complain about the shape the duck pond was in,” said Raymond Cieciuch last week. “When we were a little younger, we used to be able to go ice skating, fishing, and it was a nice place to hang out. But it had basically become a garbage dump and my brother was upset about it. So, he went to the council to tell them how he felt.”
Kids built bonfires in the winter to stay warm and burned dried out cattails in the summer to keep the mosquitoes at bay.
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Just would later become instrumental in cleaning up the duck pond and turning into the park it is today.
A weedy, swampy haven
Beginning in the 1980s, the pond – which had once offered local kids a place for outdoor adventure – became a dumping ground for old car parts, furniture, and other garbage.
Cieciuch recalls his uncle going to the pond to search for discarded wood he could use for lumber.
But it hadn’t always been that way.
For many years, until the early 1980s, the pond was an outdoor haven of undeveloped land full of wildlife. Known as a weedy, swampy hang-out for kids in the south end of town, the duck pond rarely attracted north end residents. (One north end resident, now in his fifties, said last week said he had never been to the duck pond – and didn’t even know how to get there.)
“The majority of the kids that came down were definitely from the south end,” said south end native John Schwartz. “It’s kind of the joke of everybody in town [that] we don’t really live in Secaucus because it’s a different town down there, ’cause it’s so far away. We might get a person here or there [from other sections of town] who would stroll down to the pond. But most people who hung out at the duck pond were from the south end.”
The pond was also bigger than it is currently, as much of the surrounding area was undeveloped.
“I live on Blanche Street. If you go down Blanche Street now, it’s fenced off and there’s a building and a guardrail. But we used to be able to walk right down the block and it used to turn right into a dirt road,” Schwartz recalled. “The duck pond was on both sides of that dirt road. My street basically divided the duck pond in half in those days. In the winter we used to play hockey on it. We skated on it. In the summer we’d try to do a little fishing. We’d catch fish then throw them back” in the pond.
And then there were the turtles.
“It was amazing how big they were,” Schwartz said. “Some of the snappers– I remember this one coming up the street, it had to be at least three or four feet long. It was huge.”
“We used to watch the turtles pull baby ducks under the water and eat them,” said Mayor Michael Gonnelli, a former 9th Street resident who used to hunt rabbits and pheasants at the Iron Foundry, near the duck pond.
The pond, it seems, was to previous generations what Buchmuller Park is to many kids today: a place to just socialize with friends.
“People would drive their cars down the dirt road, right in the middle of the two sides [of the pond],” said Schwartz. “They’d put the radio on and just hang out.”
Kids built bonfires in the winter to stay warm and burned dried out cattails, known as “punks,” in the summer to keep the mosquitoes and gnats at bay.
Foreign turtles and strange foul
Hartz Mountain Industries, which owns much of the land in the south end of town, eventually developed the property surrounding the duck pond. As a part of this development half of the pond was filled in, leaving the half that currently exists. This development seems to coincide with the pond’s decline and the rise of dumping at the site.
But after taking office as mayor, Just made restoration of the pond a priority of his administration and he instructed the Department of Public Works (DPW) to begin cleaning up the area.
Just didn’t stop there. Believing that a duck pond should actually have ducks in it, Just took an unusual approach to repopulating wildlife in the area.
“You know how those white ducks got there?” asked Gonnelli, who was superintendent of DPW at the time. “Me and Tony Just would go up to the butcher shop on Bergenline Ave., where they sell live chicken and ducks. He would buy two every week, save them from the butcher, and put them at the duck pond. And they’re still there.”
Hackensack Riverkeeper and Secaucus resident Bill Sheehan laughed and said, “Yes, there are, in my estimation some very interesting ducks in that area. They’re clearly not the wild ducks that we have in the Meadowlands. But, on the other hand, they don’t really look like the domestic ducks you’d find in a poultry market, either. I think they’re hybrids of some sort.”
The ducks, he added, don’t appear in any of his North American bird guides.
And the Bergenline Ave. ducks aren’t the only strange, non-indigenous species living in the pond.
Gonnelli and Sheehan both recalled an Asian group that held a religious ceremony many years ago at the pond, part of which included the release of turtles into the pond. These turtles are much smaller than the three-footers that used to prowl the area.
Sheehan, however, noted, “there are laws against placing wildlife in the waterways and releasing animals in the wild. But Tony Just and Gonnelli were really heroes when it came to saving the duck pond. Between the two of them they invested a lot of time and invested personal capital to make that place what it is. They were the ones who turned it into a park and made it a nice public access area.”
In 2008 former Mayor Dennis Elwell dedicated and named the pond the Anthony E. Just Memorial Duck Pond in honor of the late mayor, who died in 2007. Fittingly, perhaps, the dedication ceremony took place at the annual Fishing Derby.
E-mail E. Assata Wright at awright@hudsonreporter.com.