4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  That was too much for Educational Hall. Appleby had to gavel the meeting back to order. But before TenBroeck sat down, he pointed out that if— if Bradley owned the beachfront, the city had another case. The founding father had never paid a dollar in taxes. He owed the city a fortune. "We tax the widows and orphans," as one irate citizen declared, "and let the most valuable property go untaxed . . . Where is the backbone of the common council?"

  Between the conservative and the confrontational lay a middle ground. Citizens like Dr. Henry Mitchell felt a city lawsuit against Bradley would take too long and cost too much and, finally, who cared? The beach was being offered at a bargain price; Asbury Park should snap it up. Bradley's figure of $150,000, Mitchell argued, was "simply to reimburse himself for certain expenditures with no idea of being fully paid." And the city would make its investment back in just a few years. "The capitalists would flock in," Captain Jonathan Minot told the crowd, "and invest their millions."

  In the end, this argument won the day. It was, after all, the era of John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan. The twentieth century was leaving the dock; America was positioned to reap incredible profits; and their little beach town was on the verge of being left behind. "Asbury," one citizen declared, "has reached a crisis." At the end of the evening, when the chairman asked how many were in favor of accepting Bradley's offer, an "overwhelming majority" rose from their seats. A resolution passed calling for the city council to stop its legal action and okay the expenditure. Then the audience filed out into the cold November night to the sound of the Monmouth concert band. They were still playing old- fashioned oompah music.

  That Monday afternoon, James Bradley tendered his resignation as mayor. In the evening, with Appleby presiding, the council agreed to pay the $150,000. In addition, it set two mid-January elections. At the first, the council would decide on a new mayor. A week later, all the eligible citizens of Asbury would vote on a bond to purchase and improve the waterfront. What the elections were really deciding was whether to redraw the promised land: where the city was headed, what role democracy would play, how the dream would change.

  The mayoral election was the test. Bradley's supporters ran Appleby against Councilman Keator, leader of the rebel forces. The night of the election, as Keator climbed the stairs to enter the council room, a group calling itself the Taxpayers Association handed him a letter. The signatories denounced Keator's " injudicious and conspicuous action" against Bradley and implied that, if he was elected, the council would lose the support of the business community. It was one thing to buy the beach: that only made economic sense. But to attack the founding father's good word, these taxpayers argued, was to question the moral underpinnings of their Christian city.

  In the end, the council supported Keator over Appleby, 4 to 3. It wasn't just a vote against Bradley's legacy. It also swung the city toward the merchants' vision. "The beach, with its future development," said Mayor Keator in his victory speech, "will be the key of success to this city, as a health and pleasure resort, for all time to come." A week later, the bond passed easily.

  The following April, when Bradley arrived in town, the Shore Press reported that "the founder looked sadly on his old possessions but . . . then he thought of the $150,000 check and if there were any unbidden tears nobody saw them." As soon as the sale was final, the council approved funds to build a new boardwalk from Fifth Avenue south to the Pavilion, to install "beautiful lamp posts" and "artistic galvanized iron railing," to give everything on the waterfront from the pier to the benches a fresh coat of beige paint, and to remove the "old lion cages, etc."— those last reminders of the king's eccentricities.

  In May, the council accepted a $20,000 bid from a local businessman to run the various boardwalk concessions and amusements: the bootblack stands, the stereopticon booth, the tackle shop. For the first time, the boardwalk income would come to the city. Over at the Palace Amusement center, the owner was doing his bit to modernize by constructing something he called The Crystal Maze: a two-story, hundred-foot-long building featuring a hall of mirrors that thrilled tourists by distorting their images and encouraging them to lose their way.

  But there were some Asbury Park values that the merchants had no intention of changing. The beach would still be divided into clearly marked sections: season renters, transients, and colored. A glance at the July schedule for the auditorium shows the city's bread and butter was still respectable middle-class organizations. First, New Jersey's Sunday School Association would hold its convention, followed by the state Dental Society and then the American Food Exhibition. No less than Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture and codesigner of New York City's Central Park, confirmed this conservative approach. "Asbury Park," Olmsted wrote in a report that the council commissioned that spring, "has developed a character different from that of many of the beach resorts and appealing to a different class of people." What the city had avoided, according to Olmsted, was "vulgarity," and his advice was to "hold such clientele" while increasing profits by extending the tourist season.

  Walking the boardwalk that Fourth of July, 1903, you could hear this cautious, traditional approach. The council had hired Dr. G. E. Conterno's band to play the boardwalk, and his military unit was modeled on Sousa's right down to the conductor's white suit shining with medals. Toward the end of that year, Arthur Pryor's band premiered at the Majestic Theater in New York City, and Asbury's merchants recognized that this was the sound that matched the city's new direction. Pryor wrote songs that reflected the old values, including regional boosterism ("On the Jersey Shore") and patriotism ("Triumph of Old Glory"). At the same time, he was a modern man, forward thinking. Where Sousa saw the invention of the phonograph record as a threat to his concert income (he called the result "canned music"), Pryor embraced it. In its first three years, his band recorded 168 tracks at RCA Victor's Camden, New Jersey, studio. Pryor would eventually cut some twenty-five hundred selections and become, according to some historians, the first musician to live off record sales.

  Asbury Park hired Arthur Pryor's band for the 1904 season, and he was an instant hit. That first summer, he played 269 concerts and drew more than three hundred thousand listeners. Within a couple of years, the city was paying him $17,000 a season. Within five years, Pryor would quit touring elsewhere and buy a house in Asbury. Over the next quarter of a century, he became such a fixture that the city eventually dedicated the Arthur Pryor Bandstand on its boardwalk.

  If there was a turn-of-the-century music that meant beachfront and boardwalk— a shore sound— it was Arthur Pryor's. By carefully marketing "ethnic" music without ethnic musicians, he produced arrangements that were modern only in comparison to Sousa's. A Pryor concert was a semiformal event. The audience got dressed up for the occasion and then responded not with anything like the wild ragtime dances, but with toe tapping and applause. It was, in short, merchant's music. For decades, Arthur Pryor's sound embodied Asbury Park's definition of what it meant to be born in the USA.

  The merchants fully expected a new era of prosperity. In 1903, the city spent $60,000 to replace the open-air Bradley Pavilion, which jutted out over the ocean at the end of Asbury Avenue, with the two-story Casino: a state-of-the-art hall that could seat seven thousand visiting conventioneers. Two years later, the city invested nearly $400,000 in improvements and modernizations, a budget six times greater than ever before. But it quickly became obvious that income from the boardwalk alone would never cover all the expenses. Asbury's service economy ran at a deficit (Bradley often said he lost $10,000 a year), and the promised flood of capitalists hadn't materialized.

  Suddenly, the city found itself discussing an issue that had only been whispered about before: the possibility of annexing the West Side for the additional tax revenue. Estimates put the worth of the shadow city at more than a million dollars; the taxes would bring in around $20,000. When the idea of annexation was broached, Bradley wrote to the citizens of what he still considered his
city that he would "stand aside and in a fatherly way watch." He had just one proviso: Asbury Park must not include the Springwood Avenue section. If the city felt it needed to absorb the northern part of the West Side, where many of the Jewish merchants lived, fine. According to the local paper, these neighbors shared basic Asbury Park values such as "thrift." But bring the ragtime, discount, ethnic center of Springwood Avenue into his promised land? Bradley announced he would "most certainly oppose [that] because of its class of voters."

  The city council's first instinct was to agree with their founding father. But soon a countermovement sprang up. Led by the town tax collector and the head of the Ocean Grove church, the Reverend A. E. Ballard, this group argued that the council had both a fiscal and a moral obligation to include Springwood. It would certainly increase revenue. And as a group of leading merchants pointed out, if this section stayed outside the city, deliverymen and others might have to buy extra, expensive licenses to do business there.

  In addition, the Reverend Ballard argued, "with [the] Spring-wood Avenue section outside of the new city's jurisdiction it would always be a menace." Only by annexation could the good people of Asbury Park institute "a complete house-cleaning of the 'red-light' district." That included getting rid of smallpox and other diseases: with an estimated seventy-five percent of Asbury's hotel workers living on or near Springwood, the area posed the threat of an epidemic that would ruin the tourist business. But the real menace was moral. As one editorial argued, if Springwood wasn't incorporated, the city would have to "suffer from the evils that breed there without having the power to apply corrective or punitary treatment." Councilman Keator described it as "a festering cancer." Supporters appealed to the ethics of old Methodist Asbury, arguing that the city had to root out the hookers, the gin joints, the ragtime infection.

  None of this convinced Bradley. For days, he used a section of the front page of the newspaper to declare his view that annexing Springwood would "place Asbury Park in the hands of the people of the west side, many, very many of whom are not imbued with the old established American ideas, especially as to beer and liquors." If Springwood became part of the city, "their representation would be equal to ours." Power would shift; morals would fall. The founding father telegraphed his state senator that for Asbury Park to include Springwood Avenue was "to commit hari-kari." He was "not prejudiced against colored people" and offered as proof the time more than thirty years before when he and his colored man had stretched out together on the empty beach. But if Springwood Avenue was annexed, "our city will have the largest pro-rata colored voters of any city in New Jersey." That would lead to a "great depreciation of property." Justice would not be done to capital. What's more, democracy would not be served because, in the founder's opinion, "the majority of the colored vote of Monmouth county is a purchasable article."

  To this last, the Reverend Ballard replied that if the colored vote was for sale, "Mr. Bradley had the longest purse." (The reverend quickly explained he meant that as a joke.) On the other side, Councilman Appleby lined up firmly behind Bradley, saying there were 350 empty lots still available in Asbury: plenty of room for expansion and more taxes without taking over the West Side. But an investigation by the local paper couldn't locate those lots. And having done the math, the editors assured their readers that between the old city and the northern section of West Park, the majority of voters would still share Asbury's "old established American ideas."

  In the midst of the debate, Booker T. Washington (Joplin's "Guest of Honor") was invited to speak in town. "I am proud of my race," Washington began before a crowd of five hundred gathered at Asbury High School. He then went on, "Our people, however, have got to learn one thing: the value of a dollar . . . I ask the ministers and the people of the community to get after the hanger-on, the shiftless, lazy colored man." Hearing this in the midst of the raging argument over annexing the West Side must have reassured Asbury Park. There were some good Negroes. According to the Asbury paper, "Race prejudice was swept away by forceful argument." It did note, however, that only a small percentage of Washington's audience was colored.

  The city council ended up proposing the annexation of the entire West Side, including Springwood Avenue. On May 16, 1906, the resolution passed by a more than two-to-one margin. The front page of the next day's paper featured a sailor groom and his young bride: the shore linked to the shadow city. The caption to the cartoon read, "Now you're married you must obey . . ."

  The vote was Bradley's final defeat. A few days beforehand, at a rally of his supporters, the founding father had announced that this would probably be his last appearance on a public platform in Asbury Park. It wasn't, but over the remaining fifteen years of his life, the king's influence continued to decline. At age eighty, he would say, "I want to look down on Asbury Park, and I want to be pleased with the view." But eventually, he lost hope that he would ever see his promised land. He denied what he called his "early enthusiasm" and talked about the founding of Asbury as if it had been a simple economic investment all along. Even that hadn't worked out. "Had I put my money out at interest," he said not long before he died, "I would be a richer man today, and I would not have had the cares and worry . . . No, summing it all up, Asbury Park to me was a financial failure. I would have been much happier in my old age had I never heard of the place."

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1924

  To UNDERSTAND THE fourth of July, 1924, you have to go back to the Business Men's Show of that spring and what came to be known as the Merchants Orgy. To understand the Fourth of July, 1924, you have to get to know the Ku Klux Klan.

  Twenty years had passed since Asbury Park had gained control over its own beachfront. While the city still depended primarily on the one hundred thousand visitors who came to the beach each summer, it was now home to over five hundred businesses and had emerged as the shopping hub of the north Jersey shore. The fourth annual Business Men's Show celebrated what Bradley's dream had turned into: the merchants' vision.

  The trade show was held in the Casino, down on the boardwalk. The decorations committee had hung the place with lavender bunting and freshly cut greens: tasteful, sober, modern. Ads for the show promised "a liberal education . . . in what to buy for the home and for personal use." Okay, there would be a bathing-suit contest. And a display of fancy roller-skating. And an appearance by Madame Guida, the Danish "toe dancer." After all, Asbury was still a resort town, and its businessmen knew how to draw a crowd. But they advertised not for the thrill-seeking steeplechase riders but for the new, progressive consumers who "plan the home budget scientifically and economically."

  Every booth was rented. A hundred city businesses took part, from the Monmouth Ice Cream Company to the local auto dealers, from Isaac Berger's women's apparel store to Walter Tindall's print shop. The Chamber of Commerce boasted that $100,000 worth of merchandise was on display. An estimated sixty thousand people would eventually pass through the six-day show.

  By 1924, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street had revealed the underside of small-town America, and some may have recognized a similar provincialism and self-righteousness at the Business Men's Show. Those were the types who might have taken offense at the Consolidated Gas Company's booth, where free waffles were handed out by a "living reproduction" of Aunt Jemima. But most who came seemed to agree that the city's merchants were pointing the way to both a sensible and prosperous future. As Isaac Berger, chairman of the event, proudly told the papers, "It would have been possible for us to fill a building twice the size of the Casino." The city council had recently addressed that problem by passing a resolution to build a new Convention Hall. The four-thousand-seat structure would expand Asbury's tourist capacity and make it the envy of the shore towns.

  No wonder, then, if the merchants decided to celebrate their success. Thursday night after the Business Men's Show had closed, over a hundred shop owners, politicians, and city leaders showed up at an invitation-only affair out at the Deal Inn. According to one witness, the inn's wind
ows were shuttered, its doors locked, and city policemen guarded the entrances. That same witness testified that, inside, Asbury Park's leading citizens got so drunk "that they could not get off their chairs."

  There was more. The affidavit by the local printer, Walter C. Tindall, went on to state that he saw "semi-nude women." In particular, Tindall accused Asbury's mayor, Clarence E. F. He-trick, of having "caressed a half-nude dancing girl sitting on his knees" and of handing Chairman Berger a packet that contained "$1,000 of his [the mayor's] unpaid bills" from Berger's downtown clothing store. Berger accepted the envelope "too drunk to describe its contents."

  That's what Tindall reported, anyway, to Asbury Park's CivicChurch League two days later. The Civic-Church League, along with its ally the Anti-Saloon League, stood for the old Asbury Park— James Bradley's Asbury Park— a city with a conscience and a Christian mission. Twenty years ago, these forces had sided with Bradley against the annexation of the West Side, against vulgar amusements, against drinking. This Saturday morning, as the League gathered in Tindall's First Baptist Church, its members had their own victories to celebrate. Prohibition had become national law four years earlier. It was Asbury Park's antiliquor statutes written on a grand scale, the result of untiring lobbying by various religious groups. In fact, one historian writes that "the temperance movement was in many respects the characteristic Methodist battle of the century" (emphasis in original). Which didn't mean the war was over. The same way Asbury's "dry" laws had turned the city's drugstores into under-the-counter gin mills, the Eighteenth Amendment had produced a nationwide black market. In 1924 alone, the Department of Commerce estimated some $40 million of illegal booze was entering the United States. Monmouth County's newspapers were referring to the Jersey shore as "The Rum Coast," with bootleggers arriving nightly to unload their speedboats.