WOODCLIFF LAKE, N.J.—In our photograph to the right, dated to around 1906, two men enjoy a moment of serenity and a lovely view at the newly created Woodcliff Reservoir. The gazebo, which might have been called a summer house in their time, stood on the bank of the reservoir just north of the Woodcliff Lake train station.
There is now commuter parking in this spot, and a chain-link fence blocks the view of the reservoir.
Still, we don’t have to imagine what the men were seeing—the top photo allows us to spend a moment in their shoes. Snapped from inside the gazebo, it looks out toward the tree-lined causeway.
The rules of the reservoir were different when these photos were taken. Today, owner Veolia keeps both the reservoir and the land surrounding it largely off limits to the public, but that wasn’t the case 120 years ago. Back then, anyone could approach the edge of the water and even launch a boat on it.
The reservoir was created in 1905 to provide drinking water for a growing suburban population. The Hackensack Water Company dammed the Pascack Brook and submerged acres of fields, orchards, old roads, and the fieldstone bridges that had once allowed farmers’ wagons to cross the brook. Those bridges are occasionally revealed when the water level gets very low. They were well covered this past week.
“Roads, bridges, farmland, were inundated, disappearing under the rising flood,” wrote the Hackensack Republican newspaper in 1907.
“Today the waves wash fields that for more than a hundred years yielded crops to the toiling farmer.”
The reservoir changed the landscape so drastically that, in 1910, the name of the borough was changed from Woodcliff to Woodcliff Lake.
