4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Bradley had set up his city to function a lot like its hotels. The illusion was that service simply happened: you went out on your morning promenade along the boardwalk, and when you got back, your room was miraculously clean. In the same way, Bradley had assumed that the porters, maids, and ditchdiggers would live invisibly. By 1903, the African-American population had grown enough to establish the Second Baptist Church, the Mt. Pisgah Baptist Temple, the St. Stephen A.M.E. Zion Church, and St. Augustine's Episcopal Church. But all remained on the West Side. (Legally so: the 1896 decision of Plessy v. Ferguson had made separate-but-equal the law of the land.) Colored people were allowed on Asbury's beaches, but only in the section known as the Mud Hole, where the city's sewers dumped into the sea.

  When the colored population overstepped its bounds, measures were taken. This Fourth of July, 1903, as the governor congratulated Asbury Park on its freedom and its future, there was a traffic accident involving two colored men from the West Side and a white woman from Eatontown. The police arrested the men on the fifth, and that evening, as the woman lay in the hospital, word reached the Asbury police station that a mob was forming. At four thirty in the morning, the city's police chief had to hurry the suspects over to the county jail in Freehold "to escape lynching."

  Asbury's workforce wasn't entirely made up of blacks, and neither was the West Side. McKay remembers playing as a child with all kinds of kids including "Mulatoe" and "Gypsy." In 1894, the Shore Press described the neighborhood as home to "Italians, Turks, Germans, and several varieties of the genus tramp." The city of Asbury Park excluded them all. Back in the 1880s, when Bradley had set up his beach segregation, he'd argued that if Italians decided to settle in town, they'd be kept out, too. At the time, the idea had seemed far-fetched, but twenty years later there were enough Italians in Asbury for them to organize their first annual parade.

  Bradley was perfectly benevolent about the West Side. He served as the honorary "patrino" of the Italian festivities, which included a dance and a musical concert of the Lega Operaia Corpo S. Benigro. According to the Shore Press, the music, the wine, and the bright clothing proved that "the warm impulsive heart of the American Italian clings closely to the scenes of sunny Italy, that his bosom pulsates and swells under the rhythm of the dance." It was the kind of description that might apply to a minstrel show. Bradley and his city looked at the West Side with bemused condescension, willing to accept the new, Mediterranean immigrants as long as they stayed with the other tramps on their side of the tracks.

  The trouble was that the West Side proved contagious. Officially, Lake Avenue stopped at Main Street, but its continuation— called Springwood Avenue— was home to a thriving mixed economy of kosher butchers, discount haberdashers, and itinerant peddlers. What the paper called the general "uncleanliness" included bars, betting parlors, and whorehouses. There still wasn't an effective sewer system west of Main, and Asbury considered the neighborhood an incubator for flu and smallpox. Not the least of it— in fact, maybe the most contagious— was the music.

  The Negro bellhops from Georgia, the Sicilian ditchdiggers, and the other gypsies and tramps forced to live in the same crowded neighborhood had found more in common than just poverty. Musical styles mixed over an infectious, syncopated beat. The result was turn-of-the-century dance music that not only shocked Asbury's grown-ups but threatened to infect their kids. By this Fourth of July, 1903, ragtime was a national and international craze. The year before, the King of Ragtime— Scott Joplin— had followed up the astonishing success of "Maple Leaf Rag" by publishing another hit, "The Entertainer." Thousands upon thousands of copies of the sheet music were sold, and Joplin, a black man, saw no limits to the new sound. As Asbury Park celebrated its freedom, Joplin was writing his first ragtime opera, A Guest of Honor. With a cast of thirty-two, the two-act drama celebrated the day when the Negro leader Booker T. Washington had been invited to dine at Teddy Roosevelt's White House.

  Joplin, who had attended a Methodist-run college in Missouri, saw his music in elegant, danceable opposition to both organized religion and the stranglehold of "serious" classical music. With the left hand pumping a stride beat and the right syncopating over the top, Joplin (and other ragtime piano masters like Jelly Roll Morton) could get a crowd of hundreds up on their feet and dancing. To match this intoxicating music, new steps appeared: the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Cakewalk.

  The infection spread everywhere. Between 1890 and 1909, piano production in the United States would more than triple. The dignified European instrument became a centerpiece in every well-appointed parlor. It also became a carrier, as ragtime managed to slip in the side door and get its sheet music onto the stand. To the musical establishment, this was the national equivalent of the West Side coming over and using Asbury's beachfront. Ragtime was "a popular wave in the wrong direction," bred and born in the whorehouse, and designed to encourage physical contact, loose clothing, and looser morals. Mainstream magazines such as Metronome tried to convince their readers that it was a passing fad, its "days numbered." In 1900, the American Federation of Musicians ordered all its union members to stop playing the stuff. "Musicians know what is good," the union proclaimed, "and if people don't, we will have to teach them."

  According to this view, good music was played by military bands, like the one James Bradley had taken out on the campaign trail. These brass bands had grown out of the European tradition but were considered patriotically American, evoking the village green and the gazebo, a country of simple and democratic pleasures. Many of them were big enough to qualify as orchestras, with cornets, trombones, flutes, clarinets, and even string sections. Their repertoire tended toward marches. And the musicians dressed in dignified quasi-military uniforms. Even a town as firmly against frivolous amusement as Ocean Grove allowed marine bands— although acceptance hadn't always come easily. As The Music Man would reflect, years later, small-town America heard sin in the sound of seventy-six trombones. That play's main character, Professor Harold Hill, was based on a member of the era's most popular band, led by John Philip Sousa.

  Sousa was to band music what Bradley was to Asbury Park. By the summer of 1903, the man known as the March King had reigned supreme for nearly a decade. He'd started with the United States Marine Band. Then, in 1892, Sousa had launched his own unit, first appearing in Plainfield, New Jersey. The country, in the midst of a severe five-year depression, had gone crazy for his brand of proud and vivid nostalgia. Eventually, the band would go on to make annual summer tours up and down the Jersey shore as well as massively popular trips to Europe. Sousa not only led a crack unit with some of the era's most famous soloists, but he wrote a string of stirring patriotic marches, including "Stars and Stripes Forever."

  In its first year, Sousa's band had established a national reputation by playing the Chicago World Exposition. Also performing there were the greatest ragtime musicians of the day, including Scott Joplin. Sousa may not have appreciated their music much— the syncopated beat existed outside both his skills and his tastes— but he quickly recognized its popularity. He'd have to give his audience at least a taste. For that, he turned to his young trombone player who, unlike Sousa, had a feel for these "ethnic rhythms." After helping Sousa modernize his sound, the trombone player— Arthur Pryor— would go on to establish arguably the most popular band in Asbury Park's history.

  Pryor was born in one of the country's ragtime centers, St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1870. His early musical training came from his father, a bandleader, and his mother, a pianist. By the time he was eleven, Pryor was being billed as the "boy wonder" of the valve trombone, an instrument with keys like a cornet, popular in German and Italian bands. Around this time, one of his father's students couldn't pay for lessons and, instead, gave the family a slide trombone. On the slide, you didn't have keys. It was a more slippery, adjustable instrument where you had to feel your way to the notes. Pryor described the man who left it as a "tramp."

  His parents couldn't help with the
slide. The only people in St. Joe who played this kind of horn lived across the tracks. Pryor began heading over there to the local pool hall. Soon, he'd picked up the basic positions and the beginnings of his incredibly fast, slurred-note technique. The world of formal marine bands had never heard anything like it, and at the age of twenty-two, Pryor was invited East to audition for Sousa.

  At first, the March King was skeptical: "This young fellow may be just a flash." But Pryor won him over with his clean tone, four-octave range, and his stunning speed. When he took his first public solo (at the Chicago Exposition), the papers reported that the crowds threw their hats in the air and cheered. Within two years, he was not only Sousa's best-known soloist but his assistant conductor, one of his main jobs being to lead the band through ragtime tunes. Experts called Sousa's attempts at the new music "ponderous echoes of the Negroes' light-footed syncopation." Sousa couldn't hear it, they criticized, and neither could most of his musicians: "The stiff-backed old fellows felt it was beneath their dignity, and they couldn't or wouldn't give in to it."

  So, the March King left ragtime to Pryor, who produced hit after hit, among them "At Georgia Campmeeting," "Whistling Rufus," and "Smokey Mokes." Though Sousa became famous for bringing ragtime and the Cakewalk craze to Europe, Pryor deserves much of the credit. On top of his musicianship, the trombone player also composed, and his own hits included "Razzazza Mazzazza" and "A Coon Band Contest."

  The titles tell the story. Pryor may have been fifteen years younger than John Philip Sousa and a lot hipper to syncopation, but calling his piece "A Coon Band Contest" sent the same message as "Smokey Mokes." Both men were making clear to their public that though ragtime was colored, they weren't. (Meanwhile, Scott Joplin's rags had titles like "Elegant Syncopations.") The distinction was crucial to getting work. If a marine band was going to succeed, it had to be able to play resort towns like Asbury Park. There, James Bradley had stipulated that any band hired to play the beachfront couldn't employ "ethnics." "I don't want a band on my beach," he had announced, "that has musicians who in appearance are distinguished from others." He insisted on what he called an "Americanized band." In that, he appears to have reflected the views of the city. When Mayor Frank L. TenBroeck had tried to change this stipulation, in 1888, the council had voted 6 to 1 to support Bradley.

  On July 4, 1903— as the governor spoke in Asbury Park— Pryor was in the process of leaving Sousa's band to start his own. The unit he put together carefully modified the March King's sound without changing it too radically. Pryor's band would swing a little more, dare to invoke modern times, even incorporate a little of what was percolating over on the West Side. All of which pushed at the limits of Bradley's ethnic restrictions without breaking them. Pryor was leaving the March King in much the same way that Asbury Park had risen against its own royalty.

  The city's reason was simple enough: Bradley's old-fashioned values were no longer doing justice to capital. The town couldn't blame Bradley for the collapse of the First National Bank in the winter of 1903. That had been the result of false-entry bookkeeping and the board of directors' misuse of funds. But the news "fell like a thunderbolt on the business community," and it came in the midst of tough economic times. One businessman spoke of having lost $6,000 during the 1902 summer season, and this he did blame on the founding father's refusal to change with the times. "If the beach is Bradley's," the outraged citizen complained, "let him put it in order and let us live. We are not living now." The proprietor of one of the big hotels agreed. "I must say," he wrote, "that the boardwalk and pavilions, in their present conditions, do not warrant a greater investment on my part."

  After more than a decade of trying to either buy the waterfront or get Bradley to modernize it, the city now made a last desperate move. Lawyers were hired to prove that the founding father had never actually owned the beach. Nervous about the power and popularity of the seventy-two-year-old, opponents waited till Mr. and Mrs. Bradley were on their annual late-summer tour of Europe. Then, the Board of Trade, led by Councilman Keator, announced that early maps and surveys showed the beachfront, lakes, and parks as public property. Bradley himself, they claimed, had used public access as part of his pitch to sell building lots. The beach, they declared, was now and always had been the "people's."

  When Asbury Park's attorney presented this case, he took it a step further. First, he made sure to praise Bradley for all "he had done for this place." But then he argued, "If we cannot claim the property, let's buy it, and if we can't do that, then begin condemnation proceedings." A resolution to that effect passed the Board of Trade September 17, 1902, and was followed by similar actions from the Association of Hotel Keepers and the city council itself.

  The Bradleys returned in early October. A reporter from the Asbury Park Journal came to the brush factory, and the founding father was happy to chat about increasing wages for the city's policemen and about a recent local Republican convention. But when asked about ownership of the beach, he tore a scrap from the roll of wrapping paper that lay on his Pearl Street desk and wrote on it, "Silence Is Golden."

  For a month, Bradley wouldn't respond. November 7, the frontpage headline in the Journal read, CITY PROCEEDS AGAINST MAYOR. A committee headed by Councilman Keator had concluded that the beachfront, lakes, and parks were, in fact, public property. Bradley was given five days to hand the real estate over or have it confiscated.

  Not everyone supported the revolution. A young councilman, T. Frank Appleby, led the city's conservative wing. That group felt this confrontational approach "ill advised" and "lacking diplomacy." Appleby was a local boy made good, a realtor who had been partners in the construction of the 150-room Hotel Bristol and the Appleby Building, the first in the city to have an elevator. At thirty-eight, he was the young hope for the old-timers who wanted to keep Asbury Park true to Bradley's vision.

  The founding father wrote the city council that while he would "prefer to remain silent," his "shock [and] regret" prompted him to reply. In his letter, Bradley described himself as a man who didn't like antagonism and whose role as town censor derived from the "paternal character" of his relationship to the city. He described the movement to claim the beachfront for the city as "the efforts of sons and daughters to realize on the estate before the head of the house has shuffled off his mortal coil." Still, to avoid tying the city up in years of litigation, he would be willing to sell the beachfront, the parks, and the sewage system for $150,000.

  Councilman Kinmouth came right out and called the offer "a farce." They'd heard all this before, he said. "Mr. Bradley doesn't intend and never will sell the beach to the city until he is forced to do so." Bradley's next move seemed to confirm that. He filed papers to sue his children, the city council.

  In the past, this had always been the point where city officials had backed down. They'd push just so hard, then concede that the founder probably really did own the beach and meekly request some shorefront improvements. Oh, and would Mr. Bradley please leave the slot machines alone? But this time was different. The economics were too bleak, the beachfront too dingy, and the town falling too far behind the times. The city council answered Bradley by calling for a public meeting to be held on November 21 in Educational Hall.

  The setting itself was a reminder of all Bradley had done for the city. This was the hall that he'd had moved from Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition back in 1877. On the night of the twenty-first, the place was packed. The Asbury Park Journal remarked with some surprise on how a third of the audience was female, "many of whom are tax-payers and deeply interested." There was also a sizable group from outside the city limits who were convinced the future of the whole area hinged on this question of who owned Asbury's beachfront. There was no mention of anyone attending from the West Side. And Bradley passed, too, sending his regrets and adding that he hoped "your deliberation may be productive for the good of our city."

  The two-hour debate that followed— sometimes angry, sometimes apologetic, occasionally di
sruptive— underlined the divisions that ran through town. On the one side, there was Council President Appleby, who joined with many of the city's original landowners in championing Bradley and advocating a cautious, nonconfrontational approach. "What has built up Asbury Park," one of the city's original businessmen declared, "is its reputation for morality." That's what made it special, and that morality stemmed directly from the founding father. Another old-timer stood to proclaim that he would "take Mr. Bradley's word as being as good as his bond, and his bond was as good as any man's in this place tonight." For these citizens, trying to take the beachfront from Bradley wasn't just a waste of time and taxpayers' money; it was a kind of blasphemy.

  On the other side was the group of merchants and councilmen led by Councilman Keator. The beachfront didn't belong to Bradley, and as ex-mayor TenBroeck put it, "If it belongs to us, why should we pay for it?" He doubted that Bradley meant his offer to sell and dared to go even further. "That man has not kept faith with us for fourteen years, why should he keep faith with us tonight?"