MONTVALE—Can you believe that when this school photograph, above, was snapped in the autumn of 1924, this was Montvale’s entire seventh and eighth grades! Shortly into the new school year, this image was captured outside the elementary school on East Grand Avenue. In true Roaring ’20s fashion, it’s bob cuts for the girls and knickers and knee socks for the boys.
The two grades together totaled 26 kids, although only 19 are pictured. It may seem like a small group at first, but back then, the population of the borough was less than 1,000, compared with today’s 8,400 residents.
Top row (left to right) are Grace Noonan, Sagred Piatt, Edward Hatten, Henry Wilke, Margaret Marshall, Myrtle Engle, Edmund Brennan, Ronald Busse, and Edward Emerick. In the bottom row: Anna Bellefori, John Marshall, Jack Eldridge, Robert Bates, Edward Birdsall, Peter Belnay, James Davis, Marcel Bonhote, Samuel Peskanowitz, and Albert Collina.
These kids attended School No. 2 at the corner of East Grand Avenue and Waverly Place. The brick building was constructed in 1908 with two floors and two rooms on each floor. These four classrooms housed children from kindergarten through eighth grade. Later, most of the kids would be off to Park Ridge for high school. Montvale’s Pascack Hills High School opened in 1964.
In 1927, three years after this photo, four more rooms and indoor plumbing were added. The building later served as the borough’s library from 1975 to 2004. It still stands today, but in 2018 it was renovated into affordable housing units for seniors.
