Years before he became one of the Empire State Building’s key financiers, an East Coast industrialist strategically positioned his home to overlook the evolving Manhattan skyline.
Listed this April for slightly less than $2.5 million by Christine Lane of Compass New Jersey, 10 Edgewood Terrace in Montclair was completed 115 years ago on what then was highly coveted real estate, according to an August 1907 report in The Montclair Times.
Known as the triangle, the property bound by Highland Avenue, Edgewood Road and Edgewood Terrace was “considered one of the finest residential sites on the mountainside, having a gentle slope and being prettily wooded with forest trees,” according to the report. The triangle later became known for shaping the fork in the road baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra famously told people “to take” to arrive at his Highland Avenue home.
Seeking to capitalize on the triangle’s strengths and lack of development in the early 1900s was Ellis P. Earle.
Earle, who in 1907 held the claims to one of Canada’s most productive silver mines, Ontario’s Nipissing Mine, bought the triangle that summer. Later that year, he revealed plans for the now eight-bedroom and nine-bathroom Tudor castle at 10 Edgewood Terrace.
The Montclair Times reported an estimated construction cost of $100,000. Add $50,000 for the property brokered by F. M. Crawley and Bros., who had their hands in much of Montclair’s posh mountainside development, it added.
The final cost of construction was closer to $91,000, the newspaper reported in 1909. Still, the cost for most new homes in town at the time was $6,000 or less, according to newspaper listings. The result of Earle’s lavish spending was featured in the December 1911 issue of Architecture.
Built from Germantown stone with terra cotta trimmings and a green slate roof, 10 Edgewood sits on 2.15 acres and contains roughly 12,000 square feet of living space. It boasts century-old touches, such as a library with custom built-ins, a first floor trimmed in oak and windows with leaded and stained glass. Still, it has been updated to feature a modern kitchen with top-tier stainless steel appliances, a massive center island and seating for more than a dozen.
Bedrooms are reserved for the second and third floors. Five, including the primary bedroom with its fireplace, skyline view and dual closets, are on the second floor. The first floor is built around a grand central hall.
The home was designed for Earle by architect Frank E. Wallis and his associate William J. Rogers, a duo best known for Georgian and Colonial homes, according to Montclair historical records. Wallis, who had trained in the office of Richard Morris Hunt, was “a noted authority on Colonial architecture,” according to his 1929 New York Times obituary. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he was also highly active in Montclair.
Wallis designed St. John’s Church on Montclair Avenue, a cluster of typical Montclair homes at the south end of Highland Avenue, including the one once owned by Berra, and several larger-scale homes. They include 190 South Mountain Ave., 32 Llewellyn Rd. and 3 Eagle Rock Way, according to local historical records.
When Earle died in October 1945, 10 Edgewood held his funeral services. Then Gov. Charles Edison attended, as did former governors James Fielder, Morgan Larson and Arthur Harry Moore. Earle had for more than 20 years been chairman of the state’s former Board of Control of Institutions and Agencies, a board he helped create while overseeing charitable organizations on behalf of the state.
“So effectively and economically did the hospitals, prisons and other public institutions function under Mr. Earle’s leadership that every succeeding governor who was in office […] reappointed him regardless of political affiliation,” The Montclair Times wrote in his obituary.
A large donor to Princeton University and the old Montclair Community Chest, Earle was also well known locally as a philanthropist. In 1930, Earle helped finance a former boy’s camp in Jefferson Township, called Camp Ranger.
Earle was born in September 1860 in Brooklyn and educated in Elizabeth as a teenager, according to his Montclair Times obituary. A law clerk at 18, he began a transition into the mining and banking industries while securing materials for his father-in-law’s metallic paint business. He broke off from the family business in 1898 to concentrate on importing and exporting precious metals, according to The Montclair Times. Six years later, he co-founded the Nipissing Mining Company, formerly one of North America’s largest silver producers, and began to amass serious wealth.
In about 1930, a chunk of that wealth went to supplement the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s $27.5 million loan for the Empire State Building. Earle, along with Louis Kaufman, Thomas Coleman du Pont, Pierre S. du Pont and others, helped former New York State Governor Al Smith advance a project conceived by DuPont executive and former GM executive John Jakob Raskob to build a tower taller than the Chrysler Building. The project was ambitious but ultimately made easier by Coleman du Pont who owned the midtown site that had then held the original Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Earle’s Montclair home was later owned by Bob Gaudio, the keyboardist and background singer for The Four Seasons. Born in the Bronx and raised in Bergenfield, Gaudio was a key songwriter for the group, penning “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry” and “Walk Like A Man” among other hits after convincing his parents to let him leave Bergenfield High School at 16 to pursue music.
Before dropping out, Gaudio co-wrote “Short Shorts” as a 15-year-old member of the Royal Teens. After, Gaudio rose to fame and wrote and produced for other artists, including Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and Neil Diamond. Gaudio moved out to California in the early 1970s and produced multiple full albums for Diamond. He earned a Grammy Award nomination in 1979 for producing the Barbra Streisand and Diamond duet “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”
Another prominent owner of 10 Edgewood was Joseph Aiello, the former owner of the Wedgewood Cafeteria and Boonton’s Knoll Golf Club. Born in Sorrento, Italy, Aiello came to America as a pre-teen in 1904 and within a few years helped his family open a grocery store network with locations in Lake Hopatcong, Newark and Montclair, according to his January 1964 obituary in the Paterson News.
The grocery store was dovetailed with a meat and produce supplier, Aiello Bros. Inc., that operated prominently in the area in the mid-1900s. Aiello later founded the popular Wedgewood Cafeteria eatery in town and co-owned Montclair’s first post-Prohibition liquor license with his brother Gabriel Aiello, who owned Gabe’s Galley.