The Clever Postcard Initiative that Helped win Maplewood’s HPC an Award this Year

Maplewood’s Town Hall building had something in its basement that is incredibly valuable but increasingly rare — building permits dating back to 1916.

However, a decade ago, the town government wanted to free up space for storage. The local Historic Preservation Commission, which won an award this year from Preservation New Jersey, knew they had to act fast to digitize these documents before they were lost forever.

“We knew there was a lot of interesting materials down there,” said Susan Newberry, the HPC’s vice-chair. “By state law, you do not have to keep these records passed a certain year.”

In 2015, Newberry applied for a grant from the local Open Space Trust Fund that would go toward having a former commissioner, Jon Stout, sort through the riffraff. The timing, Stout said, couldn’t have been better as the hand-written documents were becoming brittle with age.

“They were very delicate and sometimes they were in fragments,” Stout said.

The project took nine months and Stout transferred the information found in the building permits into a spreadsheet. These documents are like gold to preservationists because they have information that can otherwise be difficult to track down, such as the name of a building’s original owner and the architect’s name.

But the initiative didn’t end there. Daniel Wright, HPC chair, knew his home, built in 1925, was turning 100 years old and came up with the idea to send a postcard to all the owners of homes in town built that same year.

“It’s like a birthday card,” Wright said. “People loved it and that’s what gets people excited — when you’re showing them something about their own home.”

Wright worked with Melanie Yaris, another owner of a 1925 home in Maplewood, to design the postcard. Wright, who is a marketing whizz for Adobe, created a mail merge using InDesign. The first batch included 509 postcards, which might seem like a lot for such a small town of around 24,000 residents. But the 1920s marked a building boom in town, Wright said.

The initiative is a reminder to other towns about the importance of preserving and digitizing these types of documents. As the years pile up, so does paperwork. Earlier this year, the HPC found out that the township’s historic tax documents were lost.

“In our town hall, which was built in 1932, there’s a limited amount of space,” Newberry said. “A lot of towns don’t have building permits anymore, they may have thrown this stuff out decades ago. We were lucky.”

Newberry said the postcard initiative is a way to show a different side to historic preservation. “It shows that we can be helpful, and we’re not just here to regulate things,” she said.

One of the commemorative postcards was mailed to Rebecca Jacobs, who lives in a 1925 home on Orchard Street. The postcard is now hanging up in the hallway of her Colonial Revival home. Jacobs had already been researching her home when this gift from the HPC arrived in the mail. “I learned about the initial owners, which I didn’t know before,” said Jacobs, who lives there with her husband Aaron. “We hope this is a tradition that continues.”

Wright said there are already plans to send another round of postcards next year. “We have everything set up now in our digital file so that when 2026 comes along we can very quickly crank out another 500 of these,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of people writing to us asking for their postcards.”

Darren Tobia is the editor of the Four Oranges, which covers the arts and historic preservation in Essex County.