A map of early Radburn with its three interior parks, then still unnamed, shown in green

Radburn’s creators named the streets of their planned suburb after people they admired: Howard Avenue (for Sir Ebenezer Howard, founder of the Garden City movement), Owen Avenue (for the utopian socialist Robert Owen), and Burnham Place (for the Chicago architect and planner Daniel Burnham).

But the founders didn’t extend their penchant for memorial names to Radburn’s signature parks. Instead, when they called them anything at all, they seem to have used numbers.

What is today B Park, for instance, was originally designated on plans only as “Lot 8.” A Park was “Lot 7.’’

How did that system evolve into the alphabetical letter park names used today?

We have a theory.

First, some background. The plans, diagrams and blueprints for Radburn from the late 1920s don’t give the parks names.

A 1930 map issued by the City Housing Corp., Radburn’s builder, labels each of the three interior parks only as “Private Park for Residents of Radburn.’’ One of landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley’s plans refers to A Park as Park 7, B Park as Park 8, and R Park as Park 57. (She was leaving room for many other Radburn superblock parks on the north side of Fair Lawn Avenue.) She also uses this nomenclature in her 1930 article in Landscape Architecture Magazine.

In her subsequent film about Radburn -- made no earlier than 1933 -- Cautley displays a handwritten map entitled “Walk System through Parks’’ in which each park is labeled simply “park.” (See below)

She probably was taking her cue from Clarence Stein, Radburn’s co-planner. In his memoir, written in 1949 after a return visit to Radburn, he places great importance on the parks’ role in the life of the community, but repeatedly refers to them only as “inner parks’’ and doesn’t distinguish one from another by name, letter or number.

Why? Stein and his co-planner, Henry Wright, conceived of Radburn’s green open spaces not so much as a series of discrete parks as one big park, flowing from superblock to superblock, linking the entire community. In his book Toward New Towns for America, Stein described parkland as the “backbone of the neighborhood, (with) large open areas in the center of superblocks, joined together as a continuous park.’’

But if Radburn’s designers were indifferent to the parks’ names, its administrators were not. According to the Board of Trustees’ minutes of September 2, 1930, residents were being asked for suggested names. In January of the following year, however, City Housing executive Louis Brownlow reported that only one suggestion had been received – and he asked Radburnites to keep thinking.

There’s no indication that this campaign to name the parks succeeded. So how did the current alphabetical default setting result?

Here’s a possibility.

The first documented use of names such as A Park appears in 1948 on what’s known as a Sanborn map. (See figure below.) The Sanborn Map Company published detailed maps of tens of thousands of U.S. communities for use by fire insurance companies.

In an earlier Sanborn map from 1929, however, the parks were numbered, just as they were on City Housing documents at the time (see figure below).

We think the quotes around A, B and R might be significant – as if the Sanborn researcher in the 1940s was indicating that these were not necessarily official designations, but rather names the parks had acquired informally -- maybe from residents.

Perhaps people had grown tired of saying, “Meet you in the park,’’ and being asked, “Which one?’’

In that case, the most obvious name for each park was the first letter of the alphabetically similar names of the cul de sacs surrounding the park. (The names of the cul de sacs around Radburn’s first two superblocks logically began with A and B.)

Over the years, some Radburn residents have wondered if the A, B, etc. scheme was part of an acrostic in which the names of all the parks — three built and four more proposed — would spell out the community’s name. But if so, why would the park adjacent to A not have been called D Park, rather than B?

There have been suggested reforms. In the 1970s the Board of Trustees apparently expressed their intention to rename the parks: A Park for Charles Ascher, the City Housing lawyer who devised the legal instruments that preserved the open space in perpetuity; B Park for Alexander Bing, founder of City Housing; and R Park for Clarence Stein. (Left out: Stein’s partner Henry Wright, who invented the superblock.)

Apparently these names did not take. Residents didn’t use them, and they were gradually forgotten.

Which seems fitting. The alaphabet park names probably were chosen, gradually and informally, by Radburn’s own residents – not the often imperious geniuses who planned every other detail of this famous planned community.

(A version of this article first appeared in 2021. It was updated in 2023)

There is a scene (above) from The City, a documentary made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, in which riders on horseback canter through Radburn’s R Park. At first we assumed this was an anachronism, staged for the film. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright had planned Radburn to separate pedestrians and automobiles; they apparently had given no thought to this third form of traffic.

But when we looked for records and photographs of horses in early Radburn, they began turning up.

“Horseback riding’’ was listed in a 1930 Radburn sales pamphlet alongside cricket, skeet shooting, croquet, and the other activities offered to residents.

Newspaper accounts and Fair Lawn municipal directories confirmed what the film implied: The Town for the Motor Age had a riding stable named the Radburn Riding Academy.

Ralph Baer, a Paterson silk merchant, opened the academy in 1929 on what had been the Isaac Hopper farm across from the Dutch House Tavern on Fair Lawn Avenue. Residents could rent horses and ride all the way to Broadway, passing through fields and woods. They might pass several black oaks in what is today Berdan Grove that are the state’s oldest and largest. On their way back to the stable, riders would skirt R Park.

The riding academy was on the south side of Fair Lawn Ave. Note white horse at right center.

In the fall of 1929, Baer and Evelyn Walker, wife of Radburn’s first manager, organized a Pony Club for Radburn children. They purchased Tony, a bay pony about five feet tall, and another pony named Snowball. Each child was scheduled to ride three times a week.

The children in Radburn’s Pony Club were a privileged and somewhat diverse bunch.

• Denby and Agatha Walker’s family was from the South, with accents to match. Their mother, in the recollection of one Radburn resident, was “a great lady’’ who showed the young wives how to serve afternoon tea and generally act like adults. The children’s father, John O. Walker, left his Radburn manager’s post in the late 1930s to become a New Deal housing official in Washington.

• Edith and Mary Edwards were daughters of Deane Edwards, the first minister of the Church in Radburn, and his wife, the former Margaret Dulles. One of the girls’ uncles, Allen Dulles, would become director of the CIA, and another uncle, John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State. They also were direct descendants of Jonathan Edwards, the 16th-century New England revivalist preacher and theologian.

• Barbara Golburgh was the daughter of Maxwell Golburgh, who worked in the Radburn real estate sales office, and his wife, Bess. Maxwell was born in Tsarist Russia and might have been the first Russian Jew to settle in Fair Lawn. He later became Radburn’s most important real estate broker.

• Stanley Goldberg, who was only 5 in 1929, was the son of Sydney Goldberg, a member of a prominent family that owned clothing stores and other businesses.

By 1935, as land around the old Hopper farm was developed, the academy moved east on Fair Lawn Avenue, just beyond the Grange Hall. There it grew. On June 17, 1936, for example, the Teaneck High School Riding Club, with 37 members, held its First Annual Horse Show there, complete with ribbons and silver cups.

For a while, the Radburn Riding Academy thrived on such business.

Then came 1938.

On the morning of Sunday, January 30, Abraham Frumker, 41, president of the Noxall Coat, Apron and Towel Supply Company, went out for an hour’s ride with friends. He had ridden his horse, named Dick, about a dozen times in the previous four months.

Around 10:30 Frumker was seen coming out of the woods, about a thousand feet from the stables. A few moments later, however, Dick arrived at the stable without him.

Friends found Frumker back on the trail, lying dead on the ground with a fractured skull.

Then on August 5, Baer was involved in a public scandal. The Record reported that he was found by private investigators in an apartment on 85th Street in New York City with “Chickie”, a former entertainer at Clifton’s Yellow Tavern. His wife filed for divorce.

Five days later, the Academy was in the news again.

Paul Weckel, a 41-year-old merchant, and his 13-year-old son, Philip, spent the afternoon riding. Afterward, they were feeding a horse named Sandy carrots in the stable when she suddenly bucked and killed Paul Weckel by kicking him in the head.

Fair Lawn Police Chief Michael Vanore ruled the death accidental and cleared Baer of negligence. Still, the optics, as we might say today, were not good: two deaths in less than seven months, with a scandal in between. The Town for the Motor Age, it seemed, might be safe for pedestrians, but not so much for equestrians.

Although records are unclear, Baer seems to have sold the academy shortly thereafter.

Ralph Baer died March 17, 1945, after a short illness. He was 54. That same year, the Radburn Riding Academy quietly closed. Then, on April 18, 1946, Fair Lawn Fire Companies 1, 3, and 4 responded to a fire in the empty stable on Fair Lawn Avenue. They were too late. The stable burned to the ground; the Radburn Riding Academy was gone.

And what about those cinematic horse riders shown in a brief scene in The City? Our analysis indicates they were filmed in that fateful summer of 1938.

End note: If you or your family has any memories of the Radburn Riding Academy, please share them below.

B Park’s “trophy” European Beech (right) in winter. It was critically damaged by a storm July 4

Just a few weeks ago epic winds pushed trees and limbs onto houses, cars and utility lines in Radburn and across North Jersey. So this might seem an odd time to sing the praises of trees.

But we should. Tall shade trees are the jewels of a landscape that has helped give Radburn its identity and make it a National Historic Landmark and an accredited arboretum. In the wake of the storm, rather than cut down healthy trees preventatively, we should preserve the trees we have, and plant new ones.

We say this for two reasons:

First, Radburn’s canopy – composed of trees like oaks, pines and even two rare mature American Elms – makes us cooler, healthier and – in the long run – wealthier.

Second, compared to other forms of accidental mayhem, the danger of falling trees and branches is low.

The July 4 storm was a stress test for Radburn’s trees. It was the most damaging storm in memory, including Hurricane Sandy, and perhaps the most damaging in Radburn history. Although no tree in Radburn’s parks fell, four in B Park were so damaged that, based on the opinion of licensed tree experts, they had to be taken down.

Most of the damage was on private property, including several cases in which mature pin oaks came down, crushing everything in their path.

No one was hurt. But for Radburn residents, the storm was an emotional stress test, producing grief, anger, fear, frustration and, possibly, guilt. People wonder why the blowdown happened; when and if might it happen again; and whether they can do about it.

That’s the dilemma: It’s hard to predict when a tree will fall, and hard to guarantee it will not do so.

But let’s focus for a moment on those tree benefits.

Trees and temps

Below is a heat index map based on satellite images for July 1, during the blistering heat wave that preceded the July 4 storm. The map is color-coded to show neighborhood temperatures, with red hottest and green coolest.

Urban Heat Map of Paterson, Fair Lawn and Radburn from the Arbor Day Foundation.

While every place in the area was hot, some were significantly hotter than others. The big difference: tall shade trees.

The hottest area, on the far left, is Paterson, a city with relatively few trees. The yellow area in the middle is eastern-central Fair Lawn, with more trees than Paterson but fewer than the green area to the right. That’s Radburn, Glen Rock and the area between.

Experts say that in summer trees can lower air temperatures in urban neighborhoods by 10 degrees. That saves lives (see below) and reduces electrical demand.

Trees = health

In addition to cooling us off, trees filter pollutants from the air; absorb storm water; lower stress; and help boost our immune function.

Imagine the millions of leaves on the trees in Radburn as tiny filters, capturing the small particles in the atmosphere from distant wildfires and sequestering the carbon molecules that contribute to global warming. Without these leaves, air quality would worsen, and asthma and some types of allergies would increase.

Above and below ground, trees help absorb and slow the drainage of strong rainstorms, mitigating floods

Mature shade trees lower the temperatures on the ground beneath them, which reduces power consumption – and electric bills – for cooling. But cooler temperatures also have the benefit of lowering the heat stress on the humans living nearby, and improves their cardiovascular health.

A before-and-after study of neighborhoods in 15 states that lost their ash trees as a result of a pest known as the Emerald Ash Borer found that the loss of trees contributed to an additional 22,000 respiratory and cardiovascular-related deaths compared to non-affected areas.

Not to mention that a shaded pathway encourages people to go for a walk, with all the health and social benefits such walks produce.

The Japanese even have a concept called ‘forest bathing” – shinrin yoku, which means slow, mindful walking in a forest. Research funded by the Japanese government has found that trees produce airborne molecules called phytoncides to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi.

Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall. So when you walk through a forest, you inhale those molecules and absorb them through your skin. Once in your body, they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of certain immune cells.

Aesthetics: Gold in them thar leaves

Trees enhance property values. The most desirable suburbs have lots of shade trees, take good care of them, and prevent them from being torn down without good reason.

Nothing ruins the look of a street more than losing the trees that line it. But this does not stop some private property owners, utilities and municipalities from preemptively cutting trees. This month, for instance, Public Service Gas & Electric sawed down a row of splendid London plane trees on Plaza Road North at the intersection with High Street.

Admittedly, in the short run trees can create problems. In storms, they can foul utility lines. They’re expensive to maintain, and expensive when they fall. It will cost the Radburn Association more than $40,000 to take down critically damaged trees and remedy other July 4 damage.

European Beech tree damaged in July 4 storm (left) is taken down several days later (right)

But in the long run, trees’ aesthetics are pure gold. A 2007 study in quasi-suburban East Portland concluded that a tree in front of a single family house increased the home’s market value by $7,000, and also increased the value of neighboring houses.

Good real estate agents know that when you sell your house, you’ll get back all or more of whatever you or the Radburn Association has spent on tree maintenance.

Safety and trees

Now for our second big point: trees aren’t that dangerous.

There are no solid statistics on human casualties caused by falling limbs or trunks. But according to estimates by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, something like 30 to 35 Americans are killed yearly by falling trees or branches.

What about Radburn? In researching the community’s history over the past five years, we’ve randomly come across many accidental deaths: A father killed on Plaza Road North saving his child from a runaway car; a young bicyclist hit by a car on Fair Lawn Avenue; a woman who directed children’s plays killed in a car crash; a boy drowned in B Pool; a baby killed in a house fire.

But we’ve never encountered a report of anyone killed or seriously injured in Radburn by a tree.

Now, consider the annual toll from heat waves, which are estimated to kill 12,000 Americans a year – more than any other form of extreme weather, including hurricanes and tornadoes. How many heat victims could be saved if their neighborhoods were cooled by shade trees?

That’s our case for shade trees.

Please support the Radburn Association’s all-volunteer Grounds Committee efforts to plant and water new ones, and similar efforts wherever you live. Our children will thank us.

Craig Buksar, who grew up on Ballard Place, with European beech (Ilene Kahn photo)

(Note: Stephen Taylor is chair of the Radburn Association’s volunteer Grounds Committee and a member of the Fair Lawn Borough Shade Tree Committee.)

An architectural conversation between two of Radburn’s signature buildings has been revived for the first time in three quarters of a century.

When they were built in the late 1920s, the brick Georgian-colonial Radburn Plaza Building and the stone Dutch-colonial Radburn train station faced each other across an open lot. But around 1950 their view of each other was obscured by the construction of a one- and two-story strip shopping center anchored by a Grand Union supermarket.

The tired old shopping center was demolished earlier this year. That allowed anyone on the train platform the impressive view of the imposing Plaza Building that Radburn’s original planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, intended.

For a few days, the two buildings’ view of each other was almost as good as when they were built. But since then a construction fence, several pieces of large equipment and piles of excavated soil sometimes have gotten in the way.

And when the construction is finished, Plaza Greene – a four-story, mixed-use development with 145 apartments and a Sprouts grocery store – will largely block the two landmarks’ view of each other. People at the train station will see less of the Plaza Building than they did when the shopping center was still there.

A shaded parking lot

In 1927, the City Housing Corporation purchased hundreds of rural acres in Fair Lawn for a model community named Radburn.

According to a design by City Housing’s landscape architect, Marjorie Sewell Cautley, the lot between the train station and the Plaza Building would have become one of the nation’s first parking lots – and maybe the first shaded by trees.

Years later, Cautley set down her reasoning in a planning journal article. Sitting in the sun, she wrote in The American City, “rows of shiny black cars gleam as if fitted with small mirrors.’’ But if parking lots had trees, “the parking space will become a shady, restful grove under which cars will keep cool, instead of blistering their paint and roasting their tired occupants.’’

In an alternate plan (“No. 2,’’ above), Cautley envisioned a Plaza Park featuring a lawn labeled “Bowling Green.‘‘ (The term implied a finely trimmed lawn, not necessarily a sports ground.) The square park would have diagonal parking along Fair Lawn Avenue to the south and an extended High Street to the north. Rows of sycamore trees would provide shade, while clusters of pines filled the corners. Cautley indicated on this plan that the view from Radburn Station to the Plaza Building should remain open.

City Housing’s financial woes after the stock market crash of 1929 ended those plans. That’s when the empty lot became grassy Plaza Field – Radburn’s “front yard.’’ It was the site of countless games – softball, football, maybe even cricket (Radburn had a team). Sometimes commuters getting off the train at the end of the day would doff their suit jackets and watch the action – or join it.

In those days, the sight of the Plaza Building and its clock tower told any passenger rolling into Radburn station that they’d arrived at someplace special. That place will always be special – a National Historic Landmark – but with one less great view. A

A young daredevil atop a jungle gym (circa 1930) in the town billed as “Safe for Children’’

Radburn’s fourth official Family Day, in 1979, celebrated the community’s 50th anniversary with two special events: the release of hundreds of balloons, and the burial in B Park of a time capsule containing the signatures of all residents taking part in that Family Day.

The balloons are long gone. As for the time capsule, it was a great idea with just one problem: Today, no one seems to know exactly where it was buried. (It seems to have been somewhere near Tot Lot.)

(This capsule should not be confused with one buried in the national Bicentennial year of 1976 by Radburn School students.)

The 2026 Family Day Committee would love to find the 1979 capsule. So ask around. If you can help with a location, or any other details, please reach out via email (fjhampson@gmail.com), call/text (201 286 9577) or just contact the Family Day Committee via the Radburn Association office.

Time’s awasting!

One of the most famous unintended consequences of the Radburn Plan is some children’s insistence on playing in the cul-de-sacs, which were designed to accommodate vehicles and exclude pedestrians – especially kids.

A key Radburn marketing slogan in the late 1920s was “Safe for Children.’’ But even before the community was built, its two chief planners were warned about children’s insistence on literally playing in traffic.

Before completing their plan for Radburn in 1928, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright consulted all sorts of experts and groups, including the National Recreation Association.

The group’s founder and chairman was a Boston philanthropist and lawyer named Joseph Lee (1862-1937), who helped found the 20^th Century ‘‘playground movement’’ by buying and clearing slum lots and installing recreational equipment.

Charles Ascher, lawyer for the company that built Radburn, was at Stein and Wright’s meeting with Lee in New York City. In a 1978 interview that was tape-recorded and stored for decades in The Grange, Ascher said Lee listened carefully to a presentation by Stein and Wright. Then he said: ‘‘It is very interesting, your playgrounds and parks. But I have a feeling that the children are going to want to play in the paved areas’’ – the cul-de-sacs.

That, said the crusty old Brahmin, “is where you can bounce a ball, where you can roller skate. It’s where the action is!’’

Ever since, some Radburn kids have been proving his point.

Stein himself came to acknowledge it. “The sense of exploration and curiosity leads youngsters into forbidden places’’ – including the cul de sacs, he wrote in his 1950 book Toward New Towns for America.

He went on: “I have studied the reasons for this so that in the future we might keep children and autos apart to an even greater degree.’’ But, he added, “we never will do so completely. … The spirit of adventure must not be extinguished.“

To be sure, most Radburn kids played most of the time in yards, parks or playgrounds. George Kurr, who grew up on Southside Radburn in the 1950s, writes: “Never once did I, nor any of my friends, play in a cul-de-sac. They were too narrow and with too many parked cars. … There certainly wasn’t enough room to play ball. … We all played in the parks, just the way it was designed.’’

But there were advantages to cul de sac play — for parents. Since most Radburn kitchens face the lane, an adult working there can keep a direct eye on those at play. And the cul de sacs are safe – it appears that no pedestrian ever has been killed by a vehicle in one of them.

Even the most cautious parents admit their safety.

One day in the last decade of the last century, a boy whose family lived on Bristol Place was constantly underfoot in the busy kitchen. In exasperation, his mother finally snapped, “Nick, go play in the street!’’

(A version of this article was posted in July 2023)

Rendering of Barry Place model house — No. 5 (Bergen Record)

On Saturday the Queens community of Sunnyside Gardens celebrated the memory of Alexander M. Bing, who founded the company that built Sunnyside and Radburn. Here’s the story of the death of the City Housing Corporation, an idealistic attempt to create an American garden city.

On April 7, 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Bergen Evening Record reported surprising news: plans for 17 new houses on Barry Place in Radburn.

The item had a rendering of a model house above the headline “The Home with a Future.’’

If the home had a future, its builder did not.

In less than five months, the City Housing Corp., the original developer of the celebrated “Town for the Motor Age,’’ would file for bankruptcy under its president and founder, the Manhattan real estate developer Alexander Bing.

The Record article contained no hint of that. It reported that a Barry Place model house had been completed, and three similar homes were already under construction on the cul de sac.

The Radburn sales agent is quoted as saying the new homes “can be financed with present day incomes’’ (an allusion to the Depression) and were “created to meet the requirements of the average family during the recovery period,’’ which as it turned out would last another five years.

The houses, priced around $8,000, had unfinished second floors (presumably explaining the emphasis on the ‘‘future’’).

Historians generally have said that Radburn construction ended in 1933, five years after it began and four years after the start of the Depression.

But the Record article, and a similar one in The New York Times, show that the CHC was moving forward nearly until the end.

The newspaper stories contain another surprise: The Barry houses were designed not by Clarence Stein, Radburn’s founding co-planner, or Frederick Ackerman, who did most of its early houses. Instead, they were the work of a Paterson architectural firm best known for some of New Jersey’s greatest movie palaces.

What’s in a date?

Map shows Barry Place houses and dates of construction between 1934 and 1941

The date of the Barry Place houses is important, because the 2005 designation that made Radburn a National Historic Landmark limited its essential historic structures to those constructed or under construction when the CHC filed for bankruptcy in August 1934.

1934 topographical map showing homes on the west side of Barry Place and one on the east side. Barry Place is the most northerly cul de sac in Radburn.

Houses and streets completed after that – such as those between A Park and Berdan Avenue – are termed “non-contributing’’ to the historic landmark, because although they are within the original Radburn layout, they don’t comport with the original Radburn plan. But the NHL designation includes those houses on Barry built after 1934 – and erroneously lists every house on the cul de sac as having been built in 1933.

5 Barry Place: Insurance photo dated 1934 from the Radburn Archives

This much is clear: The 1934 model house – No. 5 Barry – and several others on the street represented the City Housing Corporation’s last stand in its battle to create a template for American suburbia.

‘I know when I am licked’

Radburn originally was supposed to be a community of about 25,000 people, with three neighborhoods, each with a commercial center, parks and elementary school within walking distance. Pedestrians would be able to walk to these destinations – plus a high school, a library and factories – without crossing busy streets.

But the Depression, which Stein likened to “an earthquake,’’ ended those hopes.

For about a year after the stock market crash in October, 1929, Radburn continued to expand. But by early 1931, Bing was worried.

On Jan. 9, in a letter to John D. Rockefeller Jr., City Housing’s biggest investor, Bing reported that construction had come to “a complete standstill’’ due to an inability “to raise sufficient working capital.’’

Construction soon resumed, but Bing remained pessimistic. In March, Stein wrote in a letter to his wife that “Al … is more and more bewildered’’ about Radburn’s financial situation. Stein added: “I feel the end is probably in sight…’’

A few days later, in another letter, Stein wrote: “Yesterday morning was difficult. Alone with Al Bing for hours. His spirit has fallen low. … It’s City Housing that worries him. Can it weather the storm? … Al said, ‘I know when I am licked.’’’

Over the next few years the CHC began to sell off some of the land it had bought for Radburn at cents on the dollar. Construction dwindled to 16 new homes in 1931, 11 in 1932 and 10 in 1933.

In these years, most Radburn homeowners defaulted on their mortgages or simply turned their houses to the CHC. Most had to move or stay on as renters.

New architects

The Barry Place houses that represented the CHC’s last bid for survival were designed by Paterson’s most distinguished architectural firm, Wentworth & Vreeland.

Its founder, Fred Wesley Wentworth, had a major impact on shaping Paterson after the fire that destroyed much of its central business district in 1902. He also was famous for designing some of the nation’s first theaters designed exclusively for motion pictures, including the Fabian in Paterson, the Ritz in Elizabeth and the Stanley in Jersey City.

His other Paterson buildings included Barnert Hospital, the Masonic Temple, the Alexander Hamilton Hotel, the Passaic County Courthouse and his masterpiece, Temple Emanuel, completed in 1929.

The houses on Barry are comparatively modest. But there was a market for them. On Aug. 6, 1934, the Times reported that No. 5, the model house, had been purchased by a Long Island University historian named Hugo C.M. Wendel.

Six days earlier, City Housing had filed for bankruptcy. Professor Wendel was, in all probably, the last person ever to buy a home from the company that had once hoped to change America.

Barry Place, 1938: Photo from film March of Time.

END NOTE: How do we know the dates of the houses on Barry Place?

• The Times and Record stories say the model home, 5 Barry, was built in the spring of 1934. The same date appears on a photo of 5 Barry in the Radburn Archives. No. 6 Barry is also visible in that photograph.

• A 1934 topographical map shows five houses on the west side of Barry, plus one – 6 Barry – on the east. Also, only six homes are listed in 1934 tax records: 5, 6, 7, 9,11, and 15 Barry. (Tax records, however, incorrectly list the rest of the homes on Barry as being built in 1933. The 1933 dates must be incorrect, because the newspaper articles agree that the first Barry homes were built in 1934.)

• The Borough of Fair Lawn street directory shows that by 1937, 1, 8 and 10 Barry had joined the others. (Nos. 8 and 10 are listed as vacant.) Nos. 16 and 17 appear first in the 1939 directory (and are listed as vacant). Number 2 and what is now 12 Barry appear first in the 1941 directory. Although the original plan was for 17 houses on Barry, only 13 were built.

On Sunday evenings in the early 1930s, George V. Denny Jr. would leave his square red brick house at 316 Howard Ave. and walk toward the Radburn Plaza Building, his view of its clock tower unimpeded by structure or tree.

Upon entering the building, Denny made his way to a comfortable second floor meeting room with imposing ceiling light shades of concentric circles. Their Art Deco style proclaimed a social and technological exuberance that had been dampened by The Depression.

Radburn Plaza Building Club Room, 1930s

Denny was there to moderate discussions of political issues in those troubled times. His goal: neighbors speaking sincerely and civilly to neighbors.

This regular gathering in “The Town for the Motor Age’’ would be the seed for one of the most popular programs in the Golden Age of Radio – America’s Town Meeting of the Air.

The show would make George V. Denny Jr. a national celebrity, and set a standard for public discourse of which Americans today can only dream.

What motivated him, Denny explained, was this worry: “If we persist in Democrats reading only Democratic newspapers, listening only to Democratic speeches on the radio, and mixing socially only with those of congenial views, and if Republicans follow suit, we are sowing the seeds of the destruction of our democracy.’’

Although he would be known for promoting serious discussion of serious issues, Denny was by inclination and training a performer and entertainer.

He was born in Washington, North Carolina, in 1899. He met his wife Mary while they were students at the University of North Carolina, where they were both members of a theatrical group called the Carolina Playmakers. In 1919 and 1920 the troupe staged plays by one of the Playmakers, the soon-to-be famous writer Thomas Wolfe.

After a period of acting and stage managing on Broadway, Denny switched to the growing field of civic education, and become associate director of the League for Political Action. In 1932, he, Mary and their three children moved from an apartment in New York to Radburn, then three years old.

The Dennys joined a cohort of energetic, intelligent and well-educated young residents. They included Rensis Likert, the psychologist who developed the Likert Scale, which would become standard in questionnaires and surveys; Richard T. Ely, one of the nation’s most prominent economists; and Frank Exner, a Columbia physicist who was assembling the world’s largest X-ray machine.

The Dennys plunged into Radburn life. In addition to his public affairs discussion group, George wrote plays for, and acted in, productions of the Radburn Players theatrical group. He also was elected to the board of trustees of the Church in Radburn.

Radburn Plaza Building, circa 1930

It’s not clear exactly when Denny began organizing and moderating Radburn community discussions. But a newspaper story describes one such “round table” at a Radburn Citizens Association meeting in October 1934.

Topics that night included:

• Should Radburn try to attract more high-income people when and if it expands? (The community’s developer had filed for bankruptcy two months earlier, leaving its plan for a community of 25,000 in limbo.)

• Is the Radburn Association and its decision-making process sufficiently democratic?

• Are parents sufficiently involved in Radburn’s activities, “or merely using them to get rid of their children for a time.’’

About 100 people attended this meeting, which Denny moderated. Other members of the round table included John O. Walker, Radburn’s resident manager, and McAlister Coleman, a prominent local socialist. Walker favored allowing larger houses on larger lots; Coleman warned against attracting what he termed “wealthy riffraff.” After 30 minutes, the discussion was thrown open to the audience.

The point of the discussion, Denny told the group, was not to settle on a solution or resolve an issue, but to “think about what was said.’’

These hyperlocal sessions, as it turned out, were a dry run for what became America’s Town Meeting of the Air. And the idea for such a national radio broadcast sprung from a chance meeting – also apparently in Radburn.

Denny said he met a friend on the street after one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s national radio “fireside chats’’ (probably in 1934). The friend mentioned that one of his neighbors so hated FDR that he’d “rather be shot than caught listening to Roosevelt.”

That same evening, Denny said, he was walking in the park -- B Park, presumably – and ruminating on what his friend had said. That’s when he came up with an idea for a radio program that would expose the public to conflicting views on political issues.

In an article he later wrote called “Democracy on the Defensive,’’ he italicized one of his theses: “Democracy presupposes a system of universal education and the dissemination of unbiased news and information on a basis which will permit an honestly informed public opinion.”

Around the same time he said that democracy was in peril, “threatened by ideology that a strong man can rule better than the masses of people.’’

Just a few weeks after Denny’s B Park epiphany, he pitched an NBC executive on his idea for a radio program inspired by the traditional New England town meeting (and informed by his experience in Radburn). The network offered him a six-week trial run.

America’s Town Meeting of the Air, one of the nation’s first political talk shows, premiered Memorial Day 1935. It was broadcasting live from The Town Hall on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, with Denny as host and producer. The first topic: “Which Way America: Fascism, Communism, Socialism or Democracy?”

The show would become a Thursday evening fixture, in large part because Denny -- always the showman -- made it engaging and interactive.

Some programs began with a trumpet fanfare, followed by a band playing a patriotic song, such as a John Philip Sousa march or the Star-Spangled Banner.

Listeners then heard the voice of a town crier who rang a bell and called: “Town meeting tonight! Come to the old Town Hall and talk it over!” An announcer introduced Denny, who began with a folksy, “Good evening, neighbors!”

Two main guest speakers -- influential thinkers, political figures, scientists – took up the evening’s topic, such as press freedom, race relations, social security, public education, socialized medicine or America’s involvement in World War II.

Denny deliberately chose to broadcast his show before a live audience, rather than in an NBC studio. The cheers and boos reverberated in living rooms across America. Audience members – including some long-distance callers -- also participated in a lively question and answer period.

Denny helped organize more than 700 “listener clubs’ ‘ across America that gathered to hear and discuss the show. Libraries stocked books on the topic for the coming week. Transcripts of the show were made available to the public.

And, to avoid even the hint of censorship, for its first decade the show had no commercial sponsor.

The show was an instant hit, broadcast by up to 170 stations to an audience of around 10 million. NBC got thousands of letters each week.

The show was also a critical success. By 1949 it had won 46 national awards. Denny himself became the first two-time recipient (1943 and 1945) of the Peabody Award for Outstanding Educational Achievement. He received honorary degrees from Temple University in 1940 and Ithaca College in 1951.

After The Town Hall was named a National Historic Landmark in 2012, the plaque affixed on the wall outside listed America’s Town Meeting of the Air as its claim to fame.

While living in Radburn Denny also developed something called the “Detecto-Play,’’ a a cross between a parlor game, a murder-mystery and a short play that became a fad in the mid-1930s.

Detecto-Plays, as staged in Radburn and many other places, were interactive scenes designed for clubs, churches, settlement houses, and community theater groups. A typical Detecto-Play evening worked like this:

• A short scripted scene is performed;

• A mystery, secret, or moral puzzle is embedded in the action;

• The audience is invited to guess what really happened;

• The answer is revealed at the end

The Denny family did not live long in Radburn. In 1936 they moved to a large, newly built house in the affluent New York suburb of Scarsdale.

After World War II, however, television began to replace radio as the dominant communications medium. Denny tried to transition his long-running show to TV, but the old formula did not work. He lasted as moderator until 1952; the show itself ran until 1956.

On Nov. 11, 1959, Denny died of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 60 years old.

By that time, the show’s connection to Radburn was virtually forgotten. None of Denny’s obituaries mentioned that he had lived or volunteered there. His New York Times obit incorrectly reported that the genesis of the radio show idea occurred while he was living in Scarsdale.

But in a 1975 speech marking Radburn’s 50^th anniversary, Charles Ascher -- a key official in the company that built the community -- mentioned Denny’s connection.

The Town Meeting of the Air, like the “Town for the Motor Age,’’ was a quintessential product of its time. Yet radio remains a potent political force. And Denny’s warnings about the dangers of a polarized electorate and the importance of an informed public seem as fresh now as they did those evenings in Radburn nine decades ago.

*******

Click here for some digitized episodes of America’s Town Meeting of the Air.

(A version of this article first appeared in 2022)

Laundry hanging out to dry, Arlington Place, 1952 (Cornell University libraries)

At the 1979 ceremony marking Radburn’s 50th anniversary, Aline MacMahon, widow of the community’s co-planner Clarence Stein, read some of her husband’s letters from the time when Radburn was settled.

In one letter, Stein described a most contentious issue: “What to do about the laundry?’’

By 1979, with the electric clothes dryer a fixture in American homes, that question had become moot. But for early Radburn it was one of the most pressing. In a novel community where houses faced away from the street, and the concept of “front yard’’ vs. “back yard’’ was muddied, where did you hang the laundry?

‘The salesmen rebelled’

Here’s Stein writing in 1950 about Radburn in his memoir, Toward New Towns for America: “When houses were first opened to public inspection, the dominant problem was where to hang the laundry.’’

He wrote that the company that built Radburn “had gone with us in our American planning revolution: street and walk divorced, houses faced around, superblocks. But here the salesmen rebelled. They [said they] could not sell houses to good Americans if the week’s washing was to be displayed on the public side.

“So, on the days when the houses were first shown, we tried the drying lines on different sides of various houses. The public decided that laundry naturally belonged with other services, and not [facing] the park or in the garden. And there it has remained.’’ A photo in his book shows laundry indeed hanging on Burnham Place.

Radburn’s developer may have stacked the stacked the deck, however; houses had a hole in the ground on the street side to accommodate a clothesline pole.

Also: laundry in those days was not to be hung out on Sundays, when many residents entertained visitors or observed a day of rest. Monday was wash day.

Although Stein did not say so, the laundry issue was a proxy for a larger one, relevant to this day: Does the Radburn layout afford enough yard privacy — for dainty underthings to dry, or for residents to relax?

From Radburn Rackets, a series of 1929 satiric cartoons by architect Robert D. Kohn

Even after Radburn, laundry continued to be a design problem for Stein. In early 1933 he wrote to his wife, referring to a community he was planning in Cleveland: “Where to hang the wash? Where to hang the wash — that is giving me more trouble than anything else. In the office, at home, as I walk along the street, I am trying to hang out the laundry. It is all over the place.’’

The Writings of Clarence S. Stein, a collection of Stein’s papers, has this footnote: “In the first of the new working class ‘garden apartments’ of the 1930s, which Clarence was trying to invent, the laundry was hung in basement rooms; on special racks in bathrooms and kitchens; and in ‘drying yards.’’’

Laundry also became an issue at a new community inspired by Radburn — Greenbelt, Maryland, one of three New Deal towns planned and built by the federal government in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression.

Underlined in the Greenbelt tenants’ rulebook: “All laundry, including bathing suits, must be removed from lines, and the rope lines taken down, not later than 4 PM each afternoon, with the exception of Sundays, when no clothing or bedding of any kind is permitted on the lines from midnight Saturday to midnight Sunday. … Wire lines may be left up permanently if they are drawn tightly, so as not to sag.’’

What the rulebook did not say, but which was universal practice in Radburn and other civilized locales, was that there was a right and wrong way to hang laundry in public.

A key goal was the protection of the “unmentionables” — underwear, particularly women’s panties, bras, and petticoats. Drying them in public required a strategy called “The Shielding Technique.” Sheets, blankets, and towels were hung on the outer lines, creating a wall that blocked the view of the inner lines, where the delicate items could hang in relative privacy.

Laundry (background, behind car) on Burnham Place, 1949 (Photo by Gretchen van Tassel)

After World War II the trend-setting suburb was Levittown on Long Island, where laundry hanging on lines smacked of the city tenement houses many of the Levittowners had left behind. The community only permitted outdoor clothes drying 1) in the back yard; 2) at certain times (never Sunday); and 3) on a specially designed collapsible rack.

This was a version of the umbrella or rotary line, which had several advantages over the traditional long line. It was compact enough to fit in smaller suburban back yards and could be raised to catch the wind and lowered for loading. Above all, it allowed the washer to stand in one spot and rotate the line to her — in those days it was almost always a her — instead of walking back and forth with a heavy basket.

Then electric dryers became first, a status symbol, and then a necessity. No more braving the elements to dry the wash. In 1955 Whirlpool introduced the gas dryer, which made the process much faster. Within a decade the clothesline had been pushed to the brink of extinction, except at shore points where sea breezes and bright sunlight still impart a unique smell and feel to beach towels and bathing suits.

In Radburn today, it appears that only one household — it’s on Beekman Place — hangs laundry regularly out on a line.

Eric Meeks, the homeowner, says that if he used fossil fuels to dry clothes, “I’m not being environmentally sensitive. … I guess I could put solar cells on the roof to make electricity to run a dryer in the basement. [But] using the sun directly saves all the energy and and raw materials that were used to make the solar cells.’’

Eric’s wash, however, flaps not on the cul de sac side, but in the yard, overlooking the park.

Somewhere, Clarence Stein is frowning.

Contributing: Stephen Taylor

Note to readers: If you remember when laundry was hung outside — or have heard stories about those days — feel free to share those memories (Street side or park/yard side? Always on Monday?) in the coments section below.

Radburn’s Fair Lawn Avenune footbridge, erected 1930

One of the most picturesque landmarks of early Radburn was the wooden footbridge over Fair Lawn Avenue that connected Radburn’s North and South sides, allowing children from the latter to walk safely to school.

For years, on our walking tours of historic Radburn, two of the most common questions have involved the overpass: When was it demolished? And why?

No one even seemed to know exactly where the footrbidge stood, much less agree on when and why it was removed. But our search of news archives showed that the footbridge was taken down in July 1952, just 22 years after its construction.

Why it was removed is a more complicated story -- and not a happy one for Radburn’s reputation as the pedestrian-friendly “Town for the Motor Age.’’

Safe for Children

The footbridge was erected in 1930, a little more than a year after the first families moved into Radburn. Although the new community’s tunnel under Howard Avenue, linking A and B Parks, would become its symbol, the footbridge was equally crucial in realizing Radburn’s often-advertised claim to be “Safe for Children.’’

Its opening made the October 19 edition of The New York Times, which reported that the new bridge was “a wooden truss-work structure of fir in natural wood finish, with ramps and shallow steps at either end.’’

The bridge stood about 120 yards east of Abbott Road, about halfway to Craig Road.

Before building the bridge, workers depressed Fair Lawn Avenue about two and a half feet to allow vehicle clearance while keeping the span low enough for comfortable pedestrian access.

The bridge papered over one of Radburn’s major flaws – a community designed to separate pedestrians and motor vehicles was in fact bisected by an increasingly busy county road.

But in 1948 the bridge’s access ramps were removed to allow construction of a garden apartment complex on Fair Lawn Avenue.

Ironically, the builder of the complex was Carl “Stan” Carlson, who had been assistant superintendent and construction manager for the City Housing Corporation, which built Radburn and its predecessor community, Sunnyside Gardens in Queens. Carlson himself had moved in 1929 from Sunnyside to 18 Aberdeen Place, becoming one of Radburn’s first residents.

Unlike most early Radburnites, who were college graduates, Carlson had only two years of high school. But in time he became a member of the Radburn board and founder of the Radburn Brick Company, which was located where The Crossings stand today.

After World War II, he became a successful real estate developer – albeit not one who observed the planning principles upon which Radburn was founded.

Footbridge and approach ramps (aerial photo). Fair Lawn Avenue runs horizontally at center

In 1948 his company, Carlson Construction, began building the Park Hill Homes apartment complex on Fair Lawn Avenue. To do so, he apparently obtained permission to temporarily remove the long access ramps to the bridge, rendering its span inaccessible.

Radburn residents were told that the approaches would be restored, and a right of way established to the bridge. Meanwhile, crossing guards were hired.

Save the bridge!

Around the same time -- coincidentally or otherwise -- the county told Fair Lawn officials that the bridge had been condemned. Carlson was to demolish it. But the Radburn Citizens Association, the Radrock Association and the Radburn School PTA, among others, insisted that the bridge be saved. They enlisted the support of Fair Lawn Mayor John Pollitt, who lived on Barry Place in Radburn. One newspaper called the controversy, “The Battle of the Footbridge.’’

Finally, the county said the bridge could stay if Carlson agreed to maintain it and assume liability. But no final agreement seems to have been reached.

Then, on the morning of March 9, 1949, a Radburn School first-grader named Howard Sufian was hit by a car while crossing Fair Lawn Avenue.

Although the boy was not seriously injured, the accident made clear the bridge’s importance. Less than two weeks later, on March 21, the span reopened. But now, instead of the gradually sloping ramps, the bridge had at each end staircases of about 25 steps – a much steeper climb.

The footbridge was denuded of its approach ramps in 1948 to make way for construction

There things stayed until the first week of July, 1952. Without fanfare, the bridge was torn down. This time there was no story in the Times, just an item in the Passaic Herald-News headlined “Radburn Footbridge Disappears; Few Even Notice Landmark’s Gone.’’

“The removal of the bridge has gone practically unnoticed by even old-time residents,’’ the paper reported.

The article noted that the span’s importance had been undercut by the opening of Milnes Elementary School, which southside Radburn children now attended and could reach on foot without crossing Fair Lawn Avenue.

Fair Lawn historian Jane Lyle Diepeveen, in her history of the borough, wrote that the footbridge was removed as part of the widening of Fair Lawn Avenue, probably in part to accommodate larger trucks.

The last pedestrian

Cathe McAuliffe, whose family moved to Randolph Terrace in 1948, probably was the last child to go to and from school over the bridge.

When classes began in 1951 she was ready to start kindergarten. Milnes Elementary was opening that fall, and for the first time children on Radburn’s south side would go there instead of Radburn School.

But Cathe’s parents already had contracted to buy a house on the north side of Fair Lawn Avenue (Beekman Place) and move around Thanksgiving. So she was granted permission to begin at Radburn School, even as her neighbors went to Milnes.

Each morning, as her mother watched, Cathe would cross what she recalls as a very rickety span — so rickety, in fact, that when her mother was not there to see her off, she’d just run across Fair Lawn Avenue. It felt safer.

Radburn to the rescue?

Radburn itself might have been able to step in to save the span. But the association, which originally was supposed to have included a population as high as 25,000, had been stunted financially by the Depression, which drove City Housing into bankruptcy. It probably would have been a financial stretch to rebuild or even maintain the bridge.

What happened to Stan Carlson, whose project initiated the bridge’s demise? By 1947 he had moved to Ridgewood. In the following year, in addition to the Fair Lawn Avenue complex, he developed a row of single-family houses on Hunter Place.

After City Housing filed for bankruptcy in 1934, much of its undeveloped land in Fair Lawn was sold. Carlson was among those who purchased it at cents on the dollar, or obtained it from those who had.

The Cape-style Hunter Place houses were the antithesis of what Radburn’s designers called “the Radburn Idea,” and the epitome of post-war American suburbia: They stood in a straight line, centered on their lots, facing the street, unconnected to any park, with no particular separation of pedestrians and vehicles.

Carlson had soured on the Radburn Idea. In 1951, at a panel discussion in New York City about Radburn, one participant asked why other developments hadn’t followed the Radburn pattern. Carlson (according to a summary of the session) said that, for one thing, the Radburn Association residential property assessment “is a cost factor that real estate promoters and builders do not believe their customers will pay for.’’

A successful career

Carlson did well for himself, though. In 1948 he became president of the Homebuilders Association of North Jersey. A subsequent newspaper article reported that he “has constructed thousands of homes in Long Island and Bergen County and is one of the state’s foremost builders.”

In 1954 he built more garden apartment units on Plaza Road between Howard and High Street. His local business partners included Maxwell Golburgh, a former City Housing salesman who for decades the principal realtor in Radburn. In 1957 Carlson built the Ramsey Shopping Center.

Carlson was known for his philanthropy. For example, he donated the extensive concrete piping for the new borough swimming pool in Memorial Park, and he was a patron of the Fair Lawn Boys Club. When he died in Palm Springs, California, in 1989 at age 90, he left the lion’s share of his $25 million estate to four Roman Catholic homes for the elderly in New Jersey.

But his role in the demise of the Fair Lawn Avenue footbridge is a stain on his record. Over the years the Radburn stretch of the avenue has seen numerous pedestrian accidents, including several fatalities -- a sad legacy for The Town for the Motor Age.

A version of this article first appeared in 2022.

Left, John Reps (William Staffeld /AAP). Right, plaque and feather duster that Reps, noted for his sense of humor, provided for cleaning it in perpetuity. (Michael Tomlan).

John W. Reps (1921-2020), a Cornell professor known as “The father of American planning history,” established an archive of photographs of significant urban developments worldwide.

The Cornell Archives description of all the Reps images says they were created between 1958 and 1989. But after we found some shots of Radburn in the collection, we wanted to date them more specifically. So we submitted them to AI analysis, and Gemini Pro provided a specific answer: 1952.

Gemini cited “metadata” to support the claim, but could provide no details. We wondered: Was this another AI confabulation?

The Plaza Building paper trail

One of the Reps photos shows the Radburn Plaza Building. So we used the names of first floor business tenants visible in the photo to help date the photos.

We found that Petland of Radburn ran ads in newspapers from 1951 to 1959; that fit inside Cornell’s reported 1958 or later time span. But the Cottage Gift Shop ran newspaper ads from 1952 only until 1957 – a year before the first year of Cornell’s date for Reps’ photos.

But Bergton Real Estate, which in the Reps’ photo occupies the building’s southwestern corner storefront, turned out to be the smoking gun. From 1951 to 1952 Bergton ran frequent ads in newspapers listing its Plaza Building location. But starting in 1953, its newspaper ads list only Teaneck and Paramus offices. And Bergton is not in the 1958 Fair Lawn business directory.

Newspaper articles also indicate that the First Savings and Loan Association of Fair Lawn moved into the Plaza Building by 1953. Importantly, an undated 1950s photograph from our own archives (below) shows that the Savings and Loan replaced Bergton Real Estate in the southwestern storefront.

The verdict? Gemini was correct. Only one date is consistent with the evidence: 1952 –six years earlier than Cornell claims the collection begins. But, perhaps not coincidentally, 1952 was the first year Reps taught at Cornell.

Since we know the year they were taken, Reps’ seven Radburn photographs take on new significance: They are the earliest documented color photographs of what is now a National Historic Landmark.

In the gallery below, we provide as much identifying information as possible on the Reps’ photographs, and also correct the orientation of one slide that had been reversed in the Cornell Archive.

If you know anyone in these photos; can provide other details; or have your own early Kodachrome photos of Radburn, please comment below.

Editors’ note: In addition to being the first confirmed set of color shots of Radburn, these are the earliest documented photographs in the Reps collection (John Reps Papers, #15-2-1101, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library).

Cornell University Photos by John Reps

They give us those nice bright colors

Give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah

I got a Nikon camera

I love to take a photograph

So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away. – Paul Simon

1928 Radburn plan (never completed) shows Saddle River Basin in green at far right

The Saddle River, which inspired the name “Radburn’’ (“swift brook’’ in Scots), loomed large in the imagination of Radburn’s designers.

For Clarence Stein, Henry Wright and Marjorie Sewell Cautley, the Saddle River and its flood plain was a perfect natural boundary. It evoked the “green belt’’ of open space encircling Letchworth, the early 20th Century English garden city that inspired Radburn.

Under Stein and Wright’s plan, the river’s banks would be a place for residents to play games, swim, fish and generally enjoy nature.

And the site of a colonial-era mill once powered by the river was envisioned as Radburn’s ceremonial entrance in the Arcola section of Paramus.

Today, the river’s association with Radburn might seem odd; it’s a mile away.

But the Saddle River was a key element in the original 1928 plan for a community of 25,000 residents that stretched from the Erie Railroad tracks to Paramus.

In fact, in the late 1920s and early ‘30s, residents of the Dunkerhook area of Paramus were considered Radburn residents. Marylin Meslin, a girl whose family lived at 261 Dunkerhook Road in Paramus, attended Radburn School.

And the Dunkerhook was a popular recreational destination for Radburn folks:

Paterson Morning Call, Oct 18, 1932

Garden cities, green belts

Ebenezer Howard, who founded Letchworth, regarded an outer green belt – for agriculture, recreation, woodland – as an essential part of a garden city. The belt delineated the community and averted the sort of amorphous sprawl that would cover much of suburban America after World War II.

Letchworth drawing adjusted from Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1946 ed.)

Radburn’s developer, the City Housing Corp., was unable to afford enough land for a complete green belt. But the Saddle River area on its eastern boundary was the next best thing.

The Dunkerhook (a corruption of Dutch for “dark corner’’) area, which spanned the river’s banks, had been frequented by native Americans, Dutch colonial settlers and, until around 1900, a community of African Americans on Dunkerhook Road.

A map of Stein and Wright’s 1928 plan (top) shows an oval-shaped “recreation field’’ on the Fair Lawn side of the river, just north of Fair Lawn Avenue and south of what is now called Jordan Brook. Stein also mused about a golf course along the river – an idea eventually realized on the east side of Paramus Road.

Where the river passes through Arcola, City Housing planned to rehabilitate the Easton Tower, a brick and wood structure with a water wheel that stood on the site of a demolished 18th century grist mill said to have once been visited by Aaron Burr and Lafayette.

Postcard from 1900s showing Easton Tower in Arcola, which was to be a gateway to Radburn

The tower, which itself was built in 1899, would anchor the gateway to “The Town for the Motor Age.’’ (Today it’s part of the Bergen County Park System.) The portal, Daniel Schaffer wrote in his 1982 history of Radburn, would symbolize “the planners’ concern for nature and leisurely activities.’’

Cautley, Radburn’s landscape architect, wrote in 1930 that the Saddle River basin’s natural beauty was an enormous asset: “The problem will be a simple one of preserving old trees and water plants. In this stream … boys have fished and waded since the days when slaves chanted spirituals in the tiny chapel on the Dunkerhook farm.’’

She was referring to a one-room wooden church at a sharp bend in Dunkerhook Road on the Paramus side of the river. But Cautley (like many area residents then and now) was wrong about the church; it actually was built after the beginning of the Civil War not by the enslaved, but by free African American families, including that of a prominent midwife named Catherine Bennet.

Green corridor lost and regained

City Housing and the company that emerged from its bankruptcy in 1934 gradually sold the property east of Radburn Road at cents on the dollar, and Radburn lost even the vestige of an outer green belt.

But it did have an inner one – the interconnected parks that form the backbone of the Radburn Plan.

Stein wrote in his memoir, Toward New Towns for America, that Radburn’s planners were focused “on the value of the living green close to homes in the midst of the superblocks; it seemed more essential than green belts.’’

As it turned out, there was no need to choose between the two.

The City Housing land eventually became part of the Saddle River County Park, established in 1965. Like Radburn, the park separates pedestrians from motor vehicles – it even has several underpasses – and features playgrounds, tennis courts and ball fields.

So while Radburn lost a green belt, its residents gained access to a green corridor.

Developer Alexander Bing (seated third from right) and architect Clarence Stein (far right)

In our 2020 YouTube documentary, Historic Radburn, we repeated the standard account that the name “Radburn” is Old English for “Saddle River.’’ The reference seemed apt, because when plans for the community were announced in early 1928, it was supposed to stretch from the Erie Railroad tracks in Fair Lawn to the Saddle River.

But we’ve come to believe that Radburn’s name probably was inspired not by an Old English translation of Saddle River, but by the Scots for “quick brook.’‘

And that’s not the only problem with the standard account of how Radburn got its name.

Let us explain.

Charles Ascher (left) and Radburn resident Louis Di Geronimo. (The Bergen Record, 1975)

The conventional wisdom comes from a crucial figure in the planning of Radburn: Charles Ascher, lawyer for the City Housing Corporation, which built “The Town for the Motor Age.’’

Ascher claimed to have chosen the community’s name. Here’s what he said on Oct. 4, 1975, when he came to Radburn to mark the community’s addition to the National Register of Historic Places.

“Our (CHC) public relations man, Harry Propper, set up a press conference … to announce our intention to build a model town. That was to be on a Tuesday (Jan. 24, 1928). Suddenly, Propper realized we would have to give it a name.’’

Ascher said the job fell to him. So he spent the Saturday before the press conference at the New York Public Library, “searching the names of the governors of New Jersey and the presidents of Princeton,’’ most of which already had been used as place names.

He continued: “I found the maps prepared for George Washington’s military campaign in New Jersey, but there was no human culture in our area. It was woods and marshes. The Saddle River ran through our town site, but there was already a Saddle River Township.’’

With the Saddle River in mind, he said, he found a book on old English place names “which said that ‘rad’ meant ‘saddle,’ so I added ‘burn’ (a river or stream) and there we were.’’

‘The stream for which Rad Burn is named’

Ascher’s version was accepted by Daniel Schaffer, author of Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (1982). Similarly, Jane Lyle Diepeveen in her book Fair Lawn: Historic Tales from Settlement to Suburb (2010) says flatly: “Radburn was the Old English translation of Saddle River.’’

Our first problem with Ascher’s story is that in Old English, ‘rad’ didn’t mean saddle; ‘sadol’ meant saddle. If Ascher had named the new town based on actual Old English translation of Saddle River, it would have been called “Sadolburn.’’ Which sounds uncomfortable.

In Old English ‘‘rad’’ meant “red.’’ And so if you were talking to Londoners before 1066 and said, “Radburn,’’ they would have thought you meant “Red River.’’

A different explanation of the name’s origins comes from a prominent economist named Stuart Chase. He was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, a group centered around Radburn’s planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.

On June 24, 1928, Chase wrote in The New York Times that “the name Radburn comes from the Scottish ‘rad,’ meaning quick, and ‘burn’ meaning brook.’‘ (A Scots dictionary supports that translation.)

‘The New Town’

That’s one mystery more or less solved. But there’s a second: How the choice of the community’s name could have been a last minute affair.

City Housing was headed by Alexander Bing, one of the savviest real estate developers of his time and a man who knew how to promote a project. Why would he — or his publicist — have allowed the new community to get so close to its unveiling without something as vital as a name?

Yet the evidence suggests that’s what happened, if not why.

Just two weeks before Bing’s press conference at the Alexander Hamilton Hotel in Paterson, Clarence Stein wrote a memo entitled Notes on the New Town Planned by the City Housing Corporation. He repeatedly referred to what became Radburn simply as “the New Town.’’ Which is not as catchy as ‘‘Radburn’’ — but better than “Sadolburn.’’

(A version of this story first appeared in September 2020 and was updated in August 2023.)

The Radburn Players’ first production: The Valiant (1930) at the Radburn Plaza Building

The Radburn Players, one of New Jersey’s oldest community theater groups and a Radburn institution since 1930, has staged its final show.

“It is really over,’’ says Natalie Ross, a member of the Players for almost four decades. “So many memories. So sad.’’

The Players have not mounted a production on their stage at the Radburn Grange since 2023. Three years earlier, COVID cut short a run of Steve Martin’s The Underpants, severely sickening several Players – one was on a ventilator for 51 days – and darkening the house for the first time since the Depression.

The troupe, which staged more than 225 productions over 90 years, never recovered.

“Their acting talent was top-notch, better than most community theaters,’’ says Cornell Christenson, a theatrical producer who grew up in Radburn but was not affiliated with the Players. “Their comedies were as funny as any professional productions.’’

To its members, the ensemble was more than a theatrical company. “We were a big family,’’ says Laura Belle, president of the Players, “a creative community of caring people.’’

The Players were once an integral part of Radburn life. In the early ‘30s, when shows were upstairs in the Plaza Building’s Assembly Room, a quarter of adult residents were members.

They included George V. Denny Jr. , later famous as founder and host of America’s Town Meeting of the Air, a top-rated network radio program, Denny wrote plays and, with his wife Mary, acted in them.

“When the Players perform at the Plaza Building, and one of those glamorous people just beyond the footlights is a member of the family, the whole clan turns out,’’ wrote Clarence Stein, Radburn’s co-planner.

And the next morning one of those “glamorous people’’ might be seen out of costume in the grocery store downstairs, doing the shopping.

The Radburn Players were born of the early enthusiasm for Radburn’s experiment in community living, like the Garden Club, with its annual Flower Show; the Community Forum, with its monthly discussions; the Bridge Club, whose dance was the social event of the year. There were the Radburn Singers, the Church in Radburn and the Radburn Nursery School.

Now they are all gone, and finally the Players also became peripheral to the community for which they were named. In recent decades only a few residents were members, and attendance sagged.

There were many reasons for their decline, from antiquated quarters to the loss of people to build sets and erect stage lights. COVID merely brought down the curtain.

A “new experiment’’

The first meeting of what became the Radburn Players occurred Dec. 27, 1929, in the Club Room of the Plaza Building. It was agreed, according to the Paterson News, that “a community like Radburn should be an excellent place for such a group. The fine community spirit which has already manifested itself … augers well for this new experiment.’’

At an organizational meeting the next week, 30 residents agreed to loan the group $200 – a sum matched by the Radburn Association – to get started. The first production was a now-forgotten one-act play, The Valiant (above).

Despite Stein’s starry description, the Plaza Building stage was too low. Actors complained that “people in the rear seats could not see,’’ according to minutes of a Radburn Association board meeting.

Construction of the Grange’s gym wing in 1952 provided a higher stage, improved lighting, a larger backstage and basement space for the theater’s Green Room.

The Players usually staged two or three plays a year – a spring and a fall show at the Grange, and a summertime children’s play in the park. Milestones included first outdoor play (Robin Hood in A Park, 1938); first play on the B Park stage (Alice in Wonderland, 1940, below); first original musical (Take My Hand, 1940); first nighttime outdoor show under lights (The Princess without a Heart, 1959).

It was usually good theater. In a review in the Community News of the Players’ “riveting’’ 2014 production of That Championship Season, Christianson wrote that, for $15 a ticket, the Players “always produce a high-quality, entertaining theatre experience.’’

But the biggest fan in the family was his mother Fritzie, famous in Radburn for teaching children’s theater. “One thing my mother always wanted to do on Mother’s Day was to see the matinee of The Players’ spring production,’’ he recalls.

Stein’s “glamorous people’’ did a lot of unglamorous work. They helped build the Grange stage and raised money for a new curtain. They sewed the costumes, built the sets and hauled lighting poles to the park. They made window curtains to darken the gym for matinees.

Everyone painted, including Natalie Ross (below), better known as a director and actor. She starred as Grace in Bus Stop in 1986 and still relishes reciting the line made famous in the film version, starring Marilyn Monroe: “I like a man with big hands!’’

But over the years the Players drifted from the center of Radburn life. Relatively few residents attended shows and – surprisingly in a community seemingly interested in the performing arts – fewer joined the company.

The Players tried to strengthen their community links with free tickets for newcomers, an info booth at Family Day and a “meet the cast’’ party on the last night of each run.

Why nothing worked, Ross says, was a mystery: “We never figured that out.’’

There had always been conflicts with the Radburn Association over use of the Grange, and in the 1990s the Players felt increasingly unwelcome. Some in the administration regarded them as a nuisance – in Radburn but not of Radburn, and just another amateur theater group whose members came from all over.

“Nothing we did was ever right,’’ says Belle – from a bathroom light left on to trash after a cast party. Several Players say the group was told that, to avoid drawing undesirable outsiders, they could no longer advertise the B Park shows. The last was Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in 2001.

The Players had always benefitted from free rent at the Grange, and from the ability to build sets on stage during the rehearsal period, instead of facing a tight window between “move-in day’’ and opening night.

But even by the modest standards of community theater, the facility became obsolete, and thus a liability in recruiting talent. “A lot of actors don’t want to work in a gym with folding chairs,’’ Ross says. And the troupe, though a registered non-profit, did not qualify for many grants because the gym was not handicapped-accessible.

There were conflicts for space with other Radburn groups. Once, when the Players tried to rehearse downstairs in a vacant nursery school classroom, their lines were drowned out by the thunder of pickleball overhead in the gym.

In this century the Players lost some mainstays. Babs and Ken Van Acker moved to Pennsylvania, David Sparano to Florida. Natalie Ross’s husband Michael, a former group president, died. So did Ken Sheppard, who used to rustle up audiences by visiting senior centers “and loving up the old ladies,’’ as Ross jokingly puts it. He passed away at 64, three months after receiving the Players’ lifetime achievement award.

The last straw

The New York Times never reviewed a Players’ performance, but COVID did get the group a mention in a feature about Larry Kelly, a Manhattan resident and 2020 Underpants cast member whose revival after almost two months on a ventilator earned him the nickname “Lucky Larry.’’

The troupe was not so fortunate. With the Grange closed for many months, some people drifted to groups that had resumed productions. It was three years until the Players’ next show, a one-act play that Laura Belle calls “an attempt to get our footing back.” It did nothing to suggest they had a future in the Grange.

This year, Radburn management gently suggested that if the Players wanted to claim any of their stuff – the Grange is crammed with props, costumes, furniture, sets, lighting and sound equipment – it was time to collect it.

These days, a single light bulb burns over the Grange stage. The “ghost light’’ is both a safety measure and a theater tradition; every house has a ghost who must be deterred from sabotage with an offering of light in which to perform.

The ghost light is also a reminder of the “glamorous” players who strode the stage for nine decades, in comedy and tragedy.

Director Natalie Ross with Dave Sparano (standing) and other cast members from That Championship Season (2014). Seated from left: Shawn Kane, Michael Roney, Mike Rogers, Eric Happel.

Note: Most of the actors in the nine-image gallery above are not identified. If you recognize people in the photos, feel free to name them in the coments section below.

Radburn’s first fulltime settlers moved onto Allen Place in April 1929. But a year earlier a prominent artist already had become what a newspaper called “the first resident of Radburn’’ when he rented a house and started an art school on land the City Housing Corp. had bought for its proposed “Town for the Motor Age.’’

The artist was Ralph Pearson, who in 1928 settled for the summer in a part of Paramus’ Dunkerhook section that a few decades earlier had been home to a small African American community.

Pearson, his wife and their two children lived at 263 Dunkerhook Rd., an early 19th century farmhouse just over the Saddle River from Fair Lawn. A quarter mile down the road he opened what he called The Church Studio in an abandoned one-room church built in the 1860s by the descendants of slaves.

The former Dunkerhook AME Zion Church became The Church Studio

Many area residents “have motored over to the picturesque spot’’ to visit, reported the Ridgewood News. “It’s fame is fast spreading.’’ Of Pearson, the paper added: “It is an honor to have such a personage in the vicinity.’’

Pearson lived and taught there for three summers. The old church was damaged by an arson fire on Halloween 1930 and torn down. Four years later City Housing filed for bankruptcy, and its corporate successor sold the land in 1938.

Today, Dunkerhook is lined with large contemporary houses. No. 263 is the last remnant of the 19th century.

The untold story of Pearson on Dunkerhook Road reminds us that Radburn’s original plan for a community of 25,000 spilled into several municipalities besides Fair Lawn; that Radburn was once a cause celeb among intellectuals and artists; and that whether or not Pearson should be considered Radburn’s “first resident,’’ he certainly was one of its most interesting.

A pioneer of modern art in America

By the time he arrived at the edge of Radburn, Ralph Pearson had already lived several lives. Born in 1883 and raised largely in Chicago, he showed an early entrepreneurial streak. While still a teenager he built a newsstand and stationery business that employed more than 30 people. He studied etching at night at the Art Institute of Chicago, financing his art with business rather than patronage, a practice he never abandoned.

Adventure followed. In 1909, Pearson designed and built his own cruising powerboat, the Catherine M., and completed a circumnavigation of the eastern United States by a small private vessel—down the Mississippi, around the Gulf, up the Atlantic, and home through the Erie Canal and Great Lakes – the first successful such circumnavigation in a small boat.

By the 1910s, Pearson had become a major figure in American printmaking. He helped found the Chicago Society of Etchers and played a central role in reviving etching as an art form. His prints, which included urban labor scenes and a widely admired Lincoln series, sold well and entered museum collections. By conventional standards, he was established.

Then came the Armory Show of 1913 in New York, the first large exhibition of modern art in America. Like many artists of his generation, Pearson was shaken by the European modernism on display. He later admitted that his technical mastery now felt like “copying” rather than interpretation. Seeking renewal, he moved to New York to study modern art. Then, in 1919, he moved his family to Taos, New Mexico, bringing along what is believed to have been the region’s first fine-art printing press.

In Taos, Pearson tried raising pigs but later admitted, “I planned for the pigs to support my etching, and ended up etching to support the pigs.” So he pivoted to a more successful venture: commercial greeting cards that featured his etchings. A Taos historian would call his etchings of the Pueblo mission churches the finest visual records of those buildings.

In 1923, Pearson moved to Monterey, California and his work pushed further toward abstraction. One print, Cypress, became a fault line. As critic Luna C. Osburn wrote in 1925, it “raises squarely the question of what constitutes modern representation in etching.” Pearson himself remarked—only half kidding—that the plate lost him more friends (and dealers) than if he had committed murder.

By 1924 Pearson was back in New York and reinventing himself again – this time, as an advocate of modern art education.

He founded what he called the Design Workshop. He later wrote that it was probably the first modern art school in the country to call itself a workshop rather than a studio. (He seems to have coined this term, which has been used in several contexts since.)

Beginning in 1925, he ran the Workshop at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Its students of modern art and design did not copy masters or listen to lectures. In the city and at the Dunkerhook church, they learned by doing – working, critiquing, experimenting.

This was the philosophy that he brought, in the summer of 1928, to the woods of nascent Radburn.

The Church Studio sat at a sharp bend in Dunkerhook Road (map top center) in Paramus, where Ralph Pearson also rented a house (right center) 1928-1930. (Yellow indicates land owned in the early 1930s by the City Housing Corp., Radburn’s developer.)

By 1928 City Housing had amassed two square miles for its planned community, some of it in Paramus. That summer Pearson opened a Design Workshop campus “for the theory and practice of creative design’’ in the small church at a bend on Dunkerhook Road where today the road intersects with the vehicle exit from the Saddle River County Park.

Students either camped out on the grounds or commuted from New York City.

It’s unclear how Pearson learned about the Dunkerhook location, but City Housing was trying to interest academics and artists in moving to its innovatively-planned new community. As a result, Pearson may have heard about the Dunkerhook property through connections at the New School such as the architect Frederick Ackerman, who would design Radburn’s houses, or Richard T. Ely, a noted economist who sat on the City Housing board.

Pearson also shared with Radburn’s founders a belief in adult education – the notion that the growing number of college graduates (and adults in general) should continue to learn after their formal schooling ended. (The Carnegie Foundation of New York, a leader in the field, supported Radburn’s extensive educational offerings, which included courses in everything from child psychology to conversational French.)

In July 1928 Pearson announced a series of public lectures on his art theories at The Church Studio. More than two dozen people attended the first talk.

Tall (6’-4’’), charismatic and enthusiastic, Pearson could attract and hold an audience. He was, observed the Ridgewood Herald, “a pleasant speaker, and reflects his attractive personality in his words.’’

In addition to his classes and lectures at the Church Studio, Pearson also staged an exhibit of etchings, modern wall hangings, hooked rugs, pewter and jewelry.

He became a local sensation. “Art has preceded Radburn, the model city planned southwest of Ridgewood,’’ trumpeted the Ridgewood News. The Church Studio, with its “gay-colored walls,’’ was “a perfect setting for the objects’’ on display, the News reported, adding, of Pearson: “It is interesting that he is the first resident of Radburn.’’

It also would be interesting to know if any of Radburn’s first fulltime settlers visited the studio in the following summers — and what they thought of the claim that Pearson was their community’s “first resident.’’

On to Boston’s North Shore

Pearson didn’t stay long on Dunkerhook Road. He spent subsequent summers in Rockport, Massachusetts, where he raised a sunken 100-foot schooner from the harbor, and refitted it as a studio for his art classes.

Meanwhile, Pearson pushed the Design Workshop into production. In one venture, Workshop artists created hooked rugs intended as both household items and works of modern art.

The Design Workshop didn’t end so much as change form. By 1937, Pearson had transformed it into a national system of popular mail correspondence courses – a version of “distance learning” decades before it became common.

No. 263 Dunkerhook Rd., where the Pearsons lived. It is the only structure from the 19th century still standing on the road.

Pearson died at age 74 in 1958 in Nyack, New York, where he’d lived for many years. He had written seven books, including influential art textbooks, and published hundreds of articles. His etchings were in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the Art Institute of Chicago.

His obituary in The New York Times called him a “disciple and proclaimer of the modern movement in art.” It said nothing about his summers in the Dunkerhook woods, nor the claim that he was once “the first resident of Radburn.’’

It’s 1936. Beneath the streets of upper Manhattan, in the bowels of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, a physicist is working on a technological marvel: a three-story, million-volt X-ray machine. When it’s finished, one of his colleagues will call it “a monster.’’

The X-ray machine was designed in the famed Radiation Laboratory at the University of California-Berkeley headed by Ernest Lawrence, who in a few years will win the Nobel Prize and become one of the fathers of the atomic bomb.

The physicist assembling the machine is Frank Exner, who worked with Lawrence. It’s designed to treat cancer and do groundbreaking research into the nature of viruses and thus lead to vaccines against the diseases they cause.

And each night, after working on the leviathan, he goes home -- to Radburn.

In 1933 the Exners – Frank, his wife Faith, and their two young daughters — became the first residents of 5 Bristol Place, one of the last houses built before Radburn’s developer declared bankruptcy a year later.

But in less than a decade the family will suffer a tragedy that will change everything, including Frank’s promising career on the fast track of scientific research.

Ernest Lawrence (in tie, seated second from right) and his staff, circa 1932. Exner stands second from left.

A photograph taken in 1932 at Ernest Lawrence’s ‘‘Rad Lab,’’ as it came to be known, suggests the potential of Frank Exner.

In the background of the photo is Lawrence’s most famous invention, the cyclotron. It was the first in a series of nuclear particle accelerators that would be used in the discovery of plutonium, a constituent of the first atomic bomb.

Alongside Lawrence in the photo are his acolytes. One is Exner. Another is David Sloan, designer of the X-ray machine. A third is Wesley Coates; more, sadly, about him later.

Exner was 33 when the photo was taken. He’d grown up in Northfield, Minnesota, where his father taught chemistry at Carleton College. Frank graduated from Carleton in 1919 and went to Yale to study physics.

In 1922 he took a break from graduate school to teach physics at the Peking Union Medical College, which had been founded by Protestant missionary organizations and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The school would play a key role in the development of physics in modern China.

Peking Union Medical College staff. Exner stands at far right.

In 1925 Exner returned home. Aboard ship he met Faith Wiggin, a Bostonian and a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and of Simmons College, from which she received a master’s degree in social work. Her father was treasurer of the national Congregational Church’s foreign mission board. The family had lived in China for a number of years.

Frank and Faith shared many interests, including music. She played the cello; he, the violin.

Faith Exner

Exner resumed research at Yale for his Ph. D. dissertation, and Faith attended the university’s nursing school. They were married June 22, 1928; their daughters Polly and Betty were born in 1929 and 1930, respectively.

But Frank’s dissertation research was plagued by problems; by 1930 he was running out of time. “I took a folding cot (to the office) and worked almost around the clock,’’ he later recalled, “as long as I could stay awake.’’ In the end, though, his data was inconclusive.

In need of a job to support his family, he joined Columbia-Presbyterian’s Crocker Institute for Cancer Research.

A powerful new machine

Meanwhile, in California, Lawrence’s graduate student David Sloan had designed a new X-ray machine that would be useful for a range of experiments. Lawrence – always struggling for funds to support his research and the grad students who helped do it – next needed to finance construction of such a device.

He settled on a use that funders would support – cancer treatment. A prototype would be built for the UCal Medical School in San Francisco. The Crocker Institute in New York ordered a second.

In 1932 Exner was dispatched to California to help Sloan on the prototype and learn how to assemble and operate the New York machine. The months he spent in the Rad Lab, he later wrote, were among the most satisfying of his life.

Exner house, 5 Bristol Place, Radburn, circa 1933

When he returned east in spring, 1933, the Exners bought a new house in Radburn, which was feeling the impact of the Depression. Many early buyers had lost their homes, and had to move or stay on as renters. Faith’s widowed mother, who’d been wiped out financially in the stock market crash in 1929, moved into the unfinished attic at 5 Bristol.

To appeal to higher-income buyers – the only ones still in the new home market – Radburn builders offered custom touches. At 5 Bristol, these included an open-air, second-story porch off a bedroom, and a door between the two largest bedrooms.

Betty Exner was 3 when the family moved to Radburn. In an interview in July 2021, she recalled the sense of safety and freedom that Radburn -- which marketed itself as “Safe for Children’’ because it separated vehicles from pedestrians -- offered her and her sister: “We loved Radburn! It was such a nice little cocoon. We thought it was wonderful, how you could just go from here to there, to the Plaza Building. We could be free.’’

Faith threw herself into community life. She gave welcoming teas for newcomers and sat on the Recreation Advisory Council. She sang in the choir at the inter-denominational Church in Radburn, played in a chamber music trio, and directed a boys band.

When the daughter of a Radburn couple was discharged from the hospital after an asthma attack, the Exners put her up in what The Hackensack Evening Record described as “a special sealed dust proof room’’ in their home.

They also, at another point, took in a border: Oscar Ameringer, a Socialist activist from Oklahoma who was finishing work on his autobiography.

In the book’s introduction, the poet Carl Sandburg described Ameringer as “a man on fire over the injustice between man and man, over the chaos and darkness of so many human fates where he cannot be a silent witness,...” Yet also, Sandburg wrote, a speaker who could make a crowd of tired, tough working men laugh.

Ameringer mailed the Exners a copy of the book when it was published in 1940. Faith replied: “It is almost like having you in the house again to share our pumpernickel bread and to share your delightful stories. We still call you Our Roomer and watch the reviews of your book with as much pride as if we had a share in its writing. All Radburn is proud of you, too.’’

Sometimes the Exner family would go into New York, descend to the basement of the building at West 168^th Street, and, standing on a sort of balcony, look down at the great machine that consumed so much of Frank’s time.

“New York’s newest weapon’

New York Times coverage of the X-ray machine’s dedication. Exner is left.

In 1937, Columbia-Presbyterian’s X-ray machine was dedicated. A photo accompanying a story in The New York Times showed a shirt sleeved Exner posing with the machine alongside Francis Carter Wood, director of the cancer institute.

The Times hailed the machine as “New York’s newest weapon in the fight against cancer.’’ (Its virtues also were trumpeted by Popular Science and Popular Mechanics.)

Popular Mechanics depicts Exner, incorrectly calling him “inventor” of the X-ray machine

The Times article included a safety claim: “There is no glass to be broken, nor is there any danger of accidental contact with high voltage conductors.’’

But two months after the dedication, Wesley Coates -- one of those with Exner in the 1932 Rad Lab photo -- was electrocuted when he touched some wires while trying to fix a problem.

Exner was there. He gave first aid and called for help. But within an hour, Coates was pronounced dead. He was 29.

Wood, the cancer center director, chose to blame the victim rather than the machine, telling the Times that Coates “must have slipped, and thus have brought his body into contact with the conductor. … I cannot explain how (else) he came to touch one of the conductors.’’

Frank Exner apparently did not dismiss the incident so easily. In a 2021 interview, his granddaughter, Gretchen Kuhn, said Coates’ death “always bothered him a lot. He felt that there weren’t proper safety protocols.’’

The giant X-ray machine’s problems continued. Despite the glowing predictions at its dedication, it proved “capricious’’ and was “frequently under repair,’’ a Columbia scientist would later report.

There were other problems: conflicts between basic research and patient treatment; the retirement of Wood, Exner’s patron; and a new cancer institute in the city, Memorial Sloan Kettering, that purchased an X-ray machine of its own.

Soon, medical school administrators wanted to redirect the project’s funds.

The time Exner spent at the Rad Lab earlier in the decade came to seem to him like a lost, golden age. “I wish I could come out and see the lab now,’’ he wrote to Lawrence in 1938. “I think of my years at Berkeley as the pleasantest and best laboratory experience I ever had.’’

Exner, seated at right, with Max Delbruck (left) and S.E. Luria at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1941. Luria and Delbruck would later share a Nobel Prize.

Despite his struggles, Exner remained well-connected and well regarded.

In addition to his link to Lawrence, who won the Nobel for physics in 1939, he co-authored several important academic papers, including three with S. E. Luria, a Columbia colleague who would win a Nobel prize two decades later for work on viruses.

In 1941, one of their papers appeared in Science, and another in the equally prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. At a time when no one knew what viruses actually were -- what they looked like, how they reproduced, why they caused diseases -- Luria and Exner did foundational research into their basic nature.

Exner also had contact at Columbia with Enrico Fermi, who would become a chief architect of the atomic bomb, and Leo Szilard, who in 1939 wrote the letter to President Roosevelt (for Albert Einstein’s signature) that resulted in the decision to build the bomb.

So Exner’s lack of a Ph. D. was no bar to a successful career in physics -- especially at a time when the government’s Manhattan Project would need physicists for its crash program to develop the atomic bomb.

‘A special kind of relationship’

Then, in the summer of 1941, Faith Exner was diagnosed with breast cancer. A year later, at age 43, she died. Her memorial service was held at the house on Bristol Place. The two surviving members of her chamber trio played several of Faith’s favorite pieces.

Frank was crushed; he and Faith “had a special kind of relationship,’’ their daughter Betty would recall.

It was a turning point for everyone in the family. Changes at Columbia already had clouded Frank’s future there; in 1941 he’d told Lawrence he was worried that the X-ray machine would be “scrapped.’’ Now, he decided to move to Minnesota, where his father still lived, and take a job with the Minneapolis-Honeywell Company.

The company had received many important war contracts. One would produce the C-1 autopilot control used by the B-29s that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Polly and Betty, who’d spent the summer on Fire Island as their mother’s health worsened, had only a few days in Radburn before moving west. “Oh, it was a shock to have to leave,’’ Betty recalled. “It felt like my life ended.’’

Frank never finished his Ph. D. or joined the Manhattan Project. Luria, in an autobiography written years after their work together, cited Exner’s “lack of aggressiveness’’ for the end of his academic career. Regardless, the widower probably felt that taking a secure private sector job close to family was best for his daughters.

He still did important work, and received patents for several wartime inventions. One, filed in 1944 but not officially announced until 1951 for security reasons, was a kind of mechanical computer to calculate an aircraft’s drift angle and ground speed. It’s unclear when, if or how it was used in warfare.

Exner remarried in 1945 to Marjorie Joslyn, a friend of Faith’s. He retired in 1970 and died 20 years later, at 91. (Lawrence, in contrast, died in 1958, 19 days after his 57th birthday.)

His granddaughter, Gretchen Kuhn, said Exner always regretted not finishing his dissertation. He even wrote a three-page explanation entitled, “Why Frank didn’t get his Ph.D.’’

But unlike Lawrence, a lifelong advocate of nuclear weapons development, Exner may have been glad he never worked on the Manhattan Project. During the Cold War he joined two prominent anti-nuclear groups, the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy and the Union of Concerned Scientists. He also was active in the Minnesota chapter of the Nature Conservancy and became an advocate of world government.

He kept busy in other ways, too. He liked to take his grandchildren down into his basement shop and work on an amusing project. It wasn’t the world’s largest X-ray machine, but Frank Exner seemed perfectly content.

His career had embraced physics and virology (at Berkeley and Columbia); mechanical engineering (at Honeywell); and even astronomy (at Carlton, where as an undergraduate he published a paper on astronomical observations at the college’s nationally-known Goodsell Observatory).

He was also a good man. S.E. Luria, with whom Exner did the virus research, was an Italian Jew who came to Columbia as a refugee from facism. He said he’d never met anyone like his new colleague.

In his memoirs, he praised “Frank’s serenity, candor and lack of conceit.’’ His colleague, he wrote, seemed to personify certain American traits: “Personal responsibility, respect for privacy and concern for social welfare.’’

(A version of this article appeared in November 2021)

Howard Avenue is named for Ebenezer Howard (above), founder of the English Garden City movement. Owen honors Robert Owen, the industrialist who founded the utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. Burnham Place is named for Daniel Burnham, the architect and city planner who famously said, “Make no little plans.’’

But who chose these names? And for whom are Radburn’s other avenues, streets and lanes named?

Our best evidence comes from Charles Ascher, secretary of the City Housing Corp., which developed Radburn in the late 1920s. In an interview in 1970, Ascher said the street names were selected by himself and Louis Brownlow, Radburn’s project manager.

They did so, Ascher recalled, “one weekend at my place in Sunnyside Gardens (in Queens). … We cooked up the idea of having all the streets on a superblock begin with the same letter, so at least a man coming from outside could be guided. Then, we got names with historical meanings’’ – or, failing that, English ones.

According to the prevailing wisdom, he said, “People like to buy houses on streets that have nice Anglo-Saxon-sounding names.’‘

He and Brownlow had one other rule, Ascher added: “We decided not to commemorate any living people.’’

Besides the byways mentioned above, here are some other streets and the people for whom they probably were named. Some of the information comes from an unattributed source (probably a City Housing publicist) in an article in The Hackensack Record in 1929.

• Abbott Road: Leon Abbett (his surname spelling does not match the road’s) served as New Jersey governor from 1884 to 1887 and 1890 to 1893. His official biography refers to Abbett as “the most powerful person in New Jersey in the late 19th Century.’’

• Ashburn Place: Charles E. Ashburner, a municipal management pioneer and Brownlow mentor whom Brownlow identified in his autobiography as the first city manager in America.

• Audubon Place: John James Audubon, the naturalist and ornithologist.

• Ballard Place: Edward L. Ballard, a New York insurance executive and associate of John D. Rockefeller Jr., the CHC’s largest single investor. Despite Ascher’s rule against naming streets for the living, Ballard was still breathing when the cul-de-sac’s houses were built circa 1932. But by then Ascher and Brownlow had left City Housing, and the name may have been selected by someone else.

• Brearly Crescent: David Brearley (note the second ‘‘e’’), an American Founding Father and New Jersey federal judge.

• Craig Road: James Craig, an 18th century Scottish architect remembered for his plan for Edinburgh’s “New Town’’ section.

• Landmark Lane (in The Crossings): Landmark Properties, original developer of the site once known as Daly Field – itself named for Radburn’s longtime maintenance chief, Charles Daly.

• Randolph Place: Theodore F. Randolph, governor from 1869 to 1872 and U.S. senator from 1875 to 1881. When he was governor plans were made for a new “lunatic asylum’’ in Morris Plains. That became the Greystone mental hospital, to which Radburn’s pioneering landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley was confined in the late 1930s.

• Ruskin Place: John Ruskin, the 19^th century British critic and philosopher whose ideas influenced the founders of the Garden City movement, and thus Radburn’s planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.

• Rutgers Terrace: Henry Rutgers, the Revolutionary War military officer and philanthropist for whom New Jersy’s state university is named.

• Sandford Road: William Sandford, a large land owner in, and early settler (circa 1670) of, North Jersey. His descendants include two New Jersey governors: William Sandford Pennington and William Pennington.

• Townley Road: Richard Townley emigrated from England to Virginia in 1683 and later settled in what is today Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, he married well — to Elizabeth Carteret, widow of the state’s first governor.

• Sunnyside Drive: (no part is in Radburn today, but it might have been named before City Housing went broke in 1934 and sold much of its land): The CHC’s Radburn-forerunner development in Queens, Sunnyside Gardens.

But most of Radburn’s roads seem to have been named after cities or towns in England -- and thus supposedly sound “classy.’’

(This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared in 2023.)

Radburn School, 1930

Thanksgiving always reminds me of a story Virgil Sasso once told about his first Fair Lawn-Ridgewood football game.

It was Thanksgiving 1944. Sasso had just moved from Pennsylvania to teach at Fair Lawn High School, which had opened the previous year.

So he was surprised that day by the sound of Fair Lawn High kids from Radburn rooting for Ridgewood High School, and by the sight of several Radburn boys actually playing for Ridgewood.

Sasso soon learned the explanation for this apparent treason.

Before the opening of Fair Lawn High, the borough sent its young people to three high schools -- Paterson East Side, Hawthorne and Ridgewood. Most Radburn students attended Ridgewood (and for a time the Radburn Association helped pay their out-of-district tuition, which was higher than the East Side rate.)

When Fair Lawn High opened in 1943, borough students already enrolled in the other high schools were allowed to stay through graduation. Hence, some of the Fair Lawn kids in the Ridgewood camp at the Thanksgiving game were simply being true to their school.

Consider the example of Betty Reyle, who grew up in Radburn, first on Allen Place and later Ramapo Terrace. In 1944 she graduated from Ridgewood High, where she’d met the fellow who the following year she would marry. He was from Radrock Estates -- Glen Rock also in those days sent its high schoolers to Ridgewood.

In an interview recorded in 1978, Sasso said that tensions between Radburn and the rest of Fair Lawn stemmed in part from the fact that most Radburn kids went to Ridgewood High while most other Fair Lawn students went to East Side.

Another reason for what he termed the intra-borough “hostility’’ was that “people in Radburn were more progressive, if that’s the word. … Radburn had a sewer system when Fair Lawn didn’t. Radburn had parks and pools.’’ As a teacher, he heard students say things he thought they’d heard from their parents, like “Radburn people think they’re better.’’

“When I got to know Radburn people, that wasn’t true at all,’’ Sasso said. He added: “I never remember any hostility on the part of Radburn people against Fair Lawn.’’

Radburn residents, he said, “wanted things better and were willing to spend the money.’’ Fair Lawn voters, in contrast, had helped defeat a proposed high school a decade earlier, despite the promise of federal financial assistance. Many residents, Sasso said, “seemed to be very proud people – they didn’t want a government hand out.’’

Eventually, “the high school was built because of the pressure of the Radburn people,’’ and it helped unify the borough, he said.

At the recommendation of another teacher, he moved to Radburn himself, eventually buying a house on Brearley Crescent and serving as a Radburn trustee for five years. He became vice principal and athletic director of Fair Lawn High, whose football field is named for him.

Asked in the 1978 interview if he’d ever leave Radburn, Virgil Sasso said no. For one thing, “If I left Radburn, I’d have to leave my wife.’’

(A form of this article first appeared in 2023)

Excavating the Roots of a Mature Sugar Maple, 1929.

Radburn’s original landscape plan transformed the farmland of 1928 into parks, paths and pretty home lots. Marjorie Sewell Cautley, its designer, was ahead of her time in her emphasis on native trees. They were less expensive, easier to maintain and, she knew, would thrive in the New Jersey climate.

She implemented her vision in several ways: by leaving intact large, existing trees; by growing native species in on-site nurseries; and – perhaps most unusually – by transplanting fully grown trees from nearby.

Cautley documented Radburn’s development with films and photographs, which she used in articles and presentations. The photographs presented below document the arduous process of transplanting large sugar maple trees at newly constructed Brighton Place. These photographs were likely taken by Cautley and are in her archive at the University of Pennsylvania.

These days, the transplantation of full-sized trees is hugely expensive and rarely done. But at Little Island in Manhattan, the new park on the Hudson River, 42 mature trees were transplanted in 2020 and 2021. Interestingly, the landscape architect for that project was Signe Nielsen, a founding partner of MNLA – the landscape architecture firm that completed the master plan for the revitalization of Radburn’s parks in 2021.

The trees at Little Island were carried to the site in barges on the Hudson River and lifted into place by large cranes guided by precise geolocation coordinates in the design drawings.

Transplanting large trees, Nielsen said on a recent tour of Little Island, is stressful for the plants, which “grow with a certain orientation to light and wind.” Having identified the coordinates of their new location, she said, she rotated the trees as they were positioned to make sure the side that originally faced the sun still did so in its new location. All the Little Island trees survived.

Cautley, of course, did not have the benefit of such advanced technology, and it’s unclear how long the trees she transplanted actually lived.

The tree dolly. Having exposed the roots of a large maple (probably a sugar maple, Acer saccharum ) on property owned by Radburn’s developer, the City Housing Corporation, workers cut and expose the roots, and a two-wheeled tree dolly is moved into position.

The Flatbed Truck. The crew maneuvers the maple, now mounted on the tree dolly. A flatbed truck is ready to help move the tree.

Positioning the maple on Brighton Place. Workers guide the maple into position using the tree dolly. Unlike the procedure for transplants today, no burlap or wrapping materials are used around the pruned roots.

Planting at Brighton and Plaza Road. Ropes and wooden beams stabilize the trunk while the crew prepares to lower the tree into its planting pit.

Final Positioning. The crew steadies the tree after lowering it into its pit.

Cautley’s revised landscape plan for 3 Brighton Place shows the position of six transplanted maple trees. The work was completed by October 7, 1929. (From “Marjorie Sewell Cautley landscape drawings” in the Drawings and Archives collection of the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.)

Bristol Place, 5:20 PM, October 31, 2024

A century ago the builders of Radburn based their revolutionary plan on the strict seperation of motor vehicles and pedestrians — especially children.

These days, Halloween makes a mockery of that principle.

Hoards of trick-or-treaters take over Radburn’s cul de sacs and never come to what Radburn’s planners considered the “front’’ door — the one facing the yard or a park.

Yet this holiday that negates Radburn’s world-famous plan also affirms its spirit. On Halloween, everyone is happy.

Thousands of creatures — costumed kids, parents, dogs— jam Radburn’s signature dead-end lanes. Houses are elaborately festooned with garish, supposedly frightening decorations. By evening’s end, residents may have handed out more than 1,000 pieces of candy.

Just blocks away, in contrast, conventional suburban through-streets are almost devoid of trick or treaters.

Five reasons why Radburn became a trick or treat mecca:

1. Efficiency: The plan’s tight cul de sacs, clustered houses, and relatively small lots make it the most popular place to trick or treat – kids can get the most candy with the fewest steps in the least time.

2. Safety: Because there are so many people on its roads, Radburn is safe for trick or treaters — cars can’t get up enough speed to hurt anyone.

3. Connectivity: Social media has spread word of these advantages, attracting families from outside Radburn and the Borough of Fair Lawn (of which Radburn is a part).

4. Diversity: Unlike sectarian holidays, Halloween can be celebrated by most members of the region’s many ethno-religious groups (Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc.) — anyone who’s not offended by the orange black color scheme.

5. Hospitality: The most important, and perhaps most unlikely, factor. Many, if not most, of the trick or treaters are not from homes in the Radburn residents’ association. But despite the cost and inconvenience, residents generally receive all of them with good humor.

That last factor, as those familiar with Radburn’s history know, was hardly a given.

A community apart

For at least its first 40 years, Radburn was essentially insular.

When it opened in 1929, “The Town for the Motor Age’’ was separated from the rest of Fair Lawn by fields and woods, and distinguished from it by its recreational amenities. While Radburn kids enjoyed two concrete swiming pools, for example, their town counterparts (before Memorial Pool opened in 1949) had to splash around in a sand pit near the Passaic River.

After World War II the woods and fields around Radburn turned into tracts of houses occupied by people from places like the Bronx or Paterson, many of whom did not quite fit Radburn’s college-educated, white-collar vibe.

When the children of these families used Radburn’s parks and ballfields, the association responded by posting No Trespassing signs. A sidewalk connecting Radburn Road and one of Radburn’s interior parks was ripped up, and bushes were planted to block the path.

Radburn was many things in those years. Welcoming to uninvited outsiders was not one of them.

But somehow, Halloween — the most macbre of occasions — has come to symbolize how Radburn has changed. Although it’s hard to know who’s an insider and who’s an outsider, on Friday October 31 everyone is welcome to its cul de sacs — except the motorist.

What are your favorite Halloween experiences in Radburn?