Autumn Years Spring 2024

here are four professional sports players, three professional singers, three mem bers of Congress, one Medal of Honor recipient and mobster Ruggiero “Richie the Boot” Boiardo. Prominent at South Hackensack’s St. Michael’s Cemetery is the mausoleum of the notorious mob ster Willie Moretti. The godfather of Frank Sinatra, Moretti was gunned down in Cliffside Park. (See Autumn Years , Spring 2017.) In Mahwah, the Maryrest Cemetery, with over 22,000 burials, recently un derwent a modernization with the con struction of a large chapel mausoleum. Interred here are two professional sports players, father and son actors and the first female film director, Alice Guy Blaché.

was moved here stone by stone and serves as a chapel for funer als. The cemetery has been called an “out door museum” given the magnificent art work in the memori als. Notables buried here include three actors, a baseball pio neer, a U.S. Attorney

Brookside Cemetery (Englewood).

General, four members of Congress, and a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot who died in World War II. Catholic cemeteries There are 18 Roman Catholic cemeteries in the county. Lodi’s St. Francis de Sales Church congregation and cemetery are

bucolic resting place is Bergen County’s only Civil War monument, erected in 1895 by veterans of the war. There are 70 Civil War veterans interred here, includ ing the last surviving Civil War soldier in New Jersey. Named Simon Douglas, he was born a slave who was first forced to serve in the Confederate Army. He escaped to the Union side and joined an Ohio regiment. (See Autumn Years , Spring 2021.) Within 41 other cemeteries through out the county, the graves of 524 other veterans of the war between the states are found. Buried at Ridgefield’s English Neighborhood Reformed Church Cem etery is Brevet Major General Alexander Shaler. He is Bergen County’s only resi dent to be awarded the Medal of Honor for service during the Civil War. (See Autumn Years , Fall 2021.) In 1876, Englewood’s Brookside Cemetery was established (near today’s Englewood Health). This burial ground captures the ideal and beauty of the ru ral cemetery movement more than any other in the county. Near the entrance is the original 1860 Englewood Pres byterian Church. Donated by the con gregation in 1887, the church building

this denomination’s old est in Bergen County, both formed in 1855. In Tenafly, Our Lady of Angels Cemetery serves as the resting place of nuns. Also in Tenafly is the Mount Carmel Cemetery, where boxer James J. Braddock was laid to rest. (The 2005 Ron Howard film Cin derella Man , starring Russell Crowe, is about Braddock.) River Vale’s St. An drew’s Cemetery is small, tucked in a resi dential neighborhood, rural-looking, and has about 850 graves. North Arlington’s Holy Cross Cemetery has nearly 300,000 graves. Buried

St. Andrew’s Cemetery (River Vale).

[PHOTO CREDIT: LENNYNJ, FLICKR.COM]

Mobster Willie Moretti’s mausoleum (South Hackensack).

SPRING 2024 I AUTUMN YEARS 43