OLD TAPPAN, N.J.—The Charlie Brown’s restaurant in Old Tappan closed up shop this past week after 40 years at its Old Tappan Road location.
(RELATED STORY: Charlie Brown’s Closes, citing low volume, labor costs)
If you’ve been around the area for a while, you might remember back when this location was the Coach House restaurant in the 1960s, and then another restaurant, Oliver Twist, for a few years in the late ’70s. But for this article we are going back even farther—all the way to when Otto Lein operated his grove there.
Eighteen-year-old Lein first came to Old Tappan around 1905, back when the new borough had fewer than 300 residents. As a young man he worked as a carpenter. He was working for a contractor in Harrington Park when he was drafted during World War I.
Later in life he became very involved in local affairs, serving on Old Tappan’s borough council, board of health, and zoning board. He was a charter member of the fire department when it formed in 1932. He and wife Geneva and their children lived at the corner of Central Avenue and Old Tappan Road.
Lein opened his grove on Old Tappan Road, then a dirt lane, in the 1920s. Electricity was just coming to the borough at the time.
Lein’s Grove had first opened during the Prohibition years. In the United States, Prohibition began in 1920 with the Volstead Act and passage of the 18th Amendment. The move prohibited all manufacture, purchase, transport, import, export and sale of alcoholic beverages until 1933, when the 21st Amendment and Blaine Act repealed it. After that, Lein’s Grove added a bar and did a booming business.
It was one of many taverns in Old Tappan during those years. In fact, according to the borough’s centennial book, “It was observed that there were plenty of taverns in Old Tappan but no churches.”
For decades Bergen County groups of every form had events and picnics there: political organizations, schools, scout groups, social clubs, churches, firefighters and others held outings at Lein’s Grove. Many couples were married on the grounds. Offering an 8-acre picnic spot shaded by old oak trees, the grove had fireplaces, tables, and a dance hall. In the 1940s and 1950s, the weekend square dances at Lein’s were a popular autumn activity.
The Lein’s Grove building was destroyed in a fire in 1964. A year later, a newly built restaurant reopened there as Lein’s Coach House. The “Lein’s” part of the name was dropped in 1966.
In the 1970s the Coach House gave way to Oliver Twist restaurant, followed by Charlie Brown’s at the start of the 1980s. There’s no word yet on who the next tenant will be.