July 4, 1923 was a day of celebration for the City of Englewood, as the people marked both Independence Day and the official opening of their long-awaited new city hall.
Local newspapers provided accounts of the festivities, describing a scene in which every club and organization in the city, several bands, and city leaders both past and present joined in a massive parade that departed from Palisade Avenue and Tenafly Road that morning at 10 a.m.
The procession made a loop that took them up Tenafly Road, down Demarest Avenue, down Engle Street and then returned to Palisade Avenue, where the new city hall was located at the corner of Van Brunt Street. Spectators lined the avenues and cheered and waved as the parade passed by. Englewood homes and business were patriotically decked out in red, white and blue to celebrate that 147th birthday of America. Newspapers described it as one of the biggest events in the city’s history.
At the conclusion of the parade a brief ceremony was held at the new city hall, after which members of the public were invited inside for the first time to see the facility that $175,000 in tax dollars (equivalent to about $2.6 million today) had bought.
The new city hall had been discussed for years, with a major sticking point being where it should be located. Finally, in the spring of 1921 the town fathers determined that Englewood should build a state-of-the-art city hall in the place of the old one, at Palisade Avenue and Van Brunt Street.
By the dawn of the 1920s, the existing city hall, housed in a pre-Civil War former hotel and pub, had become woefully inadequate for a city the size of Englewood. Cramped, outdated, and a fire trap, there was also no storage place for important city documents and records. Books and papers were stored in various places scattered all over the building, none of them in a location safe from theft or fire. One particularly scathing news report called the building an eyesore and a target of ridicule from outsiders. In 1921, the state authorities condemned the jail on the site.
To make way for the new facility, in May of 1922 the old city hall was picked up off its foundation and hauled up the road to a new location at the southeast corner of Van Brunt Street and Englewood Avenue, where it was renovated and used for years as an office building. (It was eventually torn down in the 1970s.)
The new city hall, constructed in a classical style and with great attention paid to architectural detail, was a source of pride for the people of Englewood, and a far cry from its predecessor.
At the time, Mayor David J. McKenna said he expected the new facility to serve the city for the next 50 years. He might have been pleasantly surprised to learn that the building is still in use nearly a century later!
