OCTOBER 26, 2023 – Over three years had passed since we’d retained a land use lawyer and an architect, and all we had to show by the fall of 2021 were the concept drawings our architect had prepared in mid-2018 and (finally) an official designation of our properties as “an area in need of redevelopment.” The latter baby step was thanks to the report of the borough’s outside consultant—paid by us—and our lawyer’s efforts after my incessant pestering. I never did learn what had become of the “stipulated order” regarding agreement on the affordable housing ratio—the order that “the judge was expected to sign any day now” back in 2018 . . . through 2019 and 2020. By 2021 I’d quit asking Charles Sarlo about it and he never again informed me of the status.
After the public Zoom meeting of the borough council in October 2021 our contacts inside the borough hall counseled yet more patience. “Everyone needs to let things cool down before you proceed with your project,” we were told. “Another couple of months, at least. Maybe not until after the next election [in 2022].”
In my mind all bets were now off as to when and even if the borough of Rutherford would ever embrace the benefits of our project: an attractive community asset in place of a pile of bricks—and a corresponding improvement in the local tax base.
Three of us four direct inheritors of the New Jersey property were now Medicare beneficiaries. In another year, Jenny, the youngest, would officially join our “senior status.” Our two older sisters were already in their 70s, and the most vital team member—Cliff—had his eye on retirement. Would we survive political and administrative inertia, I wondered, or be conquered by it?
When Cliff called me after his latest “Wait some more” conversation with the borough manager, I lost all self control.
“#@!%!” I shouted into my phone. “I’ve had it! Absolutely had it!”
“I hear ya, I hear ya,” said Cliff, surprised by my uncharacteristic profanity. He then expressed his own frustrations and seasoned them with enough expletives to start a fire inside the warehouses had he not been climbing aboard his Denali.
I responded with another round of words that would’ve shocked more than a few people who knew me well.
After Cliff and I had scorched the earth with more expletives, I recovered a modicum of sanity: I jettisoned my rage in exchange for cold hard realism.
“I’m ready to bail, Cliff.”
“I don’t blame you. Not one bit.”
Of course I wasn’t prepared to bail-bail, but patience was getting us nowhere.
“You know what I think we should do?”
“Does it involve oily rags, gasoline, and a match?” Cliff said with a laugh.
“Ha! I wish, but that wouldn’t work. In the first place 50 Lincoln is now bare ground, and Uncle Bruce proved 20 years ago that 42 Lincoln is built like a fireproof fortress. Now that all the mahogany grandeur is gone, what’s left to burn? And speaking of fireproof, we’ve got the fireproof warehouses, remember with all the fireproof doors? I repeat, fireproof—built that way in 1911 by my great-grandfather after the fire that had destroyed most of the original warehouses. That leaves 8 Highland Cross and the corner building. But guess what, Cliff. Because casualty insurance is insanely expensive—if we could even get it—we have only liability insurance.”
“You’re killin‘ me,” said Cliff.
“Oh, and I almost forgot.”
“What?”
“We’d have to worry about being charged for arson and going to jail.”
“Or just the opposite—winning an architectural award for improving the property.”
“Very good, Cliff, but sorry—we’d more likely be fined for not getting council approval before we burned the place down.”
In keeping with the pattern established years before when confronting UB’s nonsense, Cliff and I were in full humor mode. Without frequent laughter we’d never have survived the marathon.
All joking aside, however, we needed to find a way out of the impasse.
“I think now’s the time, Cliff, for you to approach Steve Silverman. But not for advice. Instead, you need to ask him if he’s interested in making an offer. Title, environmental and trash removal contingencies, fine, but otherwise we’d have to get him to buy the properties without any pre-conditions; no financing contingency, no borough approvals. See what he’d be willing to do.”
“He’s so tied up right now, he hardly has time to pee,” said Cliff, “but he invited me to go down to his place in Florida for some golf a couple of weeks from now. It’ll be a perfect time, perfect setting to raise the question.”
* * *
When I was a kid Mother used to tell us on an overcast day that if we could see enough blue sky to make a pair of Dutchman’s britches, the cloud cover would soon yield to clear skies and sunshine. Mother had learned this from Gaga—whose English background had absorbed some New York Dutch along the way[1].
I would one day find myself explaining Gaga and Mother’s weather forecasting technique to our imaginative, seven-year-old granddaughter.
“Illiana,” I said one day pointing to the sky as the weather seemed to be struggling to make up its mind. “Did you know that if you can find enough blue sky up there to make a pair of Dutchman’s britches, it’s going to be a nice day? . . . But do you know what a Dutchman’s britches are?”
“No, Granpda.”
“‘Britches’ is an old-fashioned word for pants or trousers. And a Dutchman is a man from Holland . . . Here, quick, let me show you where Holland is on the globe in the living room.” I led Illiana from our back porch, through the dining room to our floor-stand model of Mother Earth. After a half-spin, I pressed my right hand down just west of the Urals to stop the orb, then placed my left index finger below “Netherlands” facing the North Sea.
“This country right above my finger here is Holland, Illiana, and the people who live there are called Dutch. They were once masters of art and commerce. So, anyway, in old times, Dutch men in a fishing town called Volendam wore very baggy blue pants or britches, and they became associated with Dutchmen generally. Nowadays if you can find enough blue up there amongst the clouds to make a pair of old Dutchman’s britches, you know the sky will soon clear up.”
* * *
Cliff’s disclosure about his upcoming golf vacation with Steve Silverman made me think of Gaga and Mother’s optimistic weather forecasting. I imagined lots of big blue patches in the skies above Steve’s country club down in Florida. If anyone was up to the task of making a pair of Dutchman’s britches, it would be . . . Cliff.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Because the British ultimately prevailed against their Dutch rivals, generations of post-Revolution American school children were inculcated with the idea that American culture, capitalism, and political traditions were deeply rooted in Great Britain, most particularly England. But this Anglocentric view overlooked the influence of the Dutch. This is the thesis of Russ Shorto in his fascinating analysis of the influence of the Dutch of New Amsterdam in The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America. Within our Mother’s lineage, the Holmans (and Huntleys – Scottish line of Grandpa’s mother; and Baldwins (Gaga’s father) were solidly British/English (1620s and 1630s), but by way of Gaga’s mother, the Dutch played a role in our family’s background.
