EMERSON—The following article appeared in The Paterson News on May 12, 1905. In the early 20th century, Etna was the name for what is now the Borough of Emerson. The crime in question took place at Etna’s most popular meeting place: Block’s Hotel, an inn run by August Block. The building still stands, as the Emerson Hotel.
BOLD BURGLARS ESCAPED
Stole a rifle and then dodged the mayor of Etna
The burglars entered early yesterday morning August Block’s hotel at Etna. They had gathered considerable silverware, a rifle, and several demijohns of liquor before a boarder was awakened.
He looked out of the window and saw the burglars hitching Block’s team to a wagon. The boarder aroused his host, and the hotel-keeper at once went to get his rifle. It was gone.
“Don’t say a word to the burglars,” said Block, “for they have my rifle and may kill us all.”
The boarder was not so easily to be frightened. He raised a window and yelled: “What do you men want?”
The burglars at once disappeared.
Mayor Charles Miller and a neighbor boarded the first eastbound train on the New Jersey and New York railroad, hoping to see the burglars get aboard at a station a mile or two below Etna. At River Edge two men, carrying a bundle and armed with a rifle, got on a train and took a seat in the smoker.
“I’m going to arrest these men!” the mayor said.
“Be careful. Probably they are the burglars, but if you make a mistake they will sue the borough for damages,” the neighbor said.
Consequently no arrest was made. At Carlstadt, Mayor Miller sent a message to August Block that the burglars had been found, but not captured, and they were on their way to New York.
“Why not just call the police?” one might wonder after reading that story. In 1905, the rural community of Etna, with about 600 residents, did not have a municipal police department. Instead, borough marshals kept order.
Etna’s borough marshal had run into some trouble just a few months earlier. A news report from January 1905 tells us that he had been arrested and put in jail for the crime of passing bad checks at a number of local watering holes—including Block’s Hotel. At Block’s, the marshal had paid his tab using a bad check in the amount of $15. It might not sound like much, but in 1905 that sum was equivalent to more than $500 in today’s money. Block filed a complaint and the constable came from Hackensack to arrest the borough marshal.
Block’s Hall had long been an important landmark in the small town. After the railroad came to the Pascack Valley in 1870, the ensuing decade saw a hotel built next to nearly every station along the line. The one in Kinderkamack, later called Etna and then Emerson, came in 1872. Original owner George Wallace built his hotel across the street from the station, at present-day 31 Emerson Plaza East.
Around 1890, Wallace sold the hotel to August Block (1852–1912), who had already been managing the establishment for six years. Under new ownership, the place came to be known as Block’s Hotel. Over the years many borough meetings, weddings, and other gatherings took place there, and a couple babies were even born on the premises. Block built an ice house next to his hotel. In that era before refrigeration, ice would be cut from a lake in the winter and stored in the ice house so that guests could have cold drinks in the summer.
The first municipal election in Etna took place at Block’s Hotel in 1903 and meetings of the Emerson Mayor and Council were held there for years. Some of these meetings must have gotten rather lively, as customers from the tap room were known to wander into the council chambers to sound off with loud and sometimes slightly drunken complaints.
In the early 20th century, Emerson baseball teams played on the grounds behind Block’s Hotel. Behind the building a tract of land covered in brush and cattails stretched all the way back to Palisades Avenue. Before the Church of the Assumption was formed in 1905, Etna’s early Italian-American Catholic families attended masses in the ballroom of the hotel. When the Emerson Fire Department got its start in 1905, and the extent of their equipment was buckets and pike poles, Block’s Hotel was their headquarters.
— Kristin Beuscher is president of Pascack Historical Society.