April 12, 1998

A Town Searches for a Piece of Its Past

EST NEW YORK, N.J. -- Mayor Albio Sires knows it's out there somewhere, a relic of the past lodged beneath the topsoil like a nagging memory.

What Sires and other residents of West New York are hoping they can find is a boxy copper time capsule said to have been buried here in 1948. According to local gossip, the capsule was planted years ago to commemorate the town's 50th anniversary, and though its location -- even its existence -- are still in doubt, the capsule in recent days has become the talk of the community.

"Just imagine," Sires said the other day with patent glee. "Somewhere out there there's a box with part of our history in it. We have to find it soon."

Rumors about the time capsule began circulating weeks ago as preparations began for West New York's 100th anniversary celebration in September.

Mario Capozzi, a retired school official who is overseeing the preparations, said the time capsule was first mentioned when current town officials proposed burying a capsule of their own.

"We were sitting at the meetings thinking we would plant one of these things ourselves," Capozzi recalled, "when someone said, 'Hey, didn't they do that 50 years ago?' We all kind of looked around and thought, 'Hey, maybe they did.' "

Within days, West New York was aswarm with eager chatter, and town officials mobilized a team of volunteers to pore over the dusty municipal archives and interview elderly residents in hope of discovering a lead. The only scrap of evidence turned up so far is a passage in a local history book, published in 1948, that speaks of "a copper box containing documents and souvenirs."

According to the book, "A History of West New York," by Dr. Walter Eickmann, the box was placed beneath the bronze fire bell that has stood for years outside West New York's Town Hall as a monument to local firefighters killed in the line of duty. But even such enticing information has not led town officials to order the bell removed. Not only has it stood for decades as a sacrosanct memorial, said Michael Parks, president of the local Chamber of Commerce, but the bell also sits atop an imposing granite base, too large to excavate without a major effort.

"If we could just pinpoint exactly where this thing might be, then we could avoid a lot of heavy lifting," Parks explained. "To dig or not to dig -- that is now the question."

A better question, said Bob Nessoff, a city councilman in neighboring New Milford, which planted a time capsule of its own last year in honor of its 75th anniversary, was how officials in West New York managed to lose their capsule in the first place. While Nessoff said he sympathized with ordinary West New Yorkers, he questioned the competence of town officials who planted the capsule 50 years ago without leaving behind instructions on how to dig it up.

"What's the point of burying a time capsule if you don't know exactly where it is?" Nessoff said. "Why bother if you can't have the pleasure of opening it up years later and taking the artifacts out?"

While some local residents do indeed seem embarrassed by their bit of missing history, the general sentiment in West New York is one of nostalgic longing for the capsule, which has come to represent the sunny days of 1948.

Fifty years ago, this was a thriving river town and many residents worked in bustling embroidery factories or at the New York Central Railroad along the banks of the Hudson River. Since those days, however, the railroad and most of the factories have disappeared, and the streets, once thronged with children at play, are largely quiet and treeless.

There have been some recent signs of economic recovery in West New York. K. Hovnanian, the real estate developer, has recently started the early phase of building what could be as many as 4,100 new housing units along the riverfront.

But in January, the city suffered perhaps its ultimate indignity when its former police chief, Alexander Oriente, was charged with with extorting and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for protecting illegal gambling, prostitution and after-hours liquor sales.

If the time capsule can be found, officials say it might offer a balm to such current-day misfortunes.

"There's been a tremendous change here over the years," a wistful Parks said. "There's probably a tremendous amount of information in that thing that we could use to help us out today."