By JOHN T. WARD

The building appears to sigh and lean, as though aware of its fate. Inside, nooks and corners that once teemed with the cast-offs of the decades have begun to empty out.

It’s a sad time at Monmouth Antique Shoppes, one of the anchors of Red Bank’s vaunted Arts & Antiques District. Eviction notice in hand, owner John Gribbin has informed his 23 remaining dealers that they, like he, must be out by the end of the month, ending a 29-year run.

“It’s not the best time for me to talk,” Gribbin told redbankgreen Tuesday, as he had also last week. “I’m trying to find a home for me and my dealers, and it’s not easy going.”

More than a dozen of the displaced shops are finding a new home just a few doors east, at the Gizzi family’s Riverbank Antiques. (Click to enlarge)

The wood-frame building, at the southeast corner of West Front Street and Bridge Avenue, was once part of the Eisner uniform factory complex – “a sweatshop,” said Gribbin. Now, it is slated to be razed to make way for the MW West Side Lofts project, a mixed-use assemblage of luxury rental apartments, street-level retail, live-and-work artists’ spaces, a parking garage and a Triumph Brewing Company restaurant.

No permits for the demolition or ensuing construction have yet been issued, according to a borough official. But Monmouth Antique Shoppes and Ambiance antiques, which occupies a neighboring building owned by the lofts developer, have been told to clear out. They were recently given 60 days notice, almost six years after the lofts plan won approval.

Unaffected by the action is Guy Johnson’s Antique Center of Red Bank, which occupies two sprawling buildings, including the giant barn-red structure at the intersection’s northeast corner and a second warehouse opposite Brothers Pizza.

The diaspora has proven to be an awkwardly welcome boon for Carla Gizzi, who runs her family’s Riverbank Antiques business just a block east of Gribbin’s. She’s busily making arrangements to accommodate more than a dozen displaced dealers.

“I feel horrible for John, but it actually enables us to stay in business, and we’re keeping these dealers in Red Bank,” Gizzi said. “We’re consolidating and enabling them to stay.”

Among those making the move are Reggie Hawn and Cheryl Figliola. Hawn, who’s been at the shoppes for less than two years, said she’s “looking forward to the day when we can all reunite under one tent,” reforming a group of dealers with complementary specialties.

“What made us successful here was that we’re all collectors first,” said Figliola, a 17-year tenant of the shoppes. “Everyone found their own niche.”

Gribbin said he doesn’t know where he and other dealers, who together operate as a sort of cooperative, selling each other’s goods when dealers are absent, will wind up. But he sees his business’s departure as part of an inexorable slide toward oblivion for the antiques district.

“As to me, I’m leaving Red Bank,” he said. “This industry has been a major draw for the town, and it’s going away slowly.”

Just across the street, another storefront formerly occupied by an antiques dealer stands empty following the recent departure of Plum Cottage, which relocated to Fair Haven.

Long-overdue repairs to the Red Bank are now “hitting the express track” with the installation of a slate roof, the Asbury Park Press reports Tuesday.
From the Press:

NJ Transit spokeswoman Nancy Snyder said the new roof is the first of several improvements to come this year at the old station.

In the first phase, budgeted at $800,000, the entire roof will be replaced – work expected to be complete by mid-May, Snyder said. The existing “gingerbread” trim will also be replaced during this phase, she said.

NJ Transit officials are putting out a request for proposals this summer for the second phase, expected to start in mid- to late fall, Snyder said. That work will consist of restoring the remainder of the station, including stripping old paint, painting the building and improving the waiting room.

The circa-1876 station, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, was renamed in honor of the late Red Bank mayor and state Supreme Court Justice Daniel O’Hern last August.

Closing in on a celebration of its centennial, Fair Haven is having some trouble tracking historical time capsules, the Asbury Park Press reported Wednesday.

With food, fireworks, music and other details of the June 16 public celebration squared away, borough officials are trying to determine whether to assemble a time capsule for posterity, and wondering past time capsules are accounted for, the Press reports.

From reporter Larry Higgs’ account, referring to “other time capsules buried in the borough 36 years ago, during the nation’s bicentennial in 1976:”

“We’re not certain what the status of time capsules in Fair Haven are,” said Theresa Casagrande, borough administrator, after Monday’s council meeting. “We’re looking to dig up some historical knowledge, and see how many are buried and whether it is appropriate to open them.”

Officials haven’t decided if a time capsule will be buried for the borough’s centennial this year, filled with artifacts depicting life in the borough in 2012, she said.

“I know we did find a time capsule in the cellar of borough hall that was never planted as part of the school project (in 1976) and returned it to the school,” Casagrande said. “(Historian) Pat Drummond seemed to recall there was a time capsule at Bicentennial Hall as part of that celebration.”

That time capsule remained unopened until it was returned to the superintendent of schools, she said.

“There was one in 1976 … buried across the street somewhere in Memorial Park,” said Mayor Benjamin Lucarelli. “The question is, is it time to open it, or time to put down another time capsule?”

Casagrande said officials have to determine if that is a different time capsule or the school time capsule found when the basement of borough hall was being cleaned out.

There may be one more problem. The instructions for opening one of the time capsules may be inside the time capsule, he said.

This pencil-on-paper self portrait is among the “new and unknown” works by lifelong Red Banker Evelyn Leavens on display in a solo show that opens Friday evening at McKay Imaging Gallery.

During a 2010 visit to the Red Bank house that she’s lived in since before the Great Depression, Evelyn Leavens told redbankgreen: “I’m still painting; I’m always working… I wouldn’t give it up any more than I would move out of my home.”

That particular article (which can be read here in its entirety) advanced a solo show drawn from the remarkable artist’s 60-year career, a display that we viewed as not so much a retrospective, but “a chance for Leavens to pause for one moment — a moment in which the rest of us can struggle to catch up — before sprinting ahead to the next challenge.”

Sure enough, here in 2012 there’s still much that is new, even much that’s yet to be discovered, in the world of Evelyn Leavens. On Friday evening, April 27, McKay Imaging Gallery brings us up to speed on her recent endeavors, with the opening reception of an exhibit that the octogenarian artist has described as being her “last show” (although, as she told the Two River Times, she’s “never convinced about that”).

UNTITLED 4, a 16 x 20 watercolor on paper from the Evelyn Leavens show opening April 27. (Click to enlarge)

Entitled Linear Configurations: New and Unknown Works by Evelyn Leavens, the gallery installation assembles a collection of small watercolors that the painter, photographer and instructor created just within the past year — having put aside the larger oil paintings that she had done for decades in favor of a medium that “enabled me to strive for an ever-increasing looseness, fluidity and spontaneity, completely free of any preconceptions.”

“My first pencil marks, made when I was around two or three years old, were followed by pencil marks on absolutely everything, indiscriminately, from then on,” the artist states in her bio. “I still make these marks, still indiscriminately, on everything from canvas to paper.”

While Leavens has lived in the same Red Bank home since the age of five — on a street where, as she puts it, “fine memories remain” — the words “New and Unknown” make it clear that the artist resides very much in the present and future tenses, letting her passionately produced art take her where it will.

This Friday, her work will take her up the stairs at 12 Monmouth Street, to the second-story space maintained by photographers and curators Robert and Elisabeth McKay. Since presenting the first of their public installations in 2005, the McKays have spotlighted just as many painters and sculptors as they have shutterbugs, with talked-about shows centered around the works of multimedia maestro John Kochansky, Brookdale College professor Dan Schroll, spraypaint master Doug Z and many others.

“As some of you may have noticed, our last photography show was… well, a couple of years ago!” say the McKays in their gallery statement for the new show. “Frankly, we’ve been a bit distracted by the vast pool of local talent in other mediums, particularly painters.”

Bob and Liz also don’t mind sharing the fact that they were “floored” by the opportunity to host the first appearance of this new body of work by Leavens. Visiting the artist’s home studio frequently and watching the exhibit take shape over a few short months was “a lovely experience [with] an intense result,” they write.

Leavens, a self-taught artist who’s tutored generations of young creatives in Monmouth County (and who pooh-poohs the notion that she’s a “living legend”), simply states that “I go on producing work that pleases and inspires me and will continue to do so, here in my studio, for as long as time permits.”

The free opening reception at McKay Imaging’s walk-up gallery space — always an amazing place for a little wine, conversation and great views indoors and out — runs from 7 to 10 pm on April 27, with the exhibit continuing through May 17, Wednesdays and Thursdays from 1 to 7 pm or by appointment.

Guests explored the second-floor New Jersey Room, above, where uniforms produced by the Eisner factory were on display.  (Photos by Stephanie Schroepfer. Click to enlarge)

By STEPHANIE SCHROEPFER

Seventy-five years after moving into his former digs, the Red Bank Public Library honored Sigmund Eisner with a house party Saturday.

Light guitar music and tables laden with food for 200 guests set a festive mood as guests meandered through onetime parlors, checking out vintage Army and Boy Scout uniforms produced by Eisner’s Red Bank factories,.

“When the Eisner’s lived here, it was a home. Now its a home for people of all ages and backgrounds,” said Mayor Pasquale Menna.

Menna said he found the history valuable, but not as valuable as the home this library now provides for the community.

Whether they come to do job-hunting research online, to socialize or even just to snooze in a comfy chair overlooking the Navesink River, “it’s all valid,” he said.

“It’s a home for people who live in the neighborhood. No one knows what the role of the library will be years from now, but everyone needs a home and this is one.”

Terry McCue, a 45-year borough resident whose drawings of the Eisner manse and other old homes are featured on notecards sold by the library, said visiting regularly “keeps me handy. Gives me a night” out.

Eisner great-granddaughter Deborah Rutter was among six descendants of the industrialist and philanthropist on hand, and said she learned a lot about family to make her trip down from Connecticut worth the effort.

“I’m overwhelmed by the history, photos and memorabilia,” said Rutter.

“My great-grandfather Sigmund thanks you; my grandfather Monroe thanks you; my father Robert thanks you; and I most certainly thank you,” said Sigmund’s granddaughter Jan Eisner.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony opened the New Jersey History Room, with its special collections of Red Bank, Monmouth County and state history.

With new addition to the collections and the historical tradition of the home, library director Mary Faith Chmiel said she hopes for “another 75 years here, at least.”

Wednesday’s Star-Ledger has a quirky story about what happens to all those New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway tollbooths after they’re decommissioned by E-Z Pass technology.

They’re put out to pasture in a yard near the Asbury Toll Plaza in Tinton Falls, the Sledger reports.

From the Sledger article, by Mike Franinelli:

“They call it the Tollbooth Graveyard,” said Bob Quirk, who has spent a career in and around tollbooths, first as a collector who breathed fumes and made change at Exit 14C on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1978, and now as director of tolls for the Turnpike and Parkway.

As they decide whether to hit the cash or E-ZPass express lanes, drivers wouldn’t necessarily notice the resting place for tollbooths in the shadows of the busy plaza.

The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, which oversees the Parkway and Turnpike, will one day have to figure out what to do with the highway boxes that became casualties when one-way tolling arrived on certain sections of the Parkway.

For now, similar to a dearly departed organ donor providing body parts for the still-living, tollbooths in the graveyard can be scavenged by Parkway maintenance workers for, among other useful parts, their windows and air conditioning and stainless-steel “Dutch doors” that were at the waist level of toll collectors.

In addition, some of the 32 tollbooths in the graveyard could be resurrected with new paint and parts if other toll booths on the Parkway become severely damaged.

“If, God forbid, something were to happen to the toll plaza and a whole booth went out or something, it would be easy to rig one of these up to put in,” said Tom Feeney, a spokesman for Turnpike Authority.

More here.

The $20,000 raised will help cover the cost of a daylong celebration on Saturday, June 16 that will feature a parade, a community picnic and a fireworks show at Fair Haven Fields. (Photos by Peter Lindner. Click to enlarge)

“I’d almost rather be incinerated than have to live down here,” says Suellen Sims, below inspecting her new home’s fallout shelter, built beneath an earthen berm alongside Harris Park. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

It survived the Cold War without so much as a scratch, but a Red Bank fallout shelter is about to prove no match for the great wave of American home renovation.

Sometime in the next few weeks, a backhoe is expected to demolish the underground bunker beside a River Road house recently acquired by Suellen and Jamie Sims, who plan an addition to accommodate her mother.

Suellen Sims in her soon to be demolished bunker. (Click to enlarge)

The Cold War was raging in 1959 or 1960 when Dr. James Clark, a Red Bank eye surgeon, decided like many other Americans that he needed a fallout shelter to protect his family from radiation in the event of a nuclear attack.

But when a manufacturer of mail-order shelters told him there was a two-year backlog, Clark decided to build his own on the Harris Park side of the house, said his son, David Clark.

“He drew it up on paper, dug the hole, designed the hand-cranked air-filtration system,” said Clark, of Fair Haven. “He built wooden platform beds, and loaded it with canned goods.”

The result, on the outside, was a handsome berm of soil, grass and pine trees trimmed with a low brick wall. Inside, about a dozen feet below the surface, was a room off about 12 by 12, set off to the right of the stairwell, because, said Clark, “radiation can’t turn corners.”

Clark, who was about 10 or 12 when the bunker was built, said his father gave him the chore of emptying water containers and refilling them each month, adding three drops of chlorine to each. The elder Clark died suddenly in 1962 of a heart attack, and in the ensuing years, the son and his pals used to occasionally hang out in the bunker.

“They’d ask if they could come down here if the Russians attacked,” he said. “I’d say, ‘sure, you and the 5,000 other people who have asked.’”

The new owners, who have never met Clark, referred to the bunker at a recent planning board hearing as a “bomb shelter,” but Clark says it wasn’t built for that kind of shock. “A bomb hits the top, everybody’s dead,” he said.

Suellen Sims said that when a real estate agent first showed her and her husband the house, the bunker wasn’t included in the listing information. “We said, ‘What are all those pipes sticking up out of the ground?’”

Turns out they’re part of the air filtering system, equipped originally with automotive air filters.

Sims, who said she had to duck under her desk and participate in air raid drills as a schoolgirl and recalls having been “terrified” during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, still finds it “weird that you would build this just for yourself and your family.”

And the shelter itself she finds “dystopian. I’d almost rather be incinerated than have to live down here the rest of my life,” she said.

With the bunker’s days now numbered, Sims says her daughter has suggested a sendoff party, complete with t-shirts bearing the message: “I got bombed in the bomb shelter.”

Local-history librarian Elizabeth McDermott, below, with a custom-branded Eisner lightbulb in the second-floor New Jersey Room of the Red Bank Public Library, once the home of industrialist Sigmund Eisner. (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

On April 15, 1937, the Red Bank Public Library – for decades an itinerant but growing collection of books and archival material – finally found a permanent home, relocating from a downtown storefront to a mansion at 84 West Front Street.

Three months earlier, the heirs of Sigmund Eisner – mass-manufacturer of uniforms for the Army, the Boy Scouts and other organizations  – had donated their late father’s mansion overlooking the Navesink River to the library.

The shared hope of H. Raymond, Monroe and J. Lester Eisner was that the house would provide a warm and dry place for reading, but also that it would function “as a bit of a museum, too,” says local-history librarian Elizabeth McDermott.

Next month, the library will celebrate its 75th anniversary in the house with museum-like displays that highlight Eisner and his transformative impact on Red Bank as an industrialist and philanthropist.

The event, says McDermott, “is completely about” Eisner.

The ornate first-floor parlor of the Eisner mansion, above, and an undated photo of Sigmund Eisner, below. (Click to enlarge)

Valued at $25,000 at the time, the house was donated partly furnished, according to a Red Bank Register account of the opening. Wicker chairs provided welcome indoor seating overlooking the river.

The house had been home to Eisner and his wife, Bertha Weis, a member of a well-established Red Bank family. An Eastern European immigrant who “came to Red Bank as a peddler,” Eisner set up a sewing machine in a rented house near Broad Street and eventually built an manufacturing empire that employed 5,000 people at its peak during the first World War, said McDermott.

Eisner’s complex of factory buildings at the West Front Street and Bridge Avenue was reported to be the largest uniform factory in the world, she said.

Some of that property is now the home to the Galleria at Red Bank, a collection of restaurants, shops and offices. Another portion, on the northeast corner of that intersection, is home to the Antique Center of Red Bank.

Antique Center owner Guy Johnson is lending some of his collection of Eisner and old Red Bank memorabilia to the library display, including uniforms and a lightbulb branded with the Eisner name, probably for use in the factory, McDermott said.

The event will also highlight the reopening of the library’s New Jersey History Room. For many years, an ornate front room trimmed in ornate Gothic woodwork served as the repository for reference and archival materials about Red Bank, Monmouth County and the state. But the rarity and delicate condition of some of the materials, including one-of-a-kind atlases and directories, called out for a dedicated, controlled-access space, said McDermott.

That space is now a second-floor room of several hundred square feet that is open to the public from 2 to 4 p.m. each Tuesday afternoon, and by appointment at other times. McDermott said it is available to anyone, and is particularly helpful to people interested in researching family and property histories.

McDermott herself has been immersed in the materials as she assembles the exhibit, she said. And one regular visitor, a volunteer in the effort to put together the exhibit, has been known to exclaim, while going through old photos, “Oh my god, that’s my great-grandfather,” McDermott said with a laugh.

The goal of the exhibit is to create “a kind of timeline” about Eisner, a philanthropist who left money in his will to his factory workers, as well as to a host of churches of various persuasions, said McDermott.

“He didn’t have any barriers,” she said.

The building got a $1.6 million renovation in 2007, reopening after a problematic 15-month closure in January, 2008. In the interim, the library operated out of retail space donated by Hovnanian Enterprises.

Here’s an article from the January 6, 1937 edition of the New York Times announcing the donation of the house to the borough: Eisners deed house to library

And here’s the announcement about next month’s event:

On Saturday, April 14, 2012, from 2 – 4 PM, the Red Bank Public Library will celebrate 75 years as the Eisner Memorial Library with a Ribbon Cutting and Reception in our newly restructured New Jersey History Room.

Our New Jersey Collection contains many unique and valuable items pertaining to the Library, the Borough of Red Bank, and Monmouth County. The Library building itself is a special place, having been previously the home of Sigmund Eisner, businessman, civic leader and philanthropist, and his wife Bertha, an influential businesswoman and civic organizer. Presented to the Borough of Red Bank in January 1937, the former mansion was opened as a Public Library on April 15, 1937, thanks to the generosity of the Eisner sons, Raymond, J. Lester, and Monroe Eisner.

Please join us on April 14, as we celebrate this historic anniversary in our beautiful building on the Navesink River. For more information, please feel free to contact the library at 732-842-0690.

Fair Haven’s newly renovated Bicentennial Hall, aka Fisk Chapel, is among the historical landmarks that will play a key role in the borough’s centennial.

Its 1.7 square miles boast some of the oldest homes on the greater Red Bank Green, and a classic small-town vibe that’s lamentably lacking in much of stripmall America  — but some may be surprised to learn that Fair Haven, New Jersey isn’t a day over 100.

Carved from the former Shrewsbury Township and officially incorporated in March of 1912 (the current borders, adjusted with neighboring Red Bank, date back just a little more than 50 years), the still-young borough that brought us the area’s most iconic Firemen’s Fair (and served as home field for the legendary Vince Lombardi) is scarcely too old to party in style. And this weekend, Fair Haven throws itself a “Night of the Century” celebration that promises to draw “well over a one-hundred neighbors, local business owners and community leaders who love Fair Haven.”

Scheduled for Saturday night at the Raven and the Peach restaurant on River Road, The Party That Happens Only Once Every Hundred Years is being touted as “a very special occasion for everyone who contributes to the life of this town,” in the words of Centennial Gala co-chair Christine Burke Eskwitt.

With newly sworn-in Mayor Ben Lucarelli as acting auctioneer, and a slate of live music from borough-based entertainers Bob Lucky and River Road Band, the event is one in which, as Councilwoman Susan Sorensen puts it, “our focus is Fair Haven.” It’s a focus that extends to the Centennial Gala’s silent auction, an offering for which Sorenson and fellow co-chair Marie Noglows solicited original artworks from “collectible professionals and accomplished amateurs,” all with an arty accent on Fair Haven and the surrounding area.

During the “fast but furious auction” conducted by Hizzoner, participants will bid on such big-ticket items as “a vacation home, a cocktail cruise on the Navesink, an afternoon fishing trip with catered lunch, four tickets to a Nets game with courtside club passes and a personal photo op with members of the Nets’ Dance Team or the Nets Mascot.”

A 50/50 drawing is also on the program, and co-chairs Erin Gotch and Cathy Alescio have assembled “an extensive gift card Pot of Gold” with the participation of local merchants (the Gala Committee is joined by Nicole Rice, who supervised the decor and coordinated with the Fair Haven Business Association).

Tickets ($55 per person; $100 per couple) are still available and include hors d’oeuvres, carving and pasta stations and desserts from Raven and the Peach. An additional $25 per person includes access to a VIP wine room, and reservations can be made by contacting Charlie Hoffman at (732) 747-0241, ext. 216.