4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  "Now is when the hoodlums took over," says Hammary. "[They shouted,] 'Get rid of them black pigs! Get them out of here!' . . . One of [the cops got] hit on the head, and one on the shoulder. And I saw tears in [the cops'] eyes. And they're homeboys! They ran past Second Baptist Church." As soon as the cops retreated, the whole thing escalated. "They kicked in the liquor store: boom!

  They ran up into the liquor store. Someone hollered, 'The drugs!

  The drugstore!' Boom!"

  Police Chief Thomas Smith was out at a club that Saturday night. The dispatch clerk reached him there, and he put his entire force on duty. As it had three years earlier, the strategy appeared to work. By early Sunday, Springwood was quiet. The "out-of-town agitators" drawn by the teen dances had been sent on their way. And the situation stayed calm as morning broke. Soon, the usual well-dressed West Siders were parading to and from church. Across town, on the beach, tourists were putting on suntan lotion.

  But at dusk, crowds began to re-form on Springwood. "It started," Chief Smith would say, "with large groups of teenagers about 14 and 15 years old . . . My men would move in, disperse a large group of about 200 people. They would separate, move a couple of blocks, and form up again." Said a witness who identified himself as a member of Asbury's small Black Panther Party, "I seen more people than I ever seen in my life. There wasn't no cause for it. Ain't nobody go out like Paul Revere and tell them, 'To arms, to arms— come on out on the street and let's go burn down the town!' It was spontaneous, unrehearsed and unprovoked."

  One crowd broke into a liquor store. Still, right up until midnight, it seemed to the police that the difficult Independence Day weekend would end up a manageable one. Then, at twenty past twelve, a group of about seventy-five teenagers converged on the Neptune Diner at the inland end of Springwood Avenue and Route 35. "It all happened so fast," said the owner, "that no one knew what was going on until it was over." Eight of the teenagers ran into the place and ripped off $600.

  Word spread instantaneously. The city government's response was almost instinctual. As Mayor Mattice and his city manager supervised, the police barricaded off Springwood at Main Street, isolating the East Side from the West. Behind "islands of police cars," officers stood and watched the looting in relative quiet. One cop muttered that it was "just like a party." Then, the paper wrote, he "reached under the protective glass of his riot helmet and drew hard and long on a cigarette."

  Across the line, down Springwood, people were grabbing rocks, smashing in windows, and climbing in over the glittering glass to help themselves. "I've been here twenty years," the owner of a Springwood shoe store told the paper later. "My father owned this place twenty years before that. We never had any trouble." But generations of business-as-usual had ended. The way the Spring-wood economy had always worked, one West Sider recalled, was you took your weekly or monthly check to the local market and left it there. "George would tell [you] to come anytime and get what you want . . . They'd bring George the telephone bill, the electric bill, and George would pay it. If there was anything left over, George kept it." Now years of this plantation economy were coming home to roost. The uprising targeted Peluso's Grocery up on Asbury Avenue, M6kB Meats, and Hutters bakery. West Siders threw bottles at the New Jersey National Bank and Trust. Neptune police found a firebomb propped on the window ledge at Wellers Fuel Co. Along the main stretch of Springwood Avenue, three quarters of the buildings ended up damaged. By the end of that night, at least eight would be completely destroyed.

  At three A.M. on what was now July 6, the mayor declared a state of emergency. A hundred out-of-town cops came from Neptune, Ocean, Wall, Middletown, Long Branch, Allenhurst, and Ocean Grove. The state police stood by, waiting for orders. At four A.M., the rioting was declared under control. At five A.M., the out-of-town cops were sent home. Twenty people had been arrested, and six city cops had sustained minor injuries. At six-thirty Monday morning, the city's public works department started cleaning up. Mayor Mattice announced a curfew starting that night at ten. A local Baptist minister and the president of the local NAACP agreed the rebellion had been a long time coming, the direct result of joblessness and substandard housing, then cautioned the West Side to "cool it" and "seek proper redress."

  But by noon, passing cars were being hit again, fights had broken out, and the Asbury Press reported crowds harassing "police and white civilians in the area." Enough rocks and bottles hit passing trains for Penn Central to order its engineers to skip the Asbury stop. At two in the afternoon, the Asbury police again called for backup. At three, a fire broke out in the rear of the Capitol Bar and from there spread to the fifteen-thousand-square-foot Fisch's department store: one of the keystones of Springwood Avenue. "Anybody who was anybody came and shopped at Fisch's," Officer Parreott recalls. Despite fire departments from ten neighboring companies pouring into the area, it burnt to the ground. Mayor Mattice called New Jersey governor William Cahill, and by five P.M. two hundred heavily armed state, county, and local police patrolled the West Side.

  Through the early hours of the night, they tried to maintain law and order. Then at nine, they were called back beyond the barricades. "We feared," said a deputy police chief, "that in the dark it would lead to mass slaughter on both sides." Police would come into the West Side only in response to emergency calls. Otherwise, the "jungle" was left to fend for itself.

  Trying to head off more trouble, the NAACP called a meeting just at the border of the zoned-off area. Police Chief Smith came to the West Side Community Center and listened to a group of fifteen- and twenty-year-olds insist that "this has been brewing a long time" and listing the same reasons Parreott had given three years before: no jobs, recreation, or decent housing. "When you talk with them," Smith later told the paper, "they can almost bring you around to their way of thinking." But Smith was a policeman first: "My loyalty was to the city of Asbury Park and law and order." After about twenty minutes, the meeting was abandoned.

  And the ransacking of Springwood was soon back in full swing. One West Sider watched "women . . . walking around with their arms full of loot, as if they were shopping," and even "respected members of the community" stepping through smashed-in windows, "just like a hungry army foraging for food." Officer Parreott recalls, "Guys were bumping into me with refrigerators and washing machines and sofas." Kids took hammers to the parking- meters or bent hoses so the fires couldn't be put out. The first night, as Donald Hammary puts it, had been "all home people, mostly." Now, the troubles had been "advertised," and out-of-towners had joined in. "Their main target," said one witness of the rampaging crowd, "is to get the police now. They aren't thinking about what led to it all."

  City officials claimed to be just as ignorant of causes as they'd been with the rock 6k roll riot. "There seemed to be no organization to the disorders," said Deputy Police Chief Flannigan, "and no leaders. I don't know of any main issue that would have sparked them." Mayor Mattice would go on record as saying he was convinced "outside forces" were involved.

  By two A.M. Tuesday morning the seventh, Springwood was once again quiet, the buildings smoldering, glass all over the streets. Three hours later, the mayor and the city council entered the office of the Monmouth Community Action Program (MCAP) to meet with leaders from the West Side. Willie Hamm, an assistant administrator at Rutgers University, read a list of twenty demands. They included firing both Judge Capibianco and the housing authority chairman; appointing Negroes to the school board, the housing authority, and the planning board; establishing a police review board and a recreation commission; the implementation of rent control; the completion of the urban renewal project; the construction of a recreation center; and the immediate hiring of a hundred "Negro youth" for summer employment jobs. To which Mayor Mattice replied, "I'd like to do something, but I can't." He would study the matter, but he couldn't just fire a judge. And there were no vacancies on the school board. "This doesn't take any more time or any more decision making," was Willie Hamm's response. "It takes a
n answer. You have the blame for all this on your shoulders."

  Mattice and the other city officials retreated to city hall. At noon Tuesday, they returned to the MCAP headquarters. There, in front of an angry crowd of more than a hundred, they agreed to appoint Hamm to the school board. The other issues would just have to wait. The director of MCAP left shaking his head and denouncing the meager concession. "There's going to be more trouble," he declared. "And this time they're going east. It may not be tonight, or next week, but it will happen."

  It happened within an hour.

  The MCAP office was on the corner of Springwood and Main, right where the barricades were set up. When the meeting broke up, around two in the afternoon, a crowd had already gathered nearby. "As the hot afternoon wore on," wrote the Asbury Press, "the youths began edging restlessly toward Main Street." Suddenly, a few started running. "Hey, they're going east!" a young girl yelled. "They're going east! I hope they burn it down!"

  The way the New York Times reported it, "several hundred blacks came screaming across the Penn Central tracks." After breaking through the barricades and crossing Main, the West Siders stopped at the foot of the shopping district. There was a line of about a hundred state troopers and city policemen on Cookman Avenue. As the two sides eyed each other, a young black man paraded slowly up and down the middle of the street waving a Black Liberation flag. Others joined him, fists raised in the air.

  Then, around three-thirty, the impasse broke as the crowd slowly and deliberately started smashing shop windows along Cookman. A rock went through the drugstore's plate glass. A clothing store was looted, one of its mannequins left on the sidewalk "like a corpse." The windows of the Thom McAn store collapsed inward from the pressure of the crowd, and suddenly the air was full of wooden legs from the shoe display. Two flights above, the Upstage sat in silence, its Day-Glo paintings unlit, its wall of amplifiers waiting for someone to plug back in.

  Then, "the police suddenly seemed to change character." That's how a television reporter from New York City's ABC affiliate saw it. "Almost as though an order had been given," he went on. "They started firing. I didn't actually see anybody hit, but I did see that the police were shooting level— I mean, not into the air. Shooting level." Years later, asked about his force's reaction, Chief Smith spoke softly: "In any organization like the police, you gotta figure you have some people there who just fire at random. At will. A patrolman on the line, his rifle— his shotgun— was so hot I had to take him off the line and put him in headquarters." The local hospitals would report treating forty-six people injured by gunfire.

  By four thirty, the crowd had been pushed beyond Main Street back into the West Side. This time, the state troopers and patrolmen followed, apparently with more than peacekeeping on their minds. The cops cut back and forth across Springwood, ordering people inside. West Siders would later testify that many weren't wearing their badges or any other identification. One resident was standing in his front yard talking to a neighbor when twenty-five troopers, guns drawn, marched up. He didn't mind being told to go indoors, he later testified—" This, I know, is supposed to be their job"— but he couldn't get over their attitude as they stomped through his gate, into his yard, onto his property. "If I hadn't been a man who believes in God," he told the paper, "I don't know what I might have done." His wife described the state troopers as "pressing their authority." Said her husband, "This is the way the white man acts down south."

  In neighboring Neptune and Red Bank, disturbances rocked the night. In Asbury, men reported state troopers beating them at random. Women reported sexual attacks. Years later, Willie Hamm still remembered his "total surprise." "Prior to that," he said, "I had held police in high regard, especially the state police . . . But they broke windows out [and] some appeared to be intoxicated." The next day, the mayor met again with Hamm and other West Side leaders. Now their most pressing demand was the removal of the state troopers. That night, a twenty-eight-member, self-appointed black peace patrol walked Springwood, trying to maintain law and order without bloodshed.

  On Thursday, after touring the scene, Governor Cahill asked President Nixon to declare the city a major disaster area. Not until Friday afternoon, July 10, did the city announce state troopers would be withdrawn from the West Side. They remained in other sections of the city. That afternoon, Mayor Mattice met with Willie Hamm. It was a quick, twenty-minute meeting. Convinced he'd regained the upper hand, the mayor refused to answer the list of West Side demands, including urban renewal. Hamm emerged from the meeting stone-faced and announced there would be no further communication between the mayor and Negro leaders. And the volunteer peace patrol would be pulled off the streets. Within an hour, the mayor had called an emergency meeting of the city council. By eleven that night, he'd backed down enough to promise that the city would at least answer "either yes or no" on all demands.

  Saturday, July 11, a week after the first signs of trouble, Asbury Park remained tense. Over on Cookman, the damage was mostly broken windows. But the West Side, especially Springwood Avenue, had been torched, gutted, and left for dead. Overall, 180 persons had been injured, 167 arrested, and property damage had reached $4 million. The editors of the New York Times saw "a particular irony" in this "aging holiday resort of the white middle class" going up in flames. They called the city "a pleasure dome" and added, "Violence grows out of the catastrophic, smiling neglect of . . . social decay." Was that Tillie's expression, then: smiling neglect? The "crudest part of this tragic explosion," the Times concluded, was that the protest might work: city officials might finally offer the West Side basic amenities. And this would prove that violence pays.

  The editors needn't have worried. Years after the Fourth of July uprising, the substandard housing, the lack of jobs and recreation, would all still be in place. Blocks of Springwood Avenue would remain abandoned: fields of weeds. Steinbachs would move out not long after the troubles, and other stores would follow until Cookman Avenue ended up nearly as empty as Springwood. A rash of For Sale signs would spread down James Bradley's broad avenues. The way one city official put it, Asbury Park had become another example of the nationwide "urban pathology." For those on the boardwalk side of town, the riots had done it. That's what happened when things were allowed to get out of control.

  But that wasn't how the West Side saw it. For many there, the Fourth of July uprising hadn't done Asbury Park in; it had just confirmed what they'd known all along. "The riots was just the end of it" is how one black employee of Fisch's recalls it, "burning a town that was already dead." And David Parreott insists, "The end of Asbury Park was politicians . . . Those old phony politicians we had. We should have gotten them out of office and put someone in there who would stand up . . . We needed to go out and kick sooner."

  In the ruins of the city, politicians talked about starting all over again: rebuilding the beachfront, returning Asbury to its former glory by retracing its steps. Even the fortune-tellers on the boardwalk couldn't have predicted what would eventually put Asbury Park back on the map: its collapse. Or, more specifically, its collapse as amplified through rock 6k roll. Or, even more specifically, through the rock 6k roll of that long-haired guitar player and his buddies from the Upstage.

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1978

  DAVEY SANCIOUS DIDN'T take part in the Fourth of July rebellion. He was hacking around with some friends that night in Belmar and cut his hand badly enough to need stitches. He had no idea what was going down on Springwood Avenue, but as he sat in the local emergency room, people began coming in "covered in blood. And in different states of trauma." Then the cops arrived and started asking everyone questions, and Sancious realized that there was this "other thing going on . . . The whole night changed. It got very serious." Days later, when he figured it was safe, the teenager went by Springwood and saw the smoking ruins. He remembers his first reaction as sadness: for the West Side and the Orchid Lounge and "what it used to be like. In the days. It was like it had been a war."

  Davey
's buddy from the Upstage, Garry Tallent, agreed. "Just sad," Tallent says. "It was just sad more than anything else." Tallent was one of the few white musicians who was familiar with the West Side. He'd moved to Neptune as a teenager, and his hunger for music had led him onto Springwood. That's where he found a record store with the fifties R6kB he loved. That's where he found the Orchid Lounge and became the lone white teenager who hung around outside: "When the door opened, you'd get to listen a little bit. Then they'd close it, and it would be muffled again." Finally, that's where he found— and plugged in to— the soul scene. Two, three times a week, a big black Cadillac would pull up to his mother's house, and it would be a guitar player/ singer named Melvin looking for "that funky little white boy." ("He kind of liked me," Tallent recalls, "but he never really knew my name.") They'd drive out to Piner's Lounge, an all-black club somewhere out near Fort Monmouth. There, Tallent appeared onstage as the bass player for Little Melvin and the Invaders. Melvin would call out, "Funky thing in G," and they'd wing it, playing nameless, floor-shaking, twenty-minute dance grooves. Occasionally, they'd get help from a stand-in saxophonist named Clarence Clemons. "A great, great learning experience," as Tallent remembers it. When he heard about the trouble on Springwood, Tallent drove right down and watched as his favorite record store burned: "All that vinyl melting!" As he gawked, one of the protesters threw a brick at his car, "and we got the hell out of there."

  At the time of the riots, Springsteen was living in a surfboard factory out on the edge of town. When he heard about the riots, he climbed a nearby water tower. As Springsteen remembers it, he wasn't surprised that the West Side was burning; after all, this kind of thing had been happening all over the country. Not surprised, but stunned by the sheer magnitude of the event. From the top of the tower, looking out across Route 35 toward the ocean, Springsteen felt as if he were watching his whole city go up in flames.