Home Care In Highland Lakes, NJ

VERNON -- The state Department of Environmental Protection has ordered the shutdown of a Highland Lakes gas station where leaking fuel from one or more underground tanks is believed to have seeped into the adjacent groundwater and contaminated several nearby wells.

The leakage, which was discovered more than two weeks ago at the Delta station at the corner of Breakneck and Canistear roads, has prompted authorities to notify property owners there and on nearby Ridge and Wawayanda roads who live or own businesses within a 200-foot radius of the site, as required under the state's Private Well Testing Act.

However, as a precaution, a site remediator is contacting additional property owners with the aim of testing all wells within 500 feet -- an area that could be expanded even farther if wells beyond the initial 200-foot radius are found to have been contaminated, according to James McDonald, director of the Sussex County Division of Health.

"There's a licensed site remediation professional going out and performing analyses on all wells within 500 feet, and individuals that do live within that range are going to be contacted," McDonald said Friday.

At least three nearby wells are believed to have already tested positive for excess concentrations of benzene, a gasoline component whose presence in drinking water has been linked to cancer. Additionally, some neighbors are reportedly concerned that some of the gasoline that has seeped below the water table could find its way into nearby Lake Wanda if it hasn't already done so.

Ken Marsh, owner of the Lake Wanda Store on Canistear Road just across from the station, said he immediately called a DEP hotline upon being notified recently that his well would need to be tested and questioned why the station was still being allowed to operate.

"I told them I wanted to know why they're (the gas station) still being allowed to pump gas if their tanks are leaking," he said.

A contact number for the owner of the station, Surjit Singh, could not immediately be located. However, the station has since been shut pending an investigation, and a tanker truck was at the site last week removing the remaining fuel from its tanks.

Marsh said he immediately began substituting bottled water for the tap water he normally uses in the preparation of coffee, pizza dough and pizza sauce sold at his convenience store after learning more than a week ago that his well had tested positive for benzene, though he said none of his baked goods is made with tap water.

Marsh indicated a second well at a commercial property he owns across the street, where a barber shop and a chiropractor's office are located, and a third well at a neighbor's property had also tested positive for benzene. However, he said it was his understanding that tests at the nearby Highland Lakes Fire Department and Our Lady of Fatima Church had both come up clean.

Manvi Saran -- an environmental scientist and spokesperson for Geo Enviro Remediation Consulting, which is conducting the well testing and remediation -- indicated that for properties where contamination is determined to have come from the gas station, the gas station owner will be responsible through its insurance carrier for paying the costs of both the testing and any remediation, including a carbon filtration system that she said is being recommended for anyone whose well has been affected.

The device -- known as a POET system, or point-of-entry system -- works by filtering out benzene and other harmful contaminants from tap water.

Marsh, who had one of these filtration systems installed at his convenience store on Tuesday, said test results Friday showed it was working 100 percent effectively and that his tap water was now completely free of benzene and other contaminants.

Saran, the site remediator's spokesperson, said the company is continuing to contact property owners within a 500-foot radius of the station to schedule testing of their wells. She said the gas station owner also will be responsible for paying the costs of future quarterly testing of all affected wells until contaminant levels recede below the Environmental Protection Agency's maximum allowable standard, which is 5 parts per billion for benzene.

Marsh, the Lake Wanda Store owner, suggested anyone else who has received a notice, or who is concerned their well may have been affected, contact the remediator. The phone number is 973-610-5404.

"I strongly recommend that you contact the company doing the testing," he said. "The people in charge of doing the remediation will pay for the testing and any filtration system that you may need to have installed."

Eric Obernauer can also be contacted on Twitter: @EricObernNJH or by phone at 973-383-1213.

Antiques dealer Michael Pashby specializes in 17th- and 18th-century furniture. His wife, Sandra Amann, an art conservator, focuses on modern and contemporary works.

When superstorm Sandy sent an 80-foot-tall tree crashing through the roof of their weekend home in rural New Jersey, they seized the opportunity to meld their styles in redoing the circa-1930 stone-and-timber home.

Now, after a multiyear renovation that cost roughly $750,000, Mr. Pashby, 67, said that "parts of it are new, but they blend in perfectly."

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The couple first saw the Stone House, as it is known locally, while boating on Highland Lake, about 50 miles from their primary home on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. "It looks really quite lovely from the water because it’s so much stone," Ms. Amann said of the house, which is made from local fieldstone and set amid a rocky outcropping. "It has all these walls, so it looks like some sort of Medieval structure."

The house still had its original wallpaper when they bought it in 2003, paying $525,000 for the roughly 2,500-square-foot home. The couple loved the home’s original detail, so they made few changes, even keeping the mint-green 1930s bathroom tile.

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Then Sandy hit. With the upper portion of the house extensively damaged, they took the opportunity to do a renovation they’d long considered. They hired Manhattan architect Ali C. Höcek to put an addition on the house, raising the ceiling in an attic to create a sitting room overlooking the lake, among other upgrades.

The challenge, Mr. Höcek said, was making the addition fit with the historic character of the house while balancing the contrasting sensibilities of its occupants, which is reflected in the home’s combination of Arts and Crafts-style stonework and more modern-looking casement windows.

"The steel is Sandra, the stone is Michael," said Mr. Höcek.

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One major hurdle, Mr. Höcek said, was making sure the new stonework would seamlessly blend into the original multicolored granite. The mason found a local quarry with the necessary stone, then paid careful attention to "replicating the way the stones are laid and the size of the mortar," Mr. Höcek said. To match the home’s original steel casement windows, the team used a combination of reclaimed steel and new steel sourced from Switzerland.

The new addition upstairs has a wall of glass overlooking the lake, and French doors open to a stone terrace. Though the windows look very similar to those in the original portion of the house, the new room has a decidedly contemporary feel, with black leather chairs, an overhanging steel lamp, and a colorful, three-piece coffee table. Abstract prints by the artist Agnes Martin hang on the wall.

"My taste is way more modern than Michael’s, but I do like the marrying of the two," said Ms. Amann. Mr. Höcek, she added, "has a way of being sympathetic with what exists while adding something that is perhaps more modern. I think [he does] that particularly nicely."

Another long deferred-project was gutting a room at front of the house, which wasn’t only "awful" in appearance but turned out to be sinking into the ground, Mr. Höcek said. "It looked like a tiki restaurant," Ms. Amann said. "A sinking tiki restaurant," Mr. Höcek added.

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They replaced the room’s walls with floor-to-ceiling casement windows so "you get this nice eastern light through the trees," Mr. Höcek said.

Barely used before Sandy, the room now serves as an office, where Ms. Amann said she likes to retreat when she has reports to write.

But she is especially partial to the room upstairs, where she loves to sit in the morning "and just sort of sequester myself." With a wine cooler and coffee maker up there, laughed Mr. Pashby, "Sandra hardly ever comes downstairs."

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Local residents and fans crowd tables in the rustic Highland Lakes Country Club to see Glenn Tilbrook, frontman of Squeeze, perform in January.

(Jerry McCrea)

By TRIS McCALL | For INSIDE JERSEY magazine

IT'S A CRISP AUTUMN EVENING in the Garden State, and the light of a low crescent moon tickles the treetops. In the countryside of western New Jersey, the scene couldn't be more appropriate to the season — there's a chill in the air, a twinkling of stars and the long shadows of pines and sugar maples hovering over near-deserted streets.

Yet inside a community clubhouse near a country byway bearing an evocative name — Breakneck Road — it feels more like summer at the Shore. Glenn Tilbrook, the frontman of the British pop-rock act Squeeze, is entertaining a large, heterogeneous crowd of curious seniors, bemused children and devoted fans who roar back the choruses of world-famous singles, and deep cuts, too. A giddy Tilbrook picks up his acoustic guitar shortly after sundown and doesn't stop singing until he's emptied his songbook of its biggest hits.

How did one of the most accomplished songwriters of the past 40 years become the main attraction in a small room in the northeastern corner of Sussex County? The Tilbrook show was a testament to the resourcefulness — and the showbiz connections — of the organizers of the concert series at the Seckler Stage at Highland Lakes. Nearly 50 miles of highway separate the small Skylands town from New York City. But a trio of Highland Lakes residents, with roots deep in the musical culture of Manhattan, have already managed to attract top-flight talent to their adopted community — and they're just getting started.

"I was in a band back in the city and we'd played CBGB," says Michael Gelfand, a journalist who moved his family from Manhattan to Highland Lakes more than a decade ago. "One day, my kids were playing soccer and a woman was sitting nearby with a CBGB shirt on. I didn't think anything of it at the time."

That woman was Louise Parnassa Staley, longtime CBGB booking agent. Like many residents of the Sussex County town, Staley spent childhood summers visiting family in Highland Lakes, and, eventually, the pure enchantment of the lakes and trees convinced her to make a permanent move. (Although the legendary rock club is no longer on the Bowery, Staley continues to commute to Manhattan to work for CBGB, which sponsors and promotes an annual festival.)

Randy Staley, Louise's husband, played guitar in Fossil, a smart, ambitious rock band that was a regular attraction at CBGB in the 1990s. Gelfand eventually shared his vision with the Staleys: world-class talent on the modest stage of the community's lakefront country club.

Louise Staley recruited the performers and Randy Staley agreed to run the sound. Gelfand, a vice president of the Highland Lakes Country Club, resolved to do what he could to realize the concert series. Thus, the spirit of CBGB, a palace of innovation shuttered since 2006, alighted on a small town in the Garden State.

"Nobody wants Woodstock to happen here," says Gelfand, who needed to persuade the club trustees of his good intentions before he could secure the budget necessary to host the series. "But this is a great setting for so many things. It's such a beautiful place. You have all of this open sky around the lake, and its stark blue lake water juxtaposed with the green of the trees. It's no wonder people fall in love with it. It's like the Land of the Lost.

"There aren't many options for entertainment, but people love music here. It's a hungry audience, and during shows, you can feel the energy in the room." Randy Staley agrees.

"We felt that there was a little bit of a cultural void up here," says the guitarist. "There are about 2,000 families living on the lake. We thought it would be a wonderful thing to offer them the caliber of show that they could get in New York City. Concerts are getting more and more expensive, and we could make this work by keeping the ticket prices reasonable.

"It's inspired me to want to start playing music again."

Highland Lakes was designed as a retreat from the city. A group of developers founded the town in 1935, and the current clubhouse was built 23 years after that. (Its stage is named for John Seckler, one of the town's founders.)

Many of the original residences were log cabins and the town remains proud of its rustic aesthetic. The country club overlooks one of the largest bodies of water in a Jersey county dotted with reservoirs and lakes. With its knotty pine walls and circular tables, the complex feels very much like a summer camp for grown-ups. And no summer camp is complete without music.

But there weren't any loud rock bands in the 1930s. Seckler Stage was not built to accommodate guitar players with amplifiers. This meant Randy Staley had a delicate task: The musician and sound engineer had to modify the room without damaging any of its idiosyncratic character. Any alteration to the clubhouse needs to be approved by a club voting board reluctant to make changes to a local treasure. Staley added lights and a professional sound system, but he admits that the effort is still a work in progress.

"The big challenge is taming the acoustics in there," says Staley, who ran a recording studio in Bridgewater before relocating to Highland Lakes. "The low Sheetrock ceiling is a challenge, to say the least. Every single artist that has played the room has asked me to turn the delay and reverb off of the microphones. I have to say the same thing to all of them — there's nothing on their voices."

For a versatile performer like Tilbrook, who is used to setting up in odd corners, this wasn't much of a problem. The Squeeze frontman can make a single acoustic guitar sound like an entire band. Tilbrook's playing is so deft that further orchestration is unnecessary. A louder, more aggressive rock band — one with a live rhythm section — is a different matter altogether, and when Seckler Stage welcomed Chris Harford, a songwriter influenced by the Grateful Dead and Neil Young, Staley had his hands full. Harford brought his Band of Changes, a revolving four-piece consisting of a drummer, a bassist and another electric guitarist.

According to Gelfand and Staley, some of the older members of the community were taken aback by the volume. But many others found the experience exciting. And just like Tilbrook, Harford thoroughly enjoyed his adventure in the woods of western New Jersey. "I remember that night as a great show in a beautiful room," says Harford, who was born in Princeton and whose musical project is also deeply associated with CBGB. "If people were bothered by the sound, I didn't see it. What I saw were children, seniors, all kinds of listeners having a great time.

"It's fun for musicians to play in a place that's out of the ordinary."

If you, Jersey music fan, are wondering why you didn't hear about the Tilbrook and Harford concerts, there's a reason for that. Gelfand and the Staleys cannot promote their shows as freely as can other bookers. The Seckler Stage concert series must first offer tickets to Highland Lakes clubmembers before advertising them to the general public.

The clubhouse looks spacious from the outside, but its capacity is limited: two rooms seat only 200 people.

"It's really for the members of Highland Lakes," says Bob Hughes, the president of the club. "But because the room is still bigger than what we can sell out, it can be open to others, too. We've been lucky, in a way, that all of the tickets haven't been sold to people in the club. We're also lucky that Michael, Louise and Randy all have musical backgrounds, and they've been able to come up with performers that any other community might not have been able to get.

"I've been to two of the shows so far and they've been terrific."

The limited promotional window has meant that the Seckler Stage organizers have had to lean on social media and word of mouth — which, in a funny way, better aligns the Highland Lakes clubhouse with avant garde spaces in New York City than any of the Jersey performing arts centers. Nevertheless, it's working. The crowd at the Tilbrook show was divided between families who had brought Ritz crackers and brown-bag snacks to the venue (there's no food served at the shows) and dedicated fans, many of whom traveled miles to see their hero in action.

"We're learning as we're going," says Gelfand, who grew up in Westfield. "We don't have a budget for advertising, so we're trying to take advantage of all of the free channels that are available to us.

"Ultimately, I'd love for there to be dinner here during the show, like at the Bottom Line or at the Village Vanguard, even though I know that's not realistic right now. We welcome requests and suggestions, and anything that will make this an even more inviting space for visitors and members of the community alike."

For upcoming shows, which are posted on the community website, visit hlcc.org/calendar.

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