Mountain Lakes

For the next issue of Common Place, I'm thinking of writing a memoir of the New Jersey town - 28 miles west of Manhattan - where I grew up. I was last there in 1966. Sometime in the 1990s, a new owner tore down the midcentury-modern house my parents built at 47 Powerville Road. Recently, I bought a copy of a 1951 book on modern houses published by McCall's. My parents chose the design from this book and had the architect modify it slightly: a bigger garage and an enclosed den rather than a semi-open porch. News of its destruction made me decide to rely on my mind's version of the town, so this will be an account of that semi-fictional place.