WOODCLIFF LAKE—Fewer than 500 people called the newly minted Borough of Woodcliff Lake home when this photo was snapped, around 1910. The view down Prospect Avenue toward the reservoir.
At the bottom of the hill a horse-drawn wagon travels on Broadway (then Summit Avenue) in the direction of Hillsdale. Horses and early automobiles shared the roads.
While the borough had existed since 1894 when it broke off from Washington Township, it had always gone by the shorter moniker Woodcliff. In the first decade of the 20th century the Hackensack Water Company dammed Pascack Brook and dug out a new reservoir in the rural borough.
In March 1910 the borough changed its name to Woodcliff Lake, based on its new defining feature. This also helped quell confusion surrounding an identically named neighborhood atop the Palisades in North Bergen, Hudson County, in that era before ZIP codes.
That autumn, a tragedy occurred on Broadway nearly in the location shown in our featured photograph.
William Van Riper Hering, a 41-year-old husband and the father of two teenaged children, worked as a clerk for Ackerman Brothers’ general store. The store was in a building that still stands, and recently was renovated, on Broadway across from the Woodcliff Lake station.
One night Hering was riding his bicycle down Broadway toward Hillsdale, where he was to attend a meeting of the Building and Loan Association. A wagon, without a lantern and driving on the wrong side of the road, crashed into the bicyclist. One of the shafts—the poles that run from the front of a wagon to connect it to the animal pulling it—struck him in the abdomen with great force.
The driver of the wagon took off, leaving the injured man lying in the roadway. While Hering was eventually able to stand up and make it to his home nearby, his internal injuries must have been severe.
The Montvale Standard reported, “Mr. Hering made light of the accident, but after retiring for the night, was shortly seized with severe pains. In the morning a doctor was summoned, but Mr. Hering died in a few hours.”
Oct. 17, 1910, county authorities held an inquest at Hillsdale, but it revealed no new information, and the driver of the wagon was never identified. Hering’s grave is in the Pascack Cemetery in Park Ridge.