Leonardis/Drew Funeral Home

Sometimes when I'm writing an article about a building I get overwhelmed by all the relevent information I have to comb through. Other times I have to search high and low for any little breadcrumbs the internet has to offer. This story is definitely an example of the later.

The Leonardis Memorial Home on Sanford Ave operated out of a large turn of the century home on the corner of Florence Place. The residence was largely gutted and rebuilt in the 1960s to accomidate the business, who had another location on Lafayette St.

Leonardis eventually moved out to Florham Park. The Vailsburg location was sold to the Drew Funeral Home chain, who were already well established around Essex County.

Drew Funeral Home used the facility until 2013. Unfortunately it wasn't long before the vacant building had fallen into disrepair . The property was taken over by city of Newark, and anyone who reads this blog can probably guess what happened next. The city boarded up the building and walked away. Metal thieves made quick work of the copper pipes and wires, while the occasional squatter took up residence inisde. I passed by the building man times over the years, only stopping to check it out once. 

After a decade of sitting vacant, the city finally demolished the shuttered funeral home in 2023. The land where the building sat is still vacant, but the whole block certainly does look better without the crumbling structure towering over it. Hopefully some new affordable housing will soon take its place. 

Kastner Mansion

The brewing of beer has long been ingrained in the history of Newark. The city was home to a number of breweries in the late 1800s, all of whom had wealthy owners who were trying to stand out on High Street. The Kastner mansion was once such home that stood out amongst the rest. 

The land on which the mansion was built was purchased in 1890 from the Frelinghuysen family, one of the most prolific early settlers of New Jersey. The home took two years to complete.

The home was designed by Henry Schultz for Franz Kastner, one of the city's legendary brewers. The name Henry Schulz should ring a bell to regular readers of this blog, as he designed Newarks most iconic residence, the Krueger-Scott Mansion. The homes actually shared several architectural flourishes, including the staircase ballisturs. 

In 1957 the home was purchased and used by a casket manufacturer for a short period of time. It was then sold to the Pride of Newark Elks Lodge No. 93. The Elks added a large meeting hall on the backside of the mansion, and appropriately enough they also added a bar on the first floor. Other than that they kept the interior more or less original.

Unfortunately the large home was quite expensive to maintain and had begun to fall into disrepair. Local resident Denise Colon stepped up and purchased the building from the Elks in 2007. Colon had a hopeful vision for the property, with dreams of restoring the mansion to its original glory and operating it as a community center. Such an undertaking required a massive financial investment, which Colon was up for. Unfortunately the projrct soon became unsustainable. Colon made several attempts to get a Tax Abatement to help ease the cost of the conversion. In the mean time she used the building as the headquarters of her income tax prep service.

Colon never ended up getting any help from the city. Five years and a few hundred thousand dollars later, the city ended up regaining possesion of the building. They threw up some plywood and never looked back. It wasn't long before some of the local unhoused population took up residence in the mansion.

A large fire severely damaged the building in October of 2019. The folks who were living inside the mansion when it burned ended up moving on to the nearby B'nai Jeshurun Synagague during that buildings brief period of disuse. We actually ran into them while we were documenting the synagague. The one gentleman explained to us they were using the vacant mansion as something of a boarding house. They all agreed to certain rules and made an effort to keep the digs as nice as possible. Unfortunately they ended up having to kick someone out of the squat, and that person returned later when nobody was around to burn the place down. 

After several more years sitting vacant with no roof, a second large fire tore through the building one October night in 2023. This one was far more destructive than the last fire, leaving the mansion nothing more than a shell. It was also too dangerous to leave the facade standing, so the city came in and tore down what was left of the building. 

The Kastner mansion is just one of thousands of historic, significant Newark buildings lost to neglect and arson. Hopefully this trend comes to an end soon; I shudder to think which building could be next.

Sunrise Mountain House Hotel/Hilltop Care Center

Hilltop Care Center will always hold a special place in my heart. Despite being a total dump, ir was one of the first places I ever traveled by car to visit. I grew up with both the Overbrook Hospital and Essex County Jail Annex practically in my backyard, so it took me a while to branch out. I ended up visiting the place many times over the years, but it was only recently I was able to piece together the buildings long history.

Source

What came to be known as the Hilltop Care Center was originally built as a hotel. The Konners, said to be the first Jewish Family in Montville, bought the old Vreeland Farm and opened the the Sunrise Mountain House Hotel in the early 1900s. Business was good through the decades, so by the 1930s the Konners built a large 100 room structure complete with a ballroom and indoor pool. The new building was prominently perched on the ridge of their property. It could even be seen while traveling down Bloomfield Avenue in Caldwell. 

After the Konners sold the building the name was changed to the Pine Brook Hotel. In 1944 the structure was sold to the well known spiritual leader Father Divine. Divine was a controversial figure at the time, having been jailed in the 1930s for encouraging racial harmony with his religious views. He eventually ended up purchasing a number of iconic hotels, including the "Divine Loraine" in Philadelphia and the "Divine Riviera" in Newark. 

Father Divine passed away in 1965. Shortly afterwards the bulding was converted to nursing home. This is where the more familiar "Hilltop Care Center" name was coined. 

The care center operated without much notoriety for a few decades, but was eventually closed in 1996. The existing patients were absorbed by St. Clare's health network. The facility were described at the time as "deteriorating", so it didn't stand much of a chance of re-use. Two years after the center closed it was pitched as a location for a new, similar sized nursing home. However the would-be operators decided they wouldn't make enough money to justify the project. 

Thrill seekers eventually started venturing to the shuttered nursing home, and eventually scrappers and vandals found the place too. This came to a head on August 24th 2006 when a massive fire engulfed the building. An anonymous tip led to the arrest of three people who told investigators they intentionally set a couch on fire. All three ended up going to jail for their actions. 

I visited the place for the first time around 2009. Even though it had been torched prior I still thought it was a pretty awesome place to explore. It was probably within the first dozen sites I ever visited. At the time this article is being written, I've visited roughly 1300 unique locations in 30 states. I have such fond and nostalgic memories of my multiple visits to the center, even all these years later.

The Hilltop Care Center was demolished at the tail end of 2012, and as of 2024 the property off Hook Mountain Road is still undeveloped. I still remember the first time I drove down Bloomfield Avenue and saw the empty patch of ground on the mountain where the building once stood. 

It's kind of wild how much the historic landscape of the state, and the hobby of "Urban Exploring" have come in that time. Hopefully these photos serve the same nostalgic purpose to others who didn't get a chance to take photos of their visits.

 

Slaters Mill

There are a handful of buildings in the state that sit right off a major highway. As a result they become landmarks for thousands of travelers who share the roadways every day. Slaters Mill right off of Route 287 was one such landmark.

Source

The iconic structure was built around 1850, and was originally known as Fords Mill. The land along the Pequannock River where the mill sat had hosted different mills since before the American Revolution. 

Local entrepreneur Joseph Slater purchased the existing mill in 1861. Slater used the mill to process beavers for use in Stetson Hats. Gruesome as it may be, furs were a valuable commodity before society realized how barbaric every aspect of the colonial and European fur trade was.

The mill fell out of industrial use after the Passaic Flood of 1903 destroyed the dam it relied on. It served various other hospitality uses over the years. 

1975 The mill was added to the state and National Register of Historic Places. New Jersey had only begun designating historic sites five years earlier, which speaks to how valuable the site was to so many locals. 

The building was last used as a strip club and bar, which closed around 1995. The following year it was used as a filming location for the move "In & Out", which many locals fondly remember as "the day Tom Selleck was in town". It sat on the market for years, before being abruptly demolished on November 15th, 2019. I only made one visit to the building around 2010, which is why the only photos I got were awful. For more photos, check out the Vacant New Jersey website, whose work has inspired me so much over the years. The land where the building sat is still unoccupied, with no signs of any immediate development plans. Slaters Mill joins the long list of squandered historical sites in New Jersey. 

RCA Building No. 8

The Victor Talking Machine company, established in Camden in 1901, is perhaps one of the most iconic American companies of all time. They started out making phonographs and recording equipment before braching out into the new medium of radio technology. The company expanded into a large manufacturing and office complex in downtown Camden, right at the landing of the Ben Franklin Bridge. The crown jewel of the hulking Ballinger & Perot designed campus was the iconic tower adorned with D'ascenzio Studios stained glass windows depicting the company's trademark "His Masters Voice" logo. General Electric bought out VTMC in 1919 and incorporated it into their new corporation, RCA. Over the next decade they continued to expand the Camden campus, which is when the subject of this article came to be.

Source: Library of Congress 

Building 8 was constructed between 1924 and 1925. This made it one of the few buildings added after RCA had been incorporated. Despite the expansive growth operations at the massive manufacturing center began to dwindle over the next few decades, as was the case with a lot of domestic production. The beautiful D'ascenzo Company stained glass had been removed from the tower windows, and replaced with plywood before finally being replaced again with new, cheaper glass windows.  In the late 1980s the first large scale demolition project began on campus. The two buildings adjacent to No. 8, buildings 1 and 18 were taken down and replaced with surface parking.

By the time General Electric formally vacated the complex in 1992 a majority of the production buildings had been demolished. That included building No. 4, which was attached to building 8. What remained were several warehouses, the generating station, building no. 8, and the iconic "Nipper" Building. The buildings were absolutely ravaged by metal thieves and vandals over the next decade. They found their way to the stained glass windows, and destroyed them. Thankfully the original glass had been removed in the late 1960s and distributed to several universities and museums. The remaining buildings were demolished one by one, The complex became a symbol for the overall deterioration of the city, visible to everyone taking the Ben Franklin into Philadelphia. 

Finally in 2002, after more than a decade of abandonment, the Nipper building was purchased by Philadelphia Developer Carl Dranoff. Work moved quick on the structure which reopened as apartments the following year. Replacement Stained Glass windows were even installed in the tower. Unfortately things almost immediately started to get ugly between the city and Dranoff. Part of the developers plans were contingent on the city doing an environmental survey on building No. 8 and taking on the ensuing cleanup. Afterwards the developer would purchase the building from the city and renovate that into lofts too. However, the city expected an initial loan of 3 million dollars to have been paid off first. Dranofff saw things differently. 

After years of fighting between the city and the developer, The Nipper building was put on the market in 2014. A Colorado based company attempted to purchase the apartment building, but the city refused to transfer the 30 year tax abatement they had granted to Dranoff to the new buyers. Therefore they backed out of the sale. Dranoff then sued the city, claiming they sabatoged the sale on purpose. All this time building no. 8 continued to languish, casting a tall shadow over downtown Camden. 

The highly visible Building no. 8 had long been considered an eyesore, but that was made worse in 2020 when the building was struck by lightning. Large pieces of the facade fell down to the street below, causing the city to erect a fence around the perimeter of the high rise. The following year a superior court judge ruled that the dispute would go in front of a jury. After two more years of backroom deal making a settlement was finally announced in 2023 that would see the developer receiving a small payout, and the city gaining redevelopment rights to Building No. 8. It was around this time that I visited the structure.

I had been getting rejected at everything I had been trying to access one morning in the city. I decided I had better stop pushing my luck and move on to another city. However, I remembered how accessible the old RCA building that stood downtown looked. The structure was unremarkable, but had a fantastic view of the bridge and Philly from the roof. After taking a moment to smoke a bowl in the car, I headed across the parking lot alone to the hulking shadow of a building. I could tell from the well worn path that the building was both a popular place to hang out for taggers, but also a shelter for some local unhoused folks. Not wanting to intrude on anyones space, I was extremely conscious to be as quiet as possible as I worked my way towards the stairs and began the climb up.

After about a half an hour I decided to get on with my day, so I climbed back down the stairs and headed to my car. I never did end up crossing paths with anyone inside, which was a bit of a relief. Currently the building is still standing derelict, and I'm not sure if it will ever end up being converted. Whatever happens I'll be sure to update the post. 

Lauriston Mansion

Source: Save the Lauriston Facebook Page

One of the first things many people in New Jersey associate with the town of Rumson is wealth. Not necessarily the nouveau-riche types with their gaudy beach homes and large power boats. Rumson has always held sort of an "Old Money" charm. It posesses quiet streets and large pieces of property, with homes hidden behind tall fences or thoughtfully manicured shrubbery. The relatively isolated peninsula sits between the Navesink River and Shrewsbury Bay. Plenty of homes here date back over a century, and many have found themselves places on the National Register of Historic Places. However the first home ever to land on the register happens to be one of the most beautiful homes Rumson ever saw. 

This beautiful colonial revival mansion was built in 1913 at 91 Rumson Road. While the ten thousand square foot dwelling boasts all the grandeur one would expect from a primary residence, it was actually designed as a summer home for a man named Harry A. Cesar and his second wife Laura. The mansion was named Lauriston in her honor.

Famed Monmouth County architect Leon Cubberly was chosen to design the home. The name may sound familiar, as Cubberly was the principal architect chosen to design the old Paramount Theater in nearby Long Branch.

The home was an architectural masterpiece, boasting marble walls and fireplaces, hardwood trim, plaster ceilings, just about everything you would expect to find in an extravagant home from the time period. A large sweeping staircase welcomed all who walked through the front doors. 

Laura survived her husband, but she too passed away in 1942. After many wonderful summers the family decided to sell the house to a man named J. Howard Smith.

The building changed hands several times and underwent a number of renovations over the next few decades. The 39 acre property was split up into several different parcels which were each sold and built upon. Six acres were maintained around the mansion, including the main driveway and the gardens that Laura Cubberley had dedicated so much time to. 

Lautiston was sold again in 1981 for $390,000, and the new owners made a few  Each time a room in the mansion was updated, the stewards took decent care to make sure the style of the home was cohesive and stylish. By 2002 the then-owners of Lauriston had taken such a liking to the home that they decided to have the property listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This was the strongest possible move they could have taken to ensure the landmark building and gardens would be able to be enjoyed by onlookers in perpetuity.

Unfortunately as time went on, things went south for the property. It was listed for sale several times between 2014 and 2017. Real estate listings praised the home for its many opulent features. That didn't stop it from falling into the hands of developer Roger Mumford, who bought the property for $3.7 million . Mumford sued Red Bank on behalf of the 2020 NJ Affordable Housing Mandates for a variance that would allow him to massively overdevelop the piece of property. The town quietly settled with him, to the chagrin of hundreds of town citizens.

While residents continued to speak out against the sneaky and unethical way the redevelopment was approved, Mumford took petty vengeance by doing nothing whatsoever to secure the historic building. 

Before long the mansion was the site of several outrageous parties, with the local brats going full Project X on the unattended property.

They destroyed the main staircase, trashed the entire house, spray painted the walls, and punched holes in walls. Within a matter of months the building was entirely in shambles.

This is a classic tactic discussed several times on this blog. A developer buys a property, does absolutely nothing to secure or maintain it, and then claims things are "too far gone" to be saved. Despite being a shady and entirely unethical thing to do, developers across the country continue to do it all time.

Lauriston continued to languish well into 2023. Unfortunately on March 27th, 2024 demolition crews turned up and tore the home down. I can't say much else could have been done with the mansion by then. Once again, demolition by neglect has won. 

St. Joseph's Village/Bergen County Healthcare Center

St Joseph's Home for Dependent Children was a large orphanage that once stood on Piermont Road in Rockleigh. The complex of small, one story brick buildings was built in 1958 on 48 acres of was then undeveloped land.

Source: TFPNJ Postcard Archive

Almost the entire campus was built at the same time. It was known as St. Joseph's Village. The village was founded by the Newark Sisters of St. Joseph as a replacement for their orphanage in Englewood Cliffs which was destroyed by a fire on April 1st, 1953.

Source: Palisades Interstate Park Facebook page

The new facility had a large central chapel, a gymnasium/auditorium, eight dormitories, a food services building, and a few other ancillary structures. The entire campus was connected by long corridors like many other facilities of its time. 

The last major improvement was a modern structure all the way at the west end of the campus. This was the only building that didn't get a corridor connecting it to the rest of the complex.

St Joseph's Village operated until June of 1973, when the sisters decided it was too expensive to maintain and operate the campus. The property was snapped up by Bergen County who reopened the facility as a nursing home. 

The nursing home had a rather mundane history, providing decent care for the 110 people who lived there at peak times. Still, the center endured high costs which weren't fully reimbursed by the residents. In addition, cuts to Medicaid at the time were poised to cost the center another $300,000 anually. An article in 2012 claimed the county was considering selling the facility, which could have caused severe turmoil among the residents. Thankfully they didn't go through with it. 

The facility was still open in 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic rattled the nation. As a precaution, the administration stopped admitting new residents and and initiated strict pandemic policies. Despite their efforts there was at least one outbreak. Five patients ended up dying, and over 100 other staff and patients contracted the virus acording to a September 2022 Report. Many other nursing facilities that had outbreaks fared far worse, but the losses were still significant. 

A press release from the county went out on July 16th, 2021 stating that they intended to close the center. They cited financial problems among other factors, and pointed to multiple other nursing home closures throughout the state to back that up. The families were able to relocate their loved ones, and the county was able to find jobs for the whole staff at Bergen Regional Hospital and the on site nursing unit. 

Demolition began quietly in 2023. When I first rolled up to document the complex they were already in the process of abatment. After getting inside I discovered that the western dorms had actually been reused as a school near the end of the centers life. The school ended up painting a bunch of neat murals throughout the corridors.

I could tell by the aerial view of the complex that I was getting near the gym building. I was happy to find a large stage when I walked into the room, as well as a rock climbing wall of all things. Unfortunately some of the local kids had beaten me inside, where they managed to make a huge mess. They even set a fire in the center of the room. 

They had built a wall inside the main corridor to seperate the school from the nursing home. As a result I actually had to leave the building and find a window to climb through. As I dusted myself off I was thrown off gaurd by the lights still being on. It made the rest of my visit to the complex a little more exciting. There was a single security gaurd driving around, but they never seemed to notice I was there. 

By early 2024 the entire facility was gone. I'm not sure what the county is planning to do with the land. Considering the size and existing infrastructure I wouldn't be surprised to see it become a housing development.

 I don't get up to the area often, so I'll probably have to wait until Google maps updates to find out for sure. Another New Jersey Healthcare facility gone without a trace.