Suppose you wake up one morning and you make a pot of coffee. You get the morning paper, sit down with a piece of toast and you're all set to have breakfast when you realize you need milk. So, you get up, go outside and walk down to the barn to milk the cows. But be careful: if you didn't wipe the udders off first with a damp, clean rag you may have just broken the law.

Or at least you did in Rutherford, where restrictions governing cattle and barns are still part of the borough's sanitation code. Also, the cows need to be in a whitewashed barn with a tight, dry floor and at least 500 cubic feet of airspace each unless otherwise ventilated.

These are just some of the strange or outdated ordinances still on the books in the South Bergenite area: ordinances from years past that are no longer enforced. Often they've been superseded by state regulations, they were relevant to problems, endeavors or technologies long past, or they're just plain obscure.

For instance, you need to have a $25,000 insurance policy on file with the township clerk if you want to dock your river barge on the Passaic in Lyndhurst. In Rutherford it’s illegal to harvest ice from any lake, river or pond on which skating is permitted. If police catch you passing the same spot on Ridge Road three times in a one-hour period, police in North Arlington can ticket you for cruising. Carlstadt, East Rutherford and North Arlington all forbid establishments with "mechanical amusement devices" such as jukeboxes, arcade games and pinball machines from being anywhere from 200 to 500 feet from a church.

"It makes the towns look silly," said Open Public Records advocate John Paff of the New Jersey Libertarian Party. "It makes people ask, 'Which parts are the parts I have to take seriously?’"

Solvers to past problems

Many of these ordinances are the fossilized remains of old problems and offer insight into the town's past. North Arlington cops have not enforced the cruising law in nearly 20 years, because cruising Ridge Road is no longer the problem it was in the early 1990s. Back then, 2,000 teenagers would cruise up and down Ridge Road on summer nights, earning it a statewide reputation with mentions in Hot Rod magazine and New York radio station Z100, according to Lieutenant John Hearn.

"You couldn’t get from one end of Ridge to the other. It would take an hour," said Hearn. "It was the hottest place to be for a couple of years back then."

Through aggressive enforcement of the cruising law, police were able to end the tradition of cruising up and down Ridge Road. Hearn could not say what specifically made North Arlington so popular during those summers. "There was nothing there then that isn’t here now," he said.

Rutherford's cattle ordinances serve as a reminder of the existence of Bonnie Dell Farms, a dairy on what's now the east side of Route 17 that operated until about midway through the twentieth century. Old photos, records and even milk bottles from the dairy are on display in the Meadowlands Museum, according to curator Jackie Bunker-Lohrenz.

The heyday of the Passaic had passed long before 1971, the year the Lyndhurst’s river barge ordinance was exacted, but Police Chief James O’Connor has an idea about where the ordinance may have originated.

O’Connor grew up one block from the Passaic River and remembers a time when two barges from the City of Passaic broke free from their moorings and floated in Lyndhurst waters for years. He estimates the event happened in the late 1960s. The abandoned barges might have been enough of a problem for the town to pass an ordinance requiring barge owners to insure their barges, occupied or not, while in Lyndhurst waters.

Laws for a different time

The origins of other ordinances are more sobering. Rutherford's sanitation code still stipulates how quickly doctors and even the heads of households must notify the borough board of health upon determining or suspecting someone has a communicable disease, many of which we don't even think about anymore such as malaria, cholera, yellow fever and dysentery. Diseases that seem as easily remediable today as chicken pox and the mumps were causes for serious concern and required mandatory quarantine times in which infected people and members of their households were required by law not to leave their residence for days at a time for risk of spreading the illness. Only nurses and clergymen were allowed to enter and leave without borough permission.

Such ordinances have in practice been replaced by uniform state-established procedures, said Brian O’Keefe, Rutherford’s health inspector. O’Keefe said there are now different standards for what diseases need to be reported to what public entities, be it state, county or local authorities. Furthermore, most are reported by the laboratories that confirm the diagnoses rather than doctors or heads of household.

Regulating the dead

Laws can also highlight what’s unique about a town. North Arlington, forever attached to its reputation for having the largest graveyard in the area, has a number of ordinances governing crypts and mausoleums. Holy Cross Cemetery on Ridge Road spans 200 acres and has room to inter 56,000 people.

Borough Health Code states the Construction Code Official and the Board of Health must be notified of each interment to inspect the sealing of each crypt. A crypt is a tomb in a mausoleum with room for no more than two bodies. The archdiocese of Newark, which governs the cemetery, must pay $20 per crypt each time a crypt is sealed. Mausoleums must then be inspected annually by an expert appointed by the mayor and council, according to the ordinance. Before building a mausoleum, the archdiocese must also pay $5 per "niche" and $10 per crypt.

"I think the towns should go through their ordinance books and repeal all the stuff that doesn't matter anymore," said Paff. "When you start having whole chapters of stuff that doesn't apply anymore, it diminishes people's respect for the law."

Paff said repealing old ordinances often falls to the bottom of towns’ to-do lists. One of the few times towns get their ordinances thoroughly reviewed is when they recodify them or post them online or in some other new format. Sometimes towns will hire companies to review the entirety of their ordinances and make recommendations as to what to repeal.