PASCACK VALLEY—We go back 120 years, to the night of April 26, 1894. Burglars were busy in the Pascack Valley.
While the local citizens slept, thieves made their way up the line—Woodcliff Lake, Park Ridge, Montvale, and finally Pearl River—breaking into railroad depots by prying the catches off the windows. They went for the ticket cases and money drawers, stole express packages, and made off with bags of pennies from what the newspapers described as slot machines.
While our modern minds associate slot machine with casinos and those one-armed bandits, in the 1890s the term was used to describe any coin-operated vending machine. There were penny slot machines for chewing gum or candy; ones that would test your strength; and penny scales that would measure a person’s weight.
One novelty machine even gave the user a small electric shock.
Teenagers readily fed their pennies into these devices, while older adults generally saw them as a waste of money.
“From the Park Ridge depot the thieves carried the slot machine, which weighs over 200 pounds, nearly a quarter of a mile below the station and broke it open. They cut off the lower end of the bag that contained the pennies,” the New York Evening World reported.
The “slot machine” in question was probably a penny scale. We know Park Ridge had one, as the machine is visible outside the station in the photograph accompanying this article.
These weighing machines first appeared in the late 1880s and proved to be very popular. In fact, for many Americans, the scales were their introduction to coin-operated technology. It was also a time before people had bathroom scales, so this was the only way for a person to measure his or her weight without going to a doctor.
The popularity of these coin-operated machines was not lost on thieves. Newspaper headlines from the time describe railroad station burglaries all over Bergen County in the 1890s and early 1900s.
In December 1893, seven stations between Hillsdale and Hackensack were burglarized in one night. Penny scales were broken open and the money bags cut off with a knife.
The thieves hit Westwood, Etna (Emerson), Oradell, New Milford, River Edge, Cherry Hill, and Hackensack in one busy night. New Milford had a penny scale and a gum machine, and burglars seemed especially fond of them. That station was hit six times, 1896–1904.