4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Even in its early days, when there was no railroad service and Long Branch was its own outpost in the wilderness, the town was known for its uproarious hunting and fishing parties. There may have been only six buildings along the narrow wagon track they called Ocean Avenue, but it was still "Flirtation Way" with visitors promenading up and down in their vacation best. Adventurous visitors stayed in farmhouses that offered all the oysters you could eat and late-night barn dancing. Women sported the latest fashion of dyed starfish dangling from satin ribbons. According to one contemporary account, there was "grace at each meal, hymns in the evening, [and] regular prayer meetings." But, after one particularly wild night, a farmer found his favorite cow stranded on the third floor of a downtown hotel.

  The entertainment quickly became more sophisticated. In 1846, the largest, most exclusive hotel of the time, the Allegheny House, opened. Two years later, Monmouth House followed. Mrs. Abraham Lincoln visited the year the Civil War started. New Jersey had voted against her husband (the only free state to do so) and was, in the words of one expert, "profoundly pro-Southern and openly hostile to talk of general emancipation." But Long Branch was mainly interested in attracting people of wealth and prestige, never mind their politics. In 1869, President Grant was given a house by the influential men of the city. The president was drawn not only by the hunting and riding but by the gambling. The Pennsylvania Club, which he frequented, had plush Victorian furnishings, gold weather vanes, and marble-topped gaming tables featuring roulette, faro, cards, and dice.

  In the summer of 1870, when Bradley pitched his tent on the shore, Long Branch had "probably the liveliest thoroughfare in the United States." Arriving at the train station, a contemporary writes, "The depot is crowded with splendid equipage . . . The ladies are attired in the most charming of Summer costumes [and] bands of music are playing on the cliffs." It was a "sea-shore cosmopolis" that drew the most elegant urban vacationers. On July 4, 1870, what Bradley and the other Ocean Grove pioneers would call the debauchery reached new heights. Three miles outside town, the Monmouth Park racetrack opened. Built on 128 acres of land, Monmouth Park featured the largest grandstand of any racecourse in the country. Its total opening-day purse was a mind-boggling $31,000 and lured gamblers from New York, Philadelphia, and beyond. With the blessing of Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed, senators, congressmen, judges, and fire commissioners showed up, and the newspapers reported that the chief owner and proprietor of Long Branch, Diamond Jim Fisk, arrived in his "gorgeous six-in-hand turn-out, and was accompanied by his two inimitable blondes." Methodists might campaign against The Branch— its loose women, liquor, and crude dance bands— but as the New York Times correspondent wrote that summer, "The truth is that few men who are engaged in the active business of life can withdraw themselves all at once . . . The sudden change from the bustle and excitement of business pursuits to complete solitude very rarely does the hard-worked man any good . . . 'Perfect seclusion' may have its uses, but . . ."

  Ocean Grove tried. As one observer wrote, "I cannot think of the lake and bridges by which one enters the [Grove] otherwise than the moat and drawbridges of some medieval fortified town." But the town gates couldn't always be locked. The holy city's police chief ended up issuing numerous warnings to no less than President Grant, who kept racing his horses up and down the Grove's main street. No, the only real way to protect Ocean Grove from The Branch was to secure the undeveloped land in between.

  One day that August, Bradley decided to take a look. Starting from his lot, he and one of the reverends crossed Wesley Lake and immediately hit a thicket of briars. They risked, Bradley wrote, "having our clothes torn from our bodies." Struggling on, they fought the brush, the heat, and the bugs for about a half mile, till they came to another inland lake with a number of small islands in its midst. They may have been "mere sloughs," as one reporter would later describe them, "covered with rushes, wild lilies, and huge bunches of the marshmallow plant," but to Bradley this was "as beautiful a sheet of water, as can be found anywhere." In his mind, the half-mile walk into the bush had been a passage of discovery. Here was an untouched place, an opportunity, a promised land.

  At first, he tried to get other Ocean Grove members to buy it with him. But his fellow pioneers had barely begun building one model community and weren't keen on starting another. Even the man who'd first sold Bradley on the Jersey shore declined: "I think we have enough land, now." Plus, the asking price of $90,000 seemed much too steep. So, the Association opted out. But Bradley couldn't get the empty acreage off his mind. He had started a successful business from scratch; times were good; now he hungered for something more challenging than making brushes. He finally decided to go it alone, borrowing the $90,000 against his business and home to buy five hundred acres of scrub oaks and sand dunes.

  According to one observer, among the reasons Bradley took this chance, "money making was secondary." The founder of Asbury Park had "a vision of a community not only, but of a particular kind of community, a wholesome community, a moral community." He would dedicate the community to Bishop Asbury. It would hold to the same principles as Ocean Grove except . . . except that Asbury Park would be owned and operated by one man. And while moneymaking might be secondary, it did have to be part of the equation. To make back his investment, Bradley would not only sell building lots, but he'd become a tireless public relations man. His new city would need to attract paying visitors. Even as it buffered Ocean Grove from sin, Bradley's dream city was inevitably going to end up a tourist town in competition with Long Branch.

  In the spring of 1871, Bradley had what he called "the jungle" clear-cut from Wesley Lake to the northern border at Deal Lake. The sand dunes were leveled and carted off as fill. Then, all that summer, he walked the sandy desolation, pacing off the streets, deciding where the parks and the churches would be, measuring out the future. Main Street would run from lake to lake, extending the road that ran outside Ocean Grove's fenced perimeter. That's as far inland as his city would go. From Main Street to the shore, he drew broad avenues, guaranteeing vistas to the sea. At the beachfront, he outlined a promenade that would run next to the surf. That would be called Ocean Avenue, and the next avenue back would be Kingsley, named after a recently deceased Methodist bishop. Then there'd be Heck Street, for a family of preRevolutionary War Methodists, and Webb Street after an early, charismatic minister.

  The beachfront would be kept open for visitors. Hotels would be set back from that, with the first homeowners nestling to the south as close as they could to Ocean Grove. The business district would be there, too, off Main, and Bradley named the avenue Cookman after one of the ministers who'd helped purchase Ocean Grove. At the corner of Cookman and Main Street, Bradley would build Park Hall, a two-and-a-half-story frame building that housed not only the frontier town's general store but its drugstore, tin and stove store, carriage house, post and telegraph office, and a meeting hall for clubs and churches. It would become the police station, court, and jail, polling place, and Asbury's first library and school. Overall, the city was designed to be a (religious) model for urban reform. As one historian put it, "Bradley viewed landscape as theology."

  But all of this was to come. In the summer of 1870, it was still just Bradley and his man, Baker, and that first season of solitude seems to have created the strongest impression on Asbury Park's founding father. During those long days and nights when the two men were often the only people on the shore, an incident took place that, for whatever reasons, had particular importance to Bradley.

  It occurred some time after their arrival in June but before the August day when Bradley pushed through the briars and " discovered" Asbury Park. We'll pretend it happens on the Fourth of July; it's certainly a kind of Independence Day.

  On this evening, in their solitude, Bradley suggests to Baker that they go "bathing" in the ocean. Though Bradley had come to the shore for his health— and though the Gilded Age considered salt water a restorative, and though Bradley had bought oceanfro
nt lots and was about to buy a whole town site on the shore— the idea of actually getting into the Atlantic swells had, until this moment, proved too much. When Bradley suggests the idea, Baker smiles at his boss, then politely declines. Jump into that pounding, roaring blue-black that came crashing against the empty shore? No, thank you.

  "Remember, John," Bradley insists, "cleanliness is next to godliness."

  In the darkness, with the foam shining at each hissing crest, the white man strips down. Then, standing naked, he loses his nerve: "It is somewhat lonely to trust yourself in the great ocean in the twilight and alone."

  Baker watches, fully clothed and a safe distance inland. Finally, the founding father of Asbury Park reaches a compromise. He won't actually give his body up to the surf. Instead, he lies down where he is, in the wet sand, at the place where the last force of the wave is spent in a gentle push. He "allowed the water," as he would write later, "to just touch my body."

  For a moment, he lies there, savoring the sensation and making sure he's safe. Then, some movement catching his eye, he glances to the side. Baker has stripped down, too. Imitating his boss, he's lying at the edge of the water, the ocean lapping his body. "His dusky skin," Bradley would write, "was somewhat in contrast with the white sand."

  Nothing obviously important has happened. Two men lie side by side in the dark as the ocean crashes before them. But something about the moment so burnt itself into the white man's consciousness that fifteen years later, when Asbury Park is a prosperous tourist town and Bradley decides to write a short history of it, this bathing incident takes up one of only thirteen paragraphs. And Bradley reprints the story weekly for years in the local paper he owns.

  "The whole scene," Bradley writes, "forcibly reminded me of Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday." What exactly that meant, we never learn. We know that later, John Baker would leave Bradley's employ, marry, and move to Washington, where he became a carman, hauling freight with a horse and cart. One day, loading some boxes, he had a stroke and was paralyzed. He lived long enough for Bradley to visit him on his deathbed. But the image we're left with, the last image of the summer of 1870 before Bradley begins to build his "moral community," is of the two naked men— one white, one black— lying side by side at the edge of the dark sea.

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1885

  BY 1885, THE dream was a reality. Parts of it, anyway. "The growth of towns along the Atlantic shore for the past ten years," James Bradley wrote, "has been something wonderful." A nearly continuous stretch of resorts had sprung up along the thirty miles of Monmouth County's coast. People mobbed the place, packing the beaches, the summer population of the area estimated at two hundred thousand. Bradley had been a key promoter and developer. And yet . . . and yet . . . "I fear," he wrote, "we have built too fast and too carelessly."

  Since the day Bradley had bushwhacked north from Wesley Lake, his acres of briar and sand had grown into a resort worth $2 million. The city of Asbury Park featured two hundred hotels and boardinghouses that offered some eleven thousand rooms: more than double Long Branch's capacity and three thousand more than Atlantic City. While its summer population sometimes reached fifty thousand, Asbury Park also had three thousand year-round residents. There were two public halls (Bradley had moved one in its entirety from the Centennial Exposition Grounds in Philadelphia and plunked it down on Grand Avenue in 1877), an opera house that seated twelve hundred, some eight hundred "cottages," seven church buildings, and fifteen miles of storm drains and pipes, making it, Bradley boasted, "the first seaside resort on the American Continent to adopt a perfect system of drainage." New Jersey had legislated compulsory school in 1874, and Asbury's original single classroom, which Bradley's niece had run, was now a $10,000 brick building with seven hundred students.

  In 1883, the summer season had drawn an astonishing total of six hundred thousand visitors. The New York and Long Branch railroad, which had been extended to Asbury in 1875, provided thirty trains daily from New York City and Newark. The "Pleasure Guide" to Asbury Park highlighted fishing, crabbing, sailing on "handsome yachts for hire," driving the shore in rented rigs (available with or without liveried footmen), and walking the boardwalk. The last had been installed the length of the beach from Wesley Lake to Deal Lake in 1877. At first only wide enough for two people to walk side by side, it was removed at the end of each season. By 1880, the boardwalk had been raised, widened, and made permanent, with elevated pavilions built at the foot of the cross-streets Asbury and Fifth. The next year, wooden piers were constructed, so the ladies in their long dresses and the men in their top hats could walk out and catch an offshore ocean breeze or watch the local fishermen try their luck with schools of late-summer bluefish.

  In the winter, Asbury's businesses drew shoppers from all over Monmouth County. When the Steinbach brothers' little store had first opened in 1874, it had sold everything from clothing to home furnishings, averaging a gross of "a few thousand a year." Ten years later, Steinbachs was housed in a majestic brick building called The Ocean Palace. It anchored Asbury's commercial center on Cookman Avenue, employing twenty to thirty clerks, plus milliners and tailors, and had sales in "the hundred thousands." In 1885, Henry Steinbach had electric lights installed, and he also put in a "package railway" with miniature tracks. The little trains would carry purchases and money to the back of the store and reemerge with wrapped parcels and change.

  But Asbury lived for the summer, and its main attraction wasn't man-made. "The tonic saltwater," wrote a visitor in the 1870s, "the stimulus of breasting the big waves, or the delicious relaxation of floating, face up, on the buoyant, upbearing element, furnishes the chief refreshment of a seashore holiday." Under the watchful supervision of "bathing masters," the ladies in their flannel or woolen dresses waded into the surf, careful never to go in past their waists. Their regulation nine-piece bathing suits included blouse, vest, pantaloons, stockings, kerchief, shoes, and a bonnet: a total of seven square yards of cold, clammy cloth. Males wore full suits of the same blue flannel, with loose pants, jackets, and sun hats. As a character in an 1890s short story complained, "It ain't a bathing suit. It's an auditorium, a ballroom, or something. It ain't a bathing suit."

  You could cover up the human body and dictate proper etiquette, but by the Fourth of July, 1885, the contradictions of a religious resort town were obvious. And Asbury's main attraction turned out to be a big part of the problem. Bathing might be a healthy, even medicinal pursuit, but there was no denying that it encouraged venal thoughts and actions. "The surf lubricates the joints like oil;" wrote a nineteenth-century observer, "grave men fling out their limbs like colts in pastures; dignified women . . . sport like girls at recess." As to youth, "Young men and maidens forget how far society keeps them apart and together dash in, in entire forgetfulness of all society may think." The New York Times reported that one of the resort's most admired ladies wore thick makeup, bleached reddish yellow hair, and a dress "cut so low in the neck it left very little to the imagination." On the male side, an Ocean Avenue dandy paraded in white duck trousers and waistcoat with a green necktie and a straw hat turned up in back.

  Bradley did his best to stem the tide of sinfulness. He personally patrolled the beach and the lakes, catching couples spooning in rented rowboats or lying too close together in the sand. On Sunday, he'd make sure the beaches closed at eight in the morning and the barbershops by ten thirty. He even had a series of handwritten signs put up around town: by the bathing houses, on the fences, painted on Asbury's curbstones. The signs forbade peddling and cursing, quoted from Scripture, and gave general advice on how a good Christian ought to behave. Modesty, visitors were reminded, was more to be prized than silks and riches. "Jesus," one read without benefit of punctuation, "saves from hell praise him." The city was famous for its churches—" as thick as clouds in the sky," the Times observed. "Puritanism broods over the place," the reporter went on, "and blue laws of the bluest kind make a modern human being almost afraid to smile."

  A
t the same time Bradley was following the Methodist stricture against amusement, he knew his city needed to draw visitors. And his ideas of how to do that even his admirers called "queer and extraordinary." He'd taken to strewing the beach with all kinds of junk: "old boats and animal cages, funny benches and see-saws and spars, old stoves and pieces of statuary . . . massive marble bathtubs, great wooden umbrellas" Bradley's childhood neighborhood of Lower Manhattan was being torn down for the new "skyscraping office buildings," and he haunted the demolition sites. He bought stone ornaments dating back to when the Dutch had controlled New York and plunked them down in one of Asbury's parks. He set up a dilapidated fire engine, "Old Wash ington," at the end of Sixth Avenue. There was a beached whaling boat from Newfoundland, complete with harpoon and rope, and a "monster stone cat's head." One summer, he had tanks built at the foot of the fishing pier and displayed a pair of sea lions. The attraction was so popular he had to install grandstands, and when the sea lions died, he replaced them with giant turtles.

  "Not a person to be easily understood," as his contemporaries wrote, the self-made man built a city that reflected his enormous contradictions. The sole owner and developer of a thriving resort, he was a fervent "anti-monopolist." A land speculator, he supported a limit to how much property an individual could own. A millionaire, he was for reining in the powers of the rich. He republished a favorite sermon, which argued that "this is not a government of the people, by the people, for the people, but of the corporations, by the corporations." Yet, he opposed socialism as a spreading evil and, the son of two immigrants, wanted a quota on the number of people allowed into the country, believing that Europe was making the United States into "the world's penitentiary."