PARK RIDGE—Here’s a throwback that only the long-timers will remember. The Pascack Inn used to stand on the north side of Madison Avenue between Hawthorne Avenue and the railroad tracks, a spot that locals came to call “hard luck corner.”
The location had seen many different owners and businesses over the years, as well as its share of prosperity and hardship.
A three-story wooden building constructed there in the 1870s started life as a boarding school. A New York clothier bought it in 1899 and tried to manufacture pants in Park Ridge—a venture that proved unprofitable. During the bicycle craze of the 1890s, there was a bar in the basement and a bicycle track in the rear of the building. In the 1900s and 1910s it was a hotel—that is, until 1918 when it burned down.
It was rebuilt as a tavern, but fire struck in 1929 and again in 1931.
Albert Hebeler bought and remodeled the property, calling it the Pascack Inn. His restaurant was extremely popular during World War II and the post-war era, the site of numerous dinners, celebrations, fund-raisers and meetings for individuals and organizations.
The advertisement on this page goes back 70 years to Mothers Day of 1953, when the Pascack Inn was promoting its $2.50 dinner special. Notice the old style of phone number.
A few years later, in 1957, the Pascack Inn was destroyed in what would be the final fire at the location. More than 100 firefighters from Park Ridge, Montvale and Woodcliff Lake spent five hours battling the blaze before dawn on Oct. 14, 1957. Firemen were unable to get to the source of the fire in the basement, as it had only one entrance. Over several hours the flames devoured the building from within and left only the exterior walls standing.
Hebeler, who lived just a block away from the inn, could only stand by and watch the conflagration destroy the 24-year-old building.
Nowadays the spot is a municipal parking lot.
— Kristin Beuscher is president of Pascack Historical Society.