RIVER VALE—Just west of Four Corners downtown, on the north side of Westwood Avenue, there’s a strip mall that most locals have visited. A Walgreens anchors a series of storefronts: a gym, several restaurants, a bank, a dry cleaner, salons and spas. The Walgreens used to be a Rite-Aid, which used to be an Eckerd. In the 1960s, this building started out as an A&P.
In the middle of a busy parking lot, with a modern shopping center in front of you, it is difficult to imagine that a beautiful Victorian residence once stood there.
More than a century ago, a mansion in this location was the home of Charles Metz and his wife, Helena. Metz had built significant wealth as a baker in Jersey City, and it was through one of his apprentices at the bakery, Henry Fehrenschild, that he was introduced to River Vale.
Fehrenschild, a Swiss immigrant, had apparently grown tired of the hustle and bustle of a busy Jersey City bakery. In the early 1900s he decided to become a farmer and moved to River Vale—which at the time was a quiet rural community home to about 300 people. Fehrenschild established a duck farm on the site of today’s Florentine Gardens.
While visiting his friend at River Vale, Metz was so enthralled by the township that he immediately decided to move there. He reportedly returned home to Jersey City with large barrels, telling a shocked Helena that these were to pack the dishes. They were off to River Vale.
The Victorian home that Charles and Helena Metz purchased had been the summer getaway of New Yorker Ida Bell Bergen. Newly widowed, she was the wife of Cornelius J. Bergen, a wealthy manufacturer of sewing machines, who died in 1912. She decided to sell the house at River Vale and the 5 acres that surrounded it.
The Metzes lived there for the rest of their lives. Sharing the home was their adult daughter Louisa and her husband Harry Archibald. The house stayed in the Archibald family for decades, even as Louisa and Harry built a modern brick residence adjoining the property, at the corner of Rivervale Road and Montview Place (since demolished).
Their son Harold Archibald married a neighbor from across the street, Clara Dobroslavich, and the young couple moved into the house in 1940. They lived there with daughter Ellen until 1963, when the land was sold and the old house razed to make way for the A&P shopping center.
That autumn, the mansion, set for demolition, was burned in a drill held by firefighters.