Historic home to provide one last memory

BY CLARE MARIE CELANO
Staff Writer

JERRY WOLKOWITZ staff Trees rest on the lawn in front of the Bartleson home, South Street, Freehold, as a developer continues to clear the lot in anticipation of demolishing the home and constructing an office building. A landmark home that has graced the landscape of South Street, Freehold Borough, since 1836 will soon be a memory.

But before the Bartleson mansion is demolished to make way for a 39,000-square-foot office building, it will give the town one more memory as it is used as a training ground for firefighters.

The stately residence at 83 South St. is scheduled to be used as a practice facility for a Rapid Intervention Team (RIT) drill to be run by the Fort Monmouth Fire Department for Freehold Borough firefighters, according to Freehold Fire Department Chief Charles Megill.

Megill said 20 members of the department have signed up for the fire drill that is scheduled to be held at the Bartleson mansion between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. April 10. He said officials from the RIT will present the firefighters with different scenarios they might face in a real fire — for example, someone trapped in a closet or a firefighter who needs to be rescued.

Megill said firefighters will be trained in the use of search-and-rescue techniques and how to search in different types of structures, as well as how to use specific tools in rescue situations.

The Bartleson mansion will be replaced by an office building that was approved by the Planning Board. Municipal efforts to save the home from demolition failed.

A group of people is in the process of documenting the home’s history by preserving bits and pieces of the mansion for a permanent record of its existence.

Lee Ellen Griffith, director of the Monmouth County Historical Association, said she and several members of the Freehold Borough Historic Preservation Advisory Com-mittee, along with a professional photographer and a representative from the Cul-tural Resource Consulting Company, Highland Park, met recently to begin the process of recording and salvaging the home’s history.

Griffith said an inventory of the home was made and some important pieces are being removed from the structure. These include a marble fireplace, brass door knobs and an oval stained glass window. The pieces will become part of the historical association’s collection.

Professional photographer Mark Costanza took archival quality black and white photographs in order to have a permanent record of the house, according to Griffith, who said, “This is a terrible loss to the architectural history of Freehold. Everyone worked so hard to keep this from happening, but we could only do so much. We ran out of options.”

Wayne Mason, a member of the historic preservation advisory committee, said, “Freehold must decide what it is going to do to preserve the town’s history. Sympathetic people will look at this building and respond to it. Others will never be touched by that. The destruction of this building is 100 percent deliberate and preventable.”

Councilman Kevin Coyne, the borough’s historian, said items from the home are being stored for safekeeping. Some items will be auctioned off for a twofold purpose: the hope of keeping them in the borough, and to raise money for the historical association.

“I think this is a terrible loss for our town and I disagree with the decision. I am sorry it had to come to this. This is an important building in our community and it should not be going. We fought. We lost. Now we need to see that it never happens again,” he said.

Coyne said he hopes the loss of the Bartleson mansion will be to Freehold what Penn Station was to New Yorkers. He said Penn Station was destroyed in the early 1960s and sparked a much greater awareness of the need for historic preservation.

“This is meant to show us that we cannot be bulldozing the handful of pre-Civil War homes left in our town,” he said.