Ed Coyne: the artist who helped shape Hackettstown

Some people leave behind buildings. Others leave behind businesses. A few leave behind something harder to measure — a community that is richer because they were part of it.

At 99, Ed Coyne has watched Hackettstown grow from a quiet town into the community it is today. Born in New York City in 1927, he arrived with an artist’s eye, an entrepreneur’s spirit, and a lifelong love of music. For more than four decades he has also been a dear friend of the Fiedler family — a friendship that began at his drawing board, when he designed the original Fiedler Real Estate logo for Danny Fiedler some forty years ago.

Ask Ed about his extraordinary life, though, and he doesn’t begin with business. He begins with his wife.

He married Helga on October 17, 1953, and for nearly sixty-eight years they built a life together. In 1959 — the same year a young Leonard M. Fiedler was opening a real estate office in his living room on Main Street — Ed and Helga founded their own advertising agency on Fifth Avenue, serving the great names of the jewelry trade: Harry Winston, Movado, Piaget, Baume & Mercier. Ed was the artist. Helga — herself a photographer’s model whose face appeared in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country — was its vice-president, running the photo shoots and approving the copy. There were other ventures too, including a successful trade in emeralds, but Ed insists none of it would have been possible without her. The proof still hangs framed in his home: one of his own advertisements from those years — “For the Goddess of Today…” — the artwork his, the emeralds his, and the model, of course, Helga.

They made Hackettstown home around 1970, Ed commuting to Manhattan until they sold the agency in 1976. In 1981 they opened the Sunshine Barn on Route 57 in Hackettstown — home furnishings, antiques, fine jewelry, even greenhouses — and ran it for a decade before deciding they simply wanted more time together.

But Ed’s greatest gift to Hackettstown wasn’t a business at all.

Growing up in Jackson Heights, Queens, Ed fell in love with jazz. As a teenager he stood outside the clubs, too young to enter, listening to the music drift into the street. When he finally turned 21, he walked through those doors, bought a 45-cent beer, and spent evening after evening hearing Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Billie Holiday — some of the artists who shaped his ear for life. “It was a great time to be alive and be in the music business,” he says.

When he settled in northwest New Jersey, he realized the music that had shaped him wasn’t here. So he set out to change that. His love of jazz led him to the Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, where friendships with celebrated musicians inspired him to bring world-class jazz home. After helping support improvements to Centenary’s Little Theatre, Ed launched the Summer Jazz concert series in 2003. Nationally recognized performers filled the theater, introducing local residents to the music of his life. The tradition continues today at Rutherfurd Hall.

And sometimes the music still comes to him.

His résumé is full of accomplishments. But listen to Ed, and it’s clear what mattered was never fame, wealth, or recognition. It was the people. The lifelong friendships over coffee at The Cottage. The memories of Main Street as it changed. The artists he admired, the musicians he welcomed, the community he quietly enriched.

Most of all, it was Helga. She passed on July 27, 2021, in the sixty-eighth year of their marriage. But ask Ed about her, and he doesn’t reach for the past tense. “Helga is here,” he says — and after an afternoon in his living room, you believe him.

We didn’t simply interview an artist or a businessman. We spent the afternoon with a man who quietly helped shape the culture of a town — whose legacy lives in the art he made, the music he brought here, the friendships he built, and a love story still being told, more than seven decades after he said “I do.”

That is the story we hope future generations remember.

— From a personal interview with Ed Coyne, conducted by January O’Neill and Jeff Fiedler for The Fiedler Local History Archive, July 2026.

“Every person has a story. Every story deserves to be remembered.”