HISTORY OF A NEIGHBORHOOD IN MONTCLAIR, N.J.,

INCLUDING GODFREY ROAD, PRINCETON PLACE, CARTERET STREET, EDGEMONT ROAD, OAKCROFT AVENUE, PARKSIDE STREET

  By Lisanne Renner
Revised April 2019

 

Aaron W. Godfrey, who had formerly owned a silver mine in Mexico among other occupations, made his first foray into real estate development in 1906 by shopping for land in Upper Montclair, N.J. Attracted by the Olmsted-designed Anderson Park completed just a year before, Godfrey bought about 18 acres immediately south of the park and promised the park’s landscape architect, John C. Olmsted, that he would build respectable homes surrounding it. The result was Oakcroft, and for more than 110 years the park and its adjacent 80-home subdivision have been friendly neighbors, creating what the original Oakcroft sales brochure called “a residential park.”

Anderson Park’s creation by Essex County curtailed commercial development west of the Upper Montclair Village business district and halted the spread of industrial uses, which immediately abutted the eastern park boundary along the train tracks at the Osborne and Marsellis lumber, coal and masonry yard. A deed restriction for one tract in Oakcroft prohibited construction of a factory, store, lumber or sillar yard.[1] All this solidified the trend toward residential development in the area, with Oakcroft being the first large-scale example. One Olmsted tenet held that neighborhood parks were important,[2] and Anderson Park not only helped foster a strong bond between the park and the surrounding community, but it helped shape the Oakcroft neighborhood. The park spurred development of a multi-block district that now numbers over 200 residents, and more than a century later it continues to maintain the residential character of an area just a block or two from a commercial district.

Figure 1:  Oakcroft views, clockwise, from upper left: looking north on Princeton Place from Godfrey Road; the west side of Princeton Place, viewed from Godfrey Road; looking south on Princeton Place from Parkside Street, with No. 25 in view; looking north on Edgemont Road from Godfrey Road. From “Montclair, New Jersey, and Its Advantages as a Place of Residence,” a real estate promotional booklet by Frank Hughes-Taylor Co., circa 1913.

 

By the time Anderson Park opened in 1905, Upper Montclair was on the fast track for suburban development because of the commuter railroad’s arrival in the 1870s. Similarly, parkside property was poised for development because it was attractive and walking distance to the Upper Montclair train station.[3] Oakcroft became part of a nationwide transformation of open land to suburban development, which began after the Civil War and continued into the early 20^th century as railroad service expanded rapidly. Train lines radiating from large metropolitan areas made it possible for middle-class, white-collar workers in congested cities to afford outlying homes a short commute away, where birdsong and cricket chirps filled the air.[4] Newspaper ads and a promotional brochure for Oakcroft highlighted the conveniences of urban living – “water, gas, electricity, telephone, drainage and underdrainage” – along with the charms of the country – “spacious lawns, shady groves and many forest trees.”[5]

Figure 2:  Newspaper classified advertisement promoting Oakcroft subdivision. The New York Times, April 24, 1910, pg. 17.

 

Godfrey was buying property south of the park in earnest in 1906. By that October he owned the full expanse that would become Oakcroft.[6] “Croft” is a British word meaning a small enclosed field, usually adjoining a house, and perhaps Godfrey chose it as an hommage to his English-born father. Or maybe he just liked its quaint connotations; years later he would also build a nearby neighborhood called Russelcroft. In any case, the name Oakcroft had fallen out of use by the early 1930s.

Godfrey’s arrival as a landowner in Upper Montclair removed a thorn in the side of the Essex County Park Commission, which had been embroiled in an acrimonious relationship with previous owners of the Godfrey property, who refused to give up portions of their development land for the county’s Anderson Park. Although Godfrey had every intention of building on this land, he was willing to work with Olmsted and the Park Commission while doing so, and agreements struck among these parties helped shape the southern boundary of the park as well as the emerging neighborhood.[7]

Before Oakcroft began to rise, its land served mainly as a drainage area for First Mountain runoff into Toneys Brook. A small section had been subdivided into a dozen residential lots by Marshall C. Kelley, a Michigan developer, and more lots were planned by adjacent owners, but construction never began.[8]

In October 1906 Godfrey announced his plans for Oakcroft, a subdivision that would cut six new streets and build scores of houses.[9] A few months later The Montclair Times described the future Oakcroft as a parkside neighborhood with more than 100 houses and 500 residents, hailing the development as “a great improvement in that section of the town” and describing the houses as “high-class residences.” Oakcroft’s layout was designed to “harmonize” with Anderson Park, The Montclair Times wrote. The development would be bounded by Anderson Park to the north, the south side of Godfrey Road to the south, North Mountain Avenue to the west and the train tracks to the east.[10]

 

Figure 3:  The Oakcroft subdivision, built out. Sanborn map, 1934.

 

By the end of 1906, Godfrey had approached the Park Commission about building a street along the park’s southern boundary, which would require paving some park acreage.[11] A similar request had come up several years earlier from the previous owners, and at that time the Olmsted firm proposed three alternatives for such a street, including straight and curved alignments.[12]  In all those proposals Olmsted envisioned houses facing the park and set back at least 30 feet from the street, which would intersect North Mountain Avenue at a right angle. In one plan the road ran straight, as it does now; in another it curved south near where Carteret Street is today. To Godfrey’s request Olmsted responded likewise, but the men agreed to a straight street, homes with a 25-foot setback, the preservation of large trees along the boundary, and a strip at least 5-feet wide for planting a row of street trees along Godfrey’s land.[13] By February 1907 the Township of Montclair formally approved the new street, to be called The Parkside (now Parkside Street).[14]  The road, which Godfrey offered to construct at his expense, intersected with most of Oakcroft’s other streets. By 1912 two of Oakcroft’s north-south streets, Princeton Place and Edgemont Road, had direct links to newly extended pathways into the park, establishing a formal pedestrian connection between the park and the people living beside it.[15]  

 

Figure 4: Oakcroft in its early days, looking west from the train tracks, with a sign heralding the subdivision.  From the Oakcroft sales brochure, circa 1908.

Construction crews for the Godfrey Land and Building Company had broken ground on infrastructure and home construction by the spring of 1907, laying drainage and sewer pipes, clearing brush and digging cellars. As the newspaper reported: “The improvement in this tract of land will add greatly to the appearance of that section of the town north of Watchung Avenue, and incidentally add a nice sum to the taxable values of the town of Montclair. … Oakcroft will become one of the finest sites for homes in Montclair, situated as it is between Harrison [now Edgemont Memorial Park] and Anderson Parks.”[16]

 

Figure 5:  Looking west toward 130 Edgemont Avenue, with The Parkside and Anderson Park to the right. Postcard is circa 1911.

 

Both Godfrey and the Mountain Society, a civic organization, began advocating in 1909 for lights to be installed in Anderson Park, which was dark when commuters walked home to their Oakcroft houses on winter nights. Although the Park Commission denied the request, it did review an estimate for Welsbach naptha gas lamps in 1910.[17]  In 1922 electric lights finally arrived in the park  – 22 of them, with posts made of ornamental reinforced concrete designed to resemble gray granite and opalescent Washington globes fitted with 100-candlepower lamps.[18]

The park’s presence was a strong selling point for Oakcroft, which was marketed in Montclair and New York City and described in a newspaper advertisement as “one of the choicest and best established of New York’s picturesque suburbs.”[19] A promotional brochure includes a photograph of the park and opens by saying, “Oakcroft fronts the superb twenty-five acre Essex County Park, [and] is in fact a continuation of it – a residential Park.”[20]  An item in The New York Times promoted its location – at the foothills of a mountain, beside a park, minutes from mass transit[21] – and likewise, an advertisement in The Montclair Times noted that the subdivision “adjoins Anderson Park, five minutes walk through the park from the Upper Montclair station, three minutes from the Valley Road [trolley] car.”[22]

 

Figure 6:  A page from “Godfrey Land and Building Co., Upper Montclair, New Jersey,” a promotional booklet for the Oakcroft subdivision, circa 1908.

 

“Residence parks” were all the rage in the early 1900s, and became early models of suburbia created in response to an industrialized nation and cities swelling with immigrants. Their development restrictions set the stage for the city zoning and planning codes to come; their tract associations were precursors to homeowners’ associations; and they paved the way for contemporary suburban development patterns.[23]  One of the earliest in this genre – built in 1885 in New Rochelle, N.Y., for Adrian Iselin Jr. – had grounds designed collaboratively by John C. Olmsted and Downing Vaux.[24] Residence parks typically featured winding streets with curbs and sidewalks, cohesive architecture, homes set on “garden lots” surrounded by light and air, and common green spaces. Oakcroft boasted only some of these signature elements – its streets followed a grid and it lacked shared green spaces – but it piggybacked on the adjacent park to achieve this connection.

As in many residence parks, Oakcroft tapped notable architects, and its promotional material emphasized the quality of the homes. At least six of Oakcroft’s first homes were designed by the partners George Albree Freeman and Francis George Hasselman of New York.[25]  They were no ordinary tract-house architects: During their combined careers, they designed at least three buildings that are now on the National Register of Historic Places. As partners prior to Oakcroft, they collaborated in 1903 on the Allenhurst Club in Asbury Park; in 1904 on Rosemary Hall, a Georgian-style mansion in Old Westbury, N.Y.; on Robert D. Foote’s 1906 Georgian Revival Spring Brook House mansion in Morristown, N.J. (now on the National Register of Historic Places);  and went on to design other estates and country clubs on Long Island and elsewhere.[26]

Individually, Freeman (1859-1934) was a favorite of the wealthy Whitney family, remodeling William C. Whitney’s Joye Cottage in Aiken, S.C., for instance, and designing a horse stable in Newport, R.I., for H. Payne Whitney). He designed numerous mansions, and his Neo-Classical Revival Federal Building in Sarasota, Fla., is on the National Register.

Hasselman (1877-1932) began his practice in Manhattan in 1899. Around the same time he began work on Oakcroft, he designed several houses for another New Jersey subdivision, Livingston Manor in Highland Park, a neighborhood now on the National Register. He also designed the Hale Building, an office tower in downtown East Orange, N.J.; All Souls’ Hospital in Morristown, N.J.; the Rumson Country Club in New Jersey; and the Neo-Classical Greenpoint Savings Bank in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. About two decades after Oakcroft he returned to Montclair to design a commercial building on the northwest corner of Bloomfield and Midland Avenues. It is now a “key” building in the Township’s Town Center Historic District.

Freeman and Hasselman’s Oakcroft efforts were described in American Homes and Gardens magazine: “One of the most important principles to be considered in the building of a suburban home is that which affects the physical, mental and moral well-being of the prospective home-builder. A second principle which is equally important is the element of sincerity expressed in the designing of a house in a style of architecture that will be permanent and characteristic of all that is best in art expression.”[27]

 

Figures 7 and 8:  Edgemont Road around 1908.  Top, looking east toward Nos. 115 and 111.   Above, looking west toward Nos. 114, left, 118 and 124.  Both are from the Oakcroft sales brochure.

Oakcroft is characterized primarily by two- and three-story homes, mostly single-family, many set on deep lots along tree-lined streets. Their eclectic styles include an assortment of Craftsman, Tudor Revival, American Foursquare and Prairie influences. The exteriors are varied, composed “in different forms and styles in order to make each house sufficiently distinctive.”[28] Nonetheless, several designs are repeated, with some tweaks, throughout the neighborhood. For example, 14 Princeton Place and 124 Edgemont Road are twins, and a twin-gable Tudor Revival model appears four times: once on Princeton, once on Edgemont and twice on Godfrey. (Hasselman must have been particularly fond of this Tudor Revival design: His own house in the Montrose Park neighborhood of South Orange, N.J., is very similar and was built around the same time as Oakcroft’s earliest houses.) The primary exterior building materials are wood, brick and stucco. The advertised “concrete” houses were of frame construction covered with metal lath and then coated in cement stucco.[29] These stucco houses sold better than the clapboard or shingle models in the early years.[30]

Homes built during the subdivision’s first decade tended to feature a stylistic range of exterior architectural elements, especially those associated with the Craftsman style: brackets under eaves and above windows; inglenooks on porches, and shingle-covered facades. Tudor half-timber is a recurring effect, along with Tudor-style archways on windows and porches. Roof lines include hip roofs, box roofs, ridge roofs, and gambrels. Several roof lines evoke thatched-roof cottages (Nos. 111, 119 and 120 on Edgemont).  Later additions to the neighborhood, built by subsequent developers, are generally wood-frame Colonial Revival, and these houses often have sidelights, fan windows, decorative shutters, and sunbursts and pediments over doorways. There are also several bungalows. Most homes retain their original historic fabric, and 11 are singled out as having special significance in Montclair Township’s Historic Inventory Viewer. One of the earliest Oakcroft homes (18 Princeton Place) is on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places.[31]

 

On the interior, Craftsman elements included natural oak trim – beams, plate rails, fireplace mantels, built-in china cabinets  – and walls painted or papered in earth tones. An advertisement called these homes “superbly finished with oak trim and floors, two baths and toilets, steam heat, gas and electric fixtures, tiled bathrooms, two or more open fireplaces, fine large verandas and shaded lawns.”[32]

 

 

Fig. 11: Wooden beams and trim in 105 Edgemont Road (built 1912).

Figure 12:  Undated postcard of 35 Godfrey Road, Montclair, N.J., built in 1907. This twin-gable Tudor Revival model appears four times in Oakcroft.

Figure 13:  Two Oakcroft homes, from American Homes and Gardens magazine, Jan. 1910. Top, 7 Princeton Place. Bottom, 19 Princeton Place.

 

Oakcroft was advertised as “a carefully restricted residential park of 25 acres”[33] that “contains a complete drainage system, thoroughly improved with sewers, paved streets, cement sidewalks, curbs and gutters.”[34]  That sidewalk offered an extra touch: street names, cast in bronze, inset into the pavement at intersections. Only seven of these have survived the decades.

Figure 14:  Oakcroft sidewalk insert at the southwest intersection of Godfrey and Edgemont Roads. May 2013.

 

One notable house, at 25 Princeton Place, later became the childhood home of the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who recalled playing pick-up football in Anderson Park and using the trees and boulders as goalposts.[35]  “A unique part of my youth was growing up with the park next to my house in Montclair,” Aldrin reminisced in 2008. “I played frequently on Saturdays with school buddies, throwing snowballs in the wintertime. Then I walked through the park to get to Upper Montclair during my junior high school years. It was an integral part of my surroundings, my environment, my life.”[36]

 

Figure 15:  25 Princeton Place, at the corner of The Parkside in Oakcroft. This became the childhood home of the Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Another connection between Anderson Park and Oakcroft is Toneys Brook. This tributary of Second River flows along Anderson Park but is diverted underground when it enters Oakcroft. It runs beneath Carteret Street, covered by an extra-wide sidewalk, and then sees daylight again when it resurfaces, fittingly, at Brookfield Road.

Oakcroft became the first of several real estate developments carried out by Godfrey. He was 33 years old when he began buying the Oakcroft land, and before that he had spent his post-college years briefly owning the Mexican silver mine, which failed; then working as a reporter and editor for newspapers in Philadelphia and Newark; then selling life insurance.[37] It is unclear what drew him to Montclair, although by 1903 he belonged to The Orange Club in New Jersey, and in 1906 he lived in nearby East Orange, N.J., where he was listed in the “Society Blue Book.”[38]

 

 

Figure 16:  Aaron W. Godfrey, 1940.

 

 

Throughout his life, Godfrey (1873-1943) remained a staunch supporter of his alma mater, Princeton University, from which he would have graduated with the Class of 1896 except that the shame of a family scandal forced him to leave early. (A brother-in-law was caught selling art forgeries.)[39] His nickname at Princeton was Nap, “because, like Napoleon’s, his physical stature was in inverse ratio to his mental horizons.”[40]  In 1931 he received an honorary degree from Princeton, along with the likes of the aviator Charles Lindbergh, the writer Willa Cather, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Frank B. Kellogg and the former U.S. war secretary Newton Baker.[41]  His affection for the university is reflected in an Oakcroft street name: Princeton Place.

 

 

 

Figure 17:  Princeton University honorary degree recipients, 1931. Aaron W. Godfrey is in the back row, second from right. Other recipients include Charles Lindbergh (back row, second from left) and Willa Cather (front row).

 

Figure 18:  Postcard of Princeton Place, looking north from Godfrey Road. Interstate Publishing Company, New York, N.Y. Postmarked June 30, 1916.

 

By 1916 the Godfrey Land and Building Company seemed to be wrapping up business around the park, though infill by other builders continued into the 1920s and ’30s, mostly in the Colonial Revival style.[42]  One of the last houses built, at 3 Godfrey Road, resembles an 18^th-century Dutch home but in fact was put up in 1937 by John Post, who built similar homes around Montclair, including a twin on College Avenue. Oakcroft’s boom years ran from 1907 to 1916, when 46 houses were built. Another 34 went up between 1917 and 1931. The final house was erected in 1946 (28 Parkside), and then the neighborhood was built out. More than a century after the first cellars were dug, the Township of Montclair’s Master Plan recommended a formal study of Oakcroft, along with six other neighborhoods, for possible designation as a local historic district. A report prepared for the Master Plan recommended Oakcroft based on its “distinct architectural identity,” its ability to convey historic context, and its “moderate integrity.”[43]

 

Figure 19: The number of Oakcroft houses built during five-year increments.

 

The boundaries of the potential historic district extend beyond the original Oakcroft to encompass houses on the north side of Brookfield Road; one block on the east side of North Mountain Avenue; and a smidgen on the west end of Parkside. Older 19^th-century architectural styles such as Queen Anne and Shingle appear in this area, which predates the Oakcroft development. The oldest house in the potential district is at 91 Edgemont Road, recorded as being built in 1880, although it does not appear on maps until about two decades later. The youngest house in the potential district, at 27 Brookfield Road, rose in 1968.

Several houses in this expanded area are notable. Two have distinguished architects: Alfred F. Norris designed 22 Parkside and Arthur E. Ramhurst probably designed 28 Parkside. One is a Thomas Edison/Frank Lambie poured-concrete home (303 North Mountain Avenue) on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places. Side-by-side houses on North Mountain Avenue (Nos. 293 and 295) originally sat on the Anderson Park property and were moved during park construction to their current locations.

Parts of this expanded area are different in character from the Oakcroft subdivision, in particular the stretch of Brookfield Road east of Edgemont Road. This section is zoned for two-family homes, as opposed to single-family ones, and lots are narrower and more densely built than elsewhere. Many of the original residents of this block were tradespeople – plumbers, carpenters, masons, painters, dressmakers – as opposed to Oakcroft residents, who tended to have white-collar professions such as lawyer, insurance executive and manager.

With Oakcroft a success, Godfrey took on other subdivisions in Upper Montclair, building more than 60 substantial homes on Norman, Marion, Aubrey and Caroline Roads; Patton and Nassau Streets (two street names that again nodded to Princeton); and parts of Inwood Avenue and Clarewill Avenue.  Beginning in the mid-1920s, just north of Montclair in Clifton, he began work on Russelcroft, a subdivision where streets bear the names of Princeton presidents: McCosh, Maclean, Hibben, Edwards, Witherspoon.  The New York Times estimated Godfrey’s worth in 1930 at $1 million, and by then he lived in Manhattan.[44] All told, he had built about 200 single-family homes in and around Upper Montclair.

In May 1930 he bought 36 acres of the William Hamilton dairy farm in Upper Montclair, bordering the south side of Alexander Avenue between Grove and Broad Streets. He planned a development meant to address “the problem of good but inexpensive small homes for young couples of modest means.”[45] The Depression, however, interfered with his development of that land, and three years later, in 1933, he sold it to a real estate company.

The land along North Mountain Avenue directly overlooking the park did not belong to Godfrey, but like the Oakcroft property, it too experienced significant upgrading. When Anderson Park opened, five houses sat on the stretch of North Mountain between Bellevue Avenue and the future Parkside.[46]

Figure 20:  Anderson Park with an early, unrealized subdivision plat to the south before Aaron W. Godfrey bought the land, shown in a 1906 atlas.

 

By 1928, ten houses took advantage of the park view, and some replaced wood-frame Victorian vernaculars that were demolished to make way for grander Georgian Revival and Tudor Revival homes. Several of these were built by Charles W. Anderson for family members after he donated the parkland to the county in 1903.

Anderson Park’s development turned out to be a real-estate improvement project as much as a community-spirited beautification effort. The park’s creation provided the impetus for Oakcroft, and a symbiotic relationship existed among the housing developer, the Essex County Park Commission, Montclair Township and the Olmsted Brothers firm: Godfrey ensured worthy surroundings for the park, promising to build “fairly good dwellings” facing it,[47] and in return the commission and Olmsted agreed to give up a sliver of park property for the creation of The Parkside, a road that would allow construction of houses overlooking the park.[48]

The town, which approved this arrangement to help the new Oakcroft subdivision, also benefited through beautification and increased property taxes. As one civic leader put it when advocating for park development in 1906: “A block of parkland is usually an ornament to at least four blocks surrounding it.”[49] By the time the Essex County park system was just a few years old, the ability for its parks to pay for themselves by enhancing property values was already being touted.[50] And after about two decades, a study of Essex County parks would confirm what town leaders already knew: The value of property adjoining four county parks studied increased sixfold over 11 years compared with twofold elsewhere in the same tax district.[51] As a large property owner along the park, Charles Anderson directly profited from this ripple effect and clearly understood its power: In 1912 he placed a real-estate ad for a spacious home “overlooking a beautiful park,” offering the promise of “a rare investment opportunity – rising real estate values” and the “chance for somebody to make a real home and some real money besides.”[52]  That “beautiful park” so crucial to Oakcroft’s genesis joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

The embrace of well-built homes along Anderson Park’s southern and western borders has established and maintained the area’s residential character for more than a century, reinforcing Anderson Park as an enduring example of the Olmstedian ideal of a suburban park while making it an integral part of the Oakcroft neighborhood it fostered.