SEPTEMBER 3, 2023 – With UB in the hospital and out of our hair, Cliff suggested we that we take a little tour of the more troubled realms of the warehouse. “A few weeks ago,” he explained, “we had this big snowstorm that dumped tons of snow on the roof, and when it melted, it all came flowing through a gaping hole. Of course, in the world according to Bruce, you can’t just go and repair the roof. No, god forbid, that would cost money, and even though Uncle Bruce can’t throw away fast enough another few thousand pounds at Alex, he won’t spend ten cents fixing the goddamn roof.”
With a set of keys rivaling UB’s own several-dozen key ring, Cliff let us through a series of locked doors, down several hallways, and up a couple of long staircases toward the top floor of the oldest of the warehouses. “What’s totally insane about all these locked doors,” said Cliff, once we’d arrived at our destination, “is that we could just as easily have busted through that door over there.” He pointed at a door at the other end of the space we’d entered, and as I approached it, I saw that the only lock, the only barrier that any intruder would encounter was a flimsy hook and eyelet. “We could have come up an alternative route without futzin’ with any locked doors except the main one on the ground floor,” Cliff said. “It’s a classic, ‘The world according to Bruce’ scenario.”
Along our maze-like route, Cliff drew my attention to a wall-mounted fire extinguisher. “Here’s more of the world according to Bruce,” he said. “Look at the tag.” In classic “UB bold” script it read, “Last tested: 1/15/06.”
“I don’t know who he’s tryin’ to fool, but every couple of months he goes around the place slapping these doctored inspection tags on all the fire extinguishers. He has all kinds of methods for keeping the fire inspector off the premises—his main method is acting absolutely insane—but in the chance that being loud and crazy doesn’t work, his silent tagging system is his backup plan. He thinks they’ll trick the inspector into thinking these ancient extinguishers are still working, even though the needles are never solidly in the green range.”
I shook my head. “You can’t make this stuff up,” said Cliff.
“Now for the really weird stuff . . . you ready for this?” said Cliff. “Just when you think you’ve seen everything there is to see in these warehouses, you see something weirder.” No sooner had he made this observation than we noticed water pouring down an interior wall next to where we were standing.
“And that’s not what I had in mind in the way of weird. Water pouring down the wall isn’t at all surprising, at least not these days,” said Cliff. “I know exactly where it’s coming from. Come on. I’ll show you.”
Cliff turned the corner and led us up a long staircase. The top opened onto the floor—except there was no floor to be seen. The entire space—roughly 16 feet wide and 32 feet long—was crammed more than a foot deep with open cartons of tableware wrapped in plastic. Together they contained thousands of forks, spoons and knives—4,351—as tallied on the yellow pad pages left on the inside ledge of a window overlooking Park Avenue below.
“I have no idea who owns these utensils,” said Cliff. “Obviously, some restaurant fell on hard times, and this crap wound up being stored here, but I’m pretty sure it’s been abandoned.”
The area in which we found ourselves was part of the original timber-framed, brick-clad warehouse dating back to the late 19th century. It still stands at perhaps the most desirable corner of Rutherford: Highland Cross and Park Avenue, directly across from the age-old and pleasantly landscaped Lincoln Memorial Park and diagonally across from the borough hall (formerly the Rutherford High School of yesteryear), all of which can be viewed through the dust-covered windows. In about 1960, Grandpa decided that repurposed, the space could fetch much higher revenue as the operations center for the local National Community Bank. Subsequently, it was leased for a long term to the retail travel agency arm of TAP, the national airline of Portugal. In later years, it was subdivided and rented out to a variety of more tentative renters—such as whoever had once laid claim to all that tableware.
Stepping across the open cartons of forks, spoons, and knives—our arms extended to maintain balance, as if we were fording a treacherous stream by stepping across slippery rocks—Cliff guided us to an area beyond the utensils. At first glance it looked like an indoor water park. The roof was in such disrepair, snowmelt was flowing from an open hole and down a piece of sheet metal tacked up in a corner, then into several large plastic pails that were stuck fast inside another set of plastic buckets. The containers were overflowing all over the floor and down a level.
“This was definitely a Bruce and Angelo operation,” said Cliff. “Uncle Bruce designed it and Angelo built it.”
Cliff then called his office. “Yeah, I’m upstairs—way upstairs—in the corner building. Send the guys up right away. Bruce’s flood-control system is out of control. Imagine that. The pails need to be emptied again—now! Okay. Thanks.”
Turning back to me, Cliff explained the routine that UB had forced him to adopt. “My guys will be up here in a minute. They know to come up here every hour or to empty the buckets so the tenants downstairs don’t get flooded out. They must’ve gotten sidetracked working for me for a change.”
We resumed our tour by crossing the sea of utensil cartons again back to a side door that opened into another cavernous space. This was part of the original storage warehouse and was unchanged from the day its construction was completed around 1900. The thick joists high above and solid wood floors spoke silently of the era when lumber came from virgin forests that could still be found east of Ohio.
Once filled with constantly circulating storage lots generating profits for Geo. B. Holman & Co., Inc., the area was now occupied by abandoned office furniture from the 40s, kitchen tables and chairs from the 50s, cheap living room furnishings from the 60s, but nothing more modern than a stereo console from the 70s. When viewed in aggregate the stuff looked like rejected works by an unknown sculptor specializing in “large scale concept junk.”
Yet among this conglomeration were items that surely had historical if not monetary value: a horse-drawn buggy[1]; a life-size model horse that used to be “stabled” down in the corner office; large-scale business signs from the early days of Geo. B. Holman & Co. Inc.; antique Allied Van Lines signage; a museum-quality scale model 18th century sailing ship (in need of some refurbishment); crates and iron-wheeled carts that (cleaned up) could have graced a tony apartment somewhere in the Village[2]; and two Chippendale chairs rescued from 42 Lincoln[3].
“Who,” I wondered aloud to Cliff, “will deal with all this stuff?”
Cliff laughed. “I can think of only two people,” he said, “and both are standing right here . . . But for now let’s keep going.” He led us to the far side of the expansive antique junk room and opened the big heavy steel fireproof door that yielded the way to the central and very ancient warehouse elevator.
I’d ridden—even operated—the freight elevator many times during my boyhood visits to New Jersey. I was never bothered by the inherent hazard of the open wooden platform connected to a cable looped over a two-foot wide pulley connected to heavy steel beams far overhead. If you gazed at it long enough, you’d think you were a time-traveler visiting the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.
To ride the elevator you simply lifted one end of the dubious guardrail—a three-inch horizontal pipe—from the connecting three-foot-high vertical pipe firmly planted in the concrete, pulled the “guardrail” aside and stepped from the foot-thick cement floor on either side of the elevator shaft onto the 12-foot-wide platform. You then secured the guardrail pipe back in place so that when the elevator moved up or down, no one walking the floor you left would accidentally tumble into oblivion.
Once you and your fellow passengers (and goods to be stored or removed from storage) were on board, you pressed the “up” or “down” button, depending on your desired direction, and the contraption would provide smooth vertical transit to your targeted floor. Although the elevator was rated for a maximum load of 2,000 pounds, I’d guess it could’ve handled a lot more. If UB jerry-rigged everything as cheaply as he could, Grandpa and Great Grandpa Holman built everything as solid as possible. The warehouse elevator was a prime example, put in service nearly a 100 years before and still going strong[4]. No one had ever fallen over the edge.
Cliff allowed me to do the honors of pressing the down button to the third floor, where he wanted to continue the warehouse tour. I landed the platform as proficiently as I’d learned to do as a kid. Cliff lifted the “guardrail” (for additional safety, jerry-rigged with UB’s surplus garden fencing) and stepped out to roll away the massive fireproof door next to the elevator shaft. We then entered a corridor that intersected with two more hallways lined with 500- and 1,000-cubic-foot vaults, each behind two heavy steel doors. One by one, Cliff opened several vaults.
“Some are still rented out—like this one, full of cartons of advertising literature. Some are empty,” he said, as we moved to the next vault, which was broom-clean. “And other vaults are filled with stuff no one wants anymore.” Cliff opened three more vaults, each brimming with junk, things, or cartons, all best relegated to a dumpster.
The main corridor led to a cavernous room with a couple of windows at each end to allow dusty light to drift into the space. Much of the room was filled with heavy wooden storage racks. Crowded into a corner were additional racks on wheels. All the goods and crap in this room—household furniture, furnishings, and oversized sundry curios; discarded wares inside boxes stuffed into larger containers; rolls upon rolls of carpeting; junk so tangled up with itself I couldn’t identify any constituent parts; even an ensemble of grand pianos resting on their sides inside wooden stalls—had been abandoned by their original owners[5].
“More stuff for us to deal with eventually,” said Cliff. “Because we both know UB never will.”
Even though he’d surveyed things many times before (as he searched for additional storage space for his own costume and event-prop business needs), Cliff remained as curious about all the goods as any collector would be. I myself was not an antique or curiosity shop browser, except in the company of my wife, who for a long time had been a serious collector (or at least, “searcher”). Nevertheless, many of the things on hand were of such a vintage as to appeal to my sense of history, at least.
In a remote corner I uncovered an unlikely throwback to World War I or the Great War for Civilization, as it was called by the victors . . . before World War II came along. Surrounded by dirty cardboard boxes and other nondescript items were two army helmets from that tragic early 20th century conflict. Battered by time as well as combat, the helmets rested side by side in dust-covered silence, representing the prime belligerents of the Triple Entente and the opposing Triple Alliance[6]: France and Germany.
In the moment, my thoughts were swept straight away from Rutherford, from New Jersey, from America, from February 2006. I was transported across the sea and back 90 years to a scene I’d stumbled across on my previous trip to Rutherford: the horrific Battle of Verdun and the heroics of Grandpa’s younger brother, Henry W. Holman. First with one helmet then the other in my hands, I felt a disturbing connection to that unspeakable failure of humanity—Germans killing French, French killing Germans—insanity triggered on June 28, 1914 by Gavrilo Princip . . . like Alex, a Serb. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
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[2] In fact, many years later one such cart—delivered by none other than Cliff—would serve as a coffee table (after lots of elbow grease was applied) in the high-rise Brooklyn apartment of Byron and his wife Mylène.
[3] A decade later, Cliff led on a tour of the warehouses, our family attorney—Tom Sullivan, a central hero of the story (stay tuned)—and Ed Nilsson (a close family friend but unrelated, whom I call “our non-relative relative”), an architect retained to consider a redesign of the warehouses for residential apartments above street level and retail/office space along the sidewalks. I tagged along. Upon encountering the two Chippendale dining room chairs, Cliff explained that UB had told him that George B. Holman, a highly skilled furniture maker, as well as successful entrepreneur, had made an exact replica of one the original chairs. Upon hearing this, Tom, who was very knowledgeable about antiques, closely inspected the two specimens. After running his fingers across certain joinery, he was able to distinguish the original from the replica and explained the difference. Without Tom’s learned explanation, Cliff, Ed and I could not have noticed.
[4] When a state inspector paid a visit in 2016, he remarked that it was one of only two of its heavy-duty kind he’d ever encountered.
[5] By 2006 the warehouses were mostly filled—with abandoned goods. The owners would die, go out of business, move away, forget, lose interest and in any event, quit paying monthly storage fees. The hoarder gene ran rampant in the Holman family, and the savings obsession went rogue after 100 years in the moving and storage business.
[6] The Triple Entente comprised France, Britain and Russia; Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Italy (which switched sides late in the war) constituted the Triple Alliance.
