A Celebrity Goes Missing Traditional Cache

This very sneaky, well-camouflaged small cache is the 14th in my series of caches highlighting the rich and varied history of my hometown of West Orange -- and it may be the toughest one to find!

The Mysterious Disappearance of the World’s Most Famous Restaurateur

When one of New York’s most famous celebrities went missing in 1884, it was front page news that, eventually, turned the spotlight of the media on sleepy West Orange.

As the head of New York’s original and most elegant restaurant, Charles Delmonico was already a public figure, and his attention to detail and service at the family restaurants he inherited made him a wealthy and revered city personality. But by the end of 1883, friends as well as the press began to get very concerned for his health and well-being, as the normally dapper gentleman would appear in public looking disheveled, puffy, pale, and occasionally confused — when he went out in public at all.

Then, just after New Year’s Day in 1884, Charles Delmonico suddenly disappeared.

The Delmonico family tried to quietly organize a search with private investigators, but it almost immediately became front-page news. False leads had some newspapers reporting that he had been seen on a boat bound for Europe with a young female companion, while others said they had proof that he had been committed to a Philadelphia insane asylum.

After three bitterly cold days of searching, the first real clue turned up: Two boys in New Jersey, playing along the railroad tracks approaching Newark, found torn letters, a book of Western Union telegraph vouchers, and a pair of yellow dogskin gloves that were positively identified as belonging to Charles Delmonico. Had he been on a train to Newark and dropped or thrown them? No one knew. The next day, another quarter mile up the tracks, a gold and onyx locket with the initial D was found, and investigators and the public knew they were on the right trail. They searched all along the train lines, and even started dragging lakes and rivers looking for Charles, with no luck.

The family would later admit that Charles Delmonico had been unstable, both physically and mentally, for some time, and had been under partial restraint with a pair of male nurses assigned to watch him at all times. He had convinced one of them to take him out for a walk and then managed to escape, boarding an elevated train downtown before catching the ferry across to Jersey City and boarding a train to Montclair. His plan, as they could best piece together, was to somehow get to the house of former Union General and New Jersey Governor George McClellan, who Charles had visited the previous summer at his Maywood estate in West Orange (on Prospect Avenue, today the site of the new fields being built by Seton Hall Prep – for more info on General McClellan, see that cache).

But it was a very long walk from the Montclair train station to McClellan’s house in West Orange, the weather was brutal with temperatures plunging close to zero, and Charles Delmonico never made it. On January 14, two boys hunting rabbits along Northfield Avenue found his body in the bottom of the drainage ditch, half covered in ice. The best guess was that he had made it most of the way up to the top of the ridge, just a few hundred yards from the end of his long journey, and stopped to rest — only to then doze off or pass out and fall into the ditch. He was only 44 years old.

New Yorkers were stunned, with newspapers devoting front-page coverage to reports of Delmonico’s death and speculation about his illness in the days between when he was found and his dignitary-filled funeral. He left the restaurants and his $2.5 million estate to his sister, and the family legacy of Delmonico’s restaurant was passed on to her sons, who kept it in the family until the restaurant finally went out of business in 1923. (The name is still used today, but has no connection to the original family restaurant that gave the world the Delmonico Steak, Lobster Newburgh and Baked Alaska.)

Now for the cache: This one is a bit nefarious and tough to spot. First, be very careful with traffic racing by on Northfield Ave. — you definitely don’t need to get near the roadway (and you should park just beyond the cache in the apartment complex parking lot). You’re looking for a very well-camouflaged non-standard small container that has been placed in a spot where you can be safely removed from the traffic as well as any sidewalk muggles.