PARK RIDGE—This week we go back 120 years to the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 13, 1904. The streets were dark, and the people of Park Ridge were asleep in their beds. This was an era before the Pascack Valley had electric light, and preceding the modern technology that creates constant ambient noise and creates a glow in our nighttime skies.
An explosion rocks the night. People sit bolt upright in bed. Babies cry. Dogs bark.
Of course, nobody is more startled than Clarence Stalter and Peter Tarauletti. They live in the apartments above the post office, where burglars have just used dynamite to blow the safe.
The Park Ridge Post Office in those days was in a two-story frame building on Hawthorne Avenue, diagonal from the train station, near Market Street.
In one apartment above the post office live the Stalters. Clarence, 25, and Mary, 20, have been married nearly two years and they are expecting their first child (son Lawrence is born five months later). The father-to-be works next door at the Mittag & Volger carbon paper factory.
In the other apartment lives the town’s cobbler, Mr. Tarauletti. The shoemaker’s shop is in a small room adjacent to the post office on the ground floor. The 47-year-old came to America from Italy in 1880.
The burglars are practiced at their craft. They have wired shut the doors to both apartments.
Mr. Stalter raises a window and sticks his head through to see what’s going on outside.
“Get back there or we’ll blow your head off!” is the warning from a man on the lawn, who is pointing a revolver up at him.
The shoemaker has also raised his window, and is similarly warned.
“Take in your head, if you don’t want it filled with lead!” another man yells at him.
Both windows are hastily shut.
The perpetrators were a band of burglars who traveled around Bergen County by automobile—a novelty in those days. Two men kept watch outside, while two others worked indoors to gather up the spoils.
In this case, their effort was hardly worth it. All they got out of the safe at Park Ridge was $2 worth of pennies and a few postage stamps. Divided between the four men, each took home 50 cents. Meanwhile, they caused hundreds of dollars in damage.
Postmaster George Reed said it looked like a tornado had struck the place. The bottom was blown out of the safe, the door lay on the floor, and the north side of the office where the safe stood was jarred out by the explosion. Every pane of glass on the windows was broken, and the letter boxes were knocked into kindling wood.