You can practically hear the echoes and feel the coolness of this space, can’t you? Ah, but do you know Where we are this week? If you recognize the above location, or would like to take a guess, please drop us a note.
The object of last week’s puzzler, shown here with a little more context, was one that generated some interesting responses.
The photo shows a bas-relief bust of financier J. Horace Harding, part of a monument to him on a three-sided parcel of land at the intersection of Harding Road and Ridge Road in Little Silver.
Harding, who also has a highway named for him on Long Island named for him, paid $100,000 for the 1917 construction of Harding Road, to connect Broad Street in Red Bank with Ridge Road in Rumson, local historian Randall Gabrielan write in “Rumson: Shaping a Superlative Suburb.”
A 1942 article in the Red Bank Register called the road “the greatest gift ever made to the public by a resident of this locality.”
Several readers wrote in with their own memories of the monument. Fred Blumberg writes that, back around 1968, it “was covered in weeds and brush. I found it while on my bike. That section of road was dirt; there was no turn-in on the high school side. We would stop in there and eat our sandwiches.”
Noel Rose, who’s lived in Owings Mill, Maryland, for the past 40 years, chimed in that “Harding, who was big on transportation, had the good ‘fortune’ of marrying the daughter of Charles D. Barney (later of Smith-Barney fame.) As with many rich New Yorkers, he had a ‘summer’ home in Rumson.”
Indeed, he did.
Harding died in 1929. Here’s his obituary in the Red Bank Register: jhh-obit-rb-register
And here’s what the New York Times wrote upon his death: harding-obit-010529
Thanks for writing in to Randall, Fred, Barry Lewin, Lori Coolahan, Robert Clark, Frank Leslie, Kristine Giglio and Robert Bruce.
