Happy 50th birthday to Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, the park that almost wasn't

Is it jumping the gun, in January, to talk of picnics, nature walks, skipping stones across a pond?

By no means, say trustees of Englewood's Flat Rock Brook Nature Center.

For one thing, the 150-acre nature preserve is celebrating its 50th anniversary this winter. So now might be a good time to consider how lucky we are, and how improbably it happened, that North Jersey has its own Central Park — woods, ponds, waterfalls and 3.5 miles of trails, right in the middle of the most densely populated part of the state, just 2 miles from the George Washington Bridge.

For another thing, there's plenty to do in the park in the cold months.

"If you have snowshoes, people like to go snowshoeing through there," said Susan Klausner, president of the Flat Rock Brook board of trustees.

Keeping it real

The nature center, which is free and open from dawn to dusk 365 days a year, does differ from Central Park in one respect, Klausner said. Whereas the Manhattan attraction is highly curated, with its quaint little cast iron bridges, hillocks, ballfields and fountains, Flat Rock Brook Nature Center is very much as nature left it.

"This is a 10,000-year-old hardwood forest — maple, birch, oak, evergreens," Klausner said. "We're not trying to make tow paths and horse trails. This is a destination for hiking, not biking and horseback riding."

There is, of course, a brook. And it does have flat rocks.

"Those big flat rocks are part of the ice age, the remains of glaciers," said Janet Sharma, a past president of the board of trustees and chair of the 50th-anniversary committee. "Flat Rock Brook drains eventually into Overpeck Creek."

The park, which opened in March 1973, will celebrate its 50th birthday in style.

There will be a gala anniversary celebration April 20 at The Rockleigh, a banquet hall. And a book coming out in mid-February, "Trailblazers: The Historical Founding of Flat Rock Brook Nature Center" by Maxwell Klausner (son of the president), will tell the story of the band of dedicated nature-lovers who somehow kept a prime parcel of Bergen County real estate from being turned into million-dollar homes and shopping malls.

Turf war

It's quite a story — almost as twisty as the name "Flat Rock Brook Nature Center" (try saying it three times fast). "FRB is what I call the center, since the name really is a tongue twister," Klausner said.

It's actually the story of two adjacent parcels of land — each about 75 acres — that had remained largely intact through the lean years of the Depression and World War II. But with the boom years of the 1950s and '60s, there were naturally a lot of people who looked at this woodland, right at the brink of the Palisades, and saw dollar signs.

"It's a complicated story," said Stephen Wiessner, executive director of the Flat Rock Brook Nature Association. "Each of those tracts of land had its own set of people who were fighting for them at different times."

One tract was known as Allison Woods Park — named after William Outis Allison, the first mayor of Englewood Cliffs after it split off from Englewood in 1895. His heirs wanted to see the land developed for residential use.

Unfortunately for them, Allison had left a clause in his will. The land, he said, should be preserved "for the glory of God" and the benefit of his fellow man. Stores and subdivisions did not seem to fit the bill.

That, at least, is what Ned Feldman, Englewood's mayor in 1970 and 1971, argued. So did others. The last of the lawsuits was not settled until 1988.

The other 75-acre parcel had already been — theoretically — divvied up into smaller lots, but the economic conditions of the 1930s and '40s had kept any actual development on hold.

Muscling in

Part of this property had been the estate of Bernarr Macfadden, a fantastic character of the Jazz Age, a celebrity bodybuilder turned media mogul, promoter of quack remedies and aspiring president who might be said to have combined the best qualities of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump.

"He was quite a character," Klausner said. "Here was this man whose wealth came from dubious sources, but because of him Flat Rock Brook Nature Center exists — his ex-wife donated some of the land."

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Macfadden's Wetland — originally Macfadden's Pond — is still a big attraction of the park.

Several generations of North Jerseyans had enjoyed these acres of pristine woodland by the 1960s, when talk of development started to get serious.

"A lot of people had feelings about the land because they remembered growing up and running through the woods, and the idea of developing houses there was heartbreaking for so many," Klausner said.

Among them was Campbell Norsgaard, a Bergen County nature photographer whose work had appeared in National Geographic and other magazines.

"I think he was the original person who said the woods should be saved," Wiessner said.

His passion inspired others — notably Englewood residents Priscilla McKenna, Elizabeth Frank and Lorraine Cohen.

"Priscilla was the one who was able to mobilize people for the cause," Wiessner said. "She was the community organizer who was fomenting support against development."

Parks and recreation

In the 1960s, the city of Englewood used Green Acres funds to buy the various smaller parcels of the 75-acre tract from private owners. This, combined with the 75 acres of the Allison Woods land, became the basis for the Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, which officially opened on March 12, 1973.

"It was a real miracle that it happened," Sharma said. "The land was on the block so often to be mowed down for development. It's a real public-private venture."

Today, 75,000 people visit the park annually. They come to walk its trails, take in its scenery, visit the nature center (it includes an aviary with five or six live raptors in residence, including owls) and see the various woodland critters in their natural habitat. There are a lot of them, Sharma said.

"There are foxes, raccoons, chipmunks, snakes," she said "There are two big ponds, and there are lots of turtles in the ponds. And lots of fish, though we don't allow fishing. The main thing is the beauty of the setting."

Less visible, but equally present, is the beauty of the spirit that led people to fight, in an overdeveloped world, to preserve 150 acres of rustic, natural, uncommercial splendor.

"It's about the tenacity of people who wanted to see this tract of land continuing to be what it was," Klausner said. "That's why this is still a beautiful place of nature, for people to enjoy."

Go: Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, 443 Van Nostrand Ave., Englewood; 201-567-1265, flatrockbrook.org.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Flat Rock Brook Nature Center is Central Park for North Jersey