Nereid Boat Club
Near the southern edge of Rutherford, just a half mile from the Lyndhurst border, we come to the Nereid Boat Club. Suddenly, we are not the only boats, or the only people on the river.
A crowd of 200 or so mingles on the grassy bank outside the wooden boathouse as single scullers and teams of two, four and eight hoist their needle thin racing shells overhead and march them down the steep wooden ramp to the club’s long floating dock. More spectators look on from the long bay of second-story windows. They’re all here for the Head of the Passaic Regatta, the Nereid’s annual autumn weekend competition which draws rowers and fans from all over the Northeast.
Growing up in North Arlington, we’d occasionally see Kearny or Belleville high school crew teams out training on the river. They still do. But the Head of the Passaic Regatta is a sculling event. The large gravel parking lot beside the gray and white boathouse is cluttered with racks of racing shells and small white tents where vendors hawk hotdogs or t-shirts or river causes. When our kayaks inadvertently drift onto the course, two volunteers in an Army green skiff motion for us to move to the opposite side of the channel. We paddle quickly aside as a brace of four-man sculls glides towards us up the Passaic.
The 132-year-old Nereid[1] Boat Club is the last of the original Passaic River rowing associations, the sole survivor of New Jersey’s once proud sculling tradition. Until the 1940s, rowing was a hot sport along the Passaic. The Head of the Passaic spectacle that Cathy, Carl and I are witnessing today was a regular weekend event. Ralph Van Duyne, Chief Engineer for the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, recalled the heyday of Passaic River sculling in a 1946 interview with the Newark News. “Sixty years ago I used to go in swimming near the old Triton Boat Club at the foot of Chester Street [in Newark],” Van Duyne told the News. “At that time, the Passaic was famous for its Middle States Regatta, with thousands of people lining the banks to see the competition.”
Besides the Triton rowers, Newark also claimed the Institutes, the Mystics, the Eurekas and the Passaics. Even the smallest river communities had their own rowing clubs and the competition was football fierce. Local residents took to the banks on summer weekends to cheer their hometown scullers. Pollution – and a forties-era race-fixing scandal – saw the decline of the sport and the disappearance of most rowing clubs. Passaic River pollution got so bad, said Van Duyne, “that freshly painted boats would tarnish overnight. [F]actories along the river had to close up for weeks during the hot weather. Their employees couldn’t stand the odor.” But the Nereid Boat Club survived.
When I began calling various club officials to find out exactly how the Nereid had managed to avoid extinction, everyone told me to talk to Erik King. After a few rounds of phone tag, I finally hooked up with Erik in October 2005. He and his partner had just won the mixed doubles competition in the new Nereid’s third annual Head of the Passaic Regatta. Erik and I sat on makeshift wooden bleachers amidst the crowd of cheering fans that swarmed the riverbank on that summery October afternoon.
Erik looked like a rower, broad and strong across the shoulders and chest. His hair was clipped short and turning prematurely gray, which made his blue eyes seem even bluer. Despite a busy schedule – Erik is married with two children and a successful contracting business – he rows every day, year ‘round, even – rumor has it – when there’s ice on the Passaic. “It’s a great escape,” he said, about his obsession. “When you’re rowing you have to concentrate so deeply that you really can’t be thinking about anything else. You’re rowing along this beautiful river. You have this beautiful feeling. I’ve had days where I had a row that was so great that if I was in a bad mood it totally turned me around.”
Erik King has a long and deep connection to the sport and to the Passaic. As a teenager, he competed for Belleville High School. His father rowed on the Nereid teams of the forties and fifties. That was when the Nereid clubhouse was on a barge near the Belleville-Newark border. An arson fire destroyed the barge boathouse in 1962. Route 21 runs over the site now.
The first Nereid Boat Club formed in Newark on May 15, 1866 and disbanded several years later. But the current Nereid Boat Club traces its origins to the summer of 1875 when eight Belleville rowers – John C. Lloyd, Charles Leverich Webster, William H. Webster, James D. Ferris, Clarence S. Van Houten, J. Roger Kingsland, Joseph Kingsland and William M. McCreery – resurrected the Nereid name. The club went “dormant” again after the 1962 boathouse fire, said Erik. But it didn’t die. The dream and the paperwork lived on with Homer Zinc.
Zinc was a lawyer, a rower, a Belleville native and one of the Nereid club’s officers. He eventually left Belleville for Princeton, N.J., but he kept the club’s charter. In 1988, determined to revive the Nereid rather then start a new rowing club, Erik King traveled to Princeton to try and convince Homer Zinc to transfer the club’s original charter. “I met him at his house,” recalled Erik. “He was older and he wasn’t healthy, and he didn’t really trust handing anything over to me until he saw that this was legitimately going to happen. So he just kind of brushed me off.”
The brush off was understandable given that Erik could only produce 12 committed club members, including himself and his wife. But during the next year, Erik worked his old Belleville high crew connections and the membership grew. When it hit 100, he went back down to Princeton. Zinc had suffered a heart attack in the interim. The two met in his hospital room. “When I showed him what I had done and how serious we were,” said Erik, “and with him knowing it was now or never, he signed everything over to me.”
The neo-Nereids moved into the Rutherford boathouse several years later. The old two-story building once housed the Rutherford Yacht Club and after that a Chris Craft dealership. It had been empty for some time when the Nereid club members invested their own money and labor in renovating it. The club now offers rowing classes and programs, kitchen and shower facilities, equipment and storage, a big stone fireplace, a river web cam and, of course, its annual autumn head racing festival.
All excerpts from This American River: Paradise to Superfund, Afloat on New Jersey’s Passaic are the copyrighted property of the book’s author Mary Bruno.