4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  The money went to the people who owned the casinos, and despite all the state's assurances, organized crime had gotten in at the very start. The owner of the first casino, Resorts International, had grown out of the Florida gambling operation of the famous mobster Meyer Lansky. Inspectors investigated other ties, including the influence of the Gambino family, led by Carlo Gambino, the model for The Godfather. On the Fourth of July, 1978, Resorts International was extending its hospitality to Carlo's nephew Joey and his wife, Rosario. They were put up in the casino's luxury suite with all expenses paid. Less than two years later, Mr. and Mrs Gambino were both indicted on charges of importing $60 million in heroin.

  Atlantic City proved what Asbury Park had been proving. That the trickle-down theory didn't work. That the money tended to stay in a few hands. That this top-down vision of the promised land had corruption built right in.

  As the Gambinos slept in the only legalized casino on the Jersey shore, Asbury had officially been designated the twelfth most distressed urban area in the United States. In fact, with its falling tax base, crumbling housing stock, and ongoing redlining, some experts were calling the city a "model of deterioration." It was a prime example, according to its director of community affairs, "of a Northeastern city that could not make the transition from railroad to an automobile-oriented society." The president of Asbury's Chamber of Commerce had another explanation. The city's "precipitous decline" was a product of the 1970 riots. "You can find whole rows of downtown stores that have closed up and resurfaced in Monmouth Mall, four miles outside of town. We simply have not gotten out from under the shadow of the civil disorders."

  If it could rehabilitate itself, the New York Times wrote, Asbury Park could once again become a national symbol: this time "a small-scale model" for post-Vietnam urban renewal. The city's new Development Corporation set out to address the problem with what the Times called "the current 'pragmatic' social consciousness." That consciousness anticipated the era of Ronald Reagan, which was about to begin. The 1960s War on Poverty had proved, this argument went, that there was nothing to be gained by governmental programs aimed at improving the ghetto. The key was making sure private enterprise thrived. So, the board of Asbury's new Development Corporation didn't bother to include representatives from civic groups and/or the West Side. As the head of the board put it, "It's not so much a question of black and white as a question of green."

  If some Asbury Park residents thought all this sounded mighty familiar, their suspicions were confirmed when the Development Corporation revealed the "most striking feature" of its $200,000 plan: extend the boardwalk into town. Boardwalk, boardwalk, boardwalk! This constant return to the same idea— and the constant insistence that it was, in fact, a new idea— was almost funny. Except that the situation had gotten that much more desperate.

  By the Fourth of July, 1978, the desolation had spread to once-prime residential areas. On Fourth Avenue, where Stephen Crane's mother had bought her cottage, the collapse of the tourist industry had forced hotels like Lang's Guest House to look for other ways to fill their rooms. Already zoned for high-density use and desperate for dollars, many had turned to the state of New Jersey, which needed places to house its "deinstitutionalized." A year before the West Side "riot," Lang's had converted to a boardinghouse and, by 1978, was home to some twenty ex-patients of the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. Enough old hotels had followed this model for the city manager to declare Asbury Park "a dumping ground for ex-mental patients."

  According to the pragmatic social consciousness of the Development Corporation, this made the area between the beachfront and Main Street a "dead space." This Fourth of July would prove that the designation had more than one meaning. Many of the old hotels were out of code. Over the decades, as the population had shifted, safety inspections had gotten less frequent and less strict. The city treated this "dumping ground" as it had always treated the West Side. In fact, to what remained of Asbury's white middle class, it may have seemed as if the West Side had spread east: their worst nightmare. On this Independence Day, a torrential rain flooded the roads and forced Asbury to cancel its fireworks. In the midst of the downpour, Lang's Guest House caught fire. The exact cause wasn't known: faulty wiring, the fire chief thought, or maybe someone smoking in bed. Three people died.

  "You can't have community pride unless there's something to have pride in." That was retiring Police Chief Thomas Smith's description of his old neighborhood around Springwood Avenue, and it was becoming true of more and more of the city. The record Springsteen had out that Independence Day seemed to reflect that. Its characters, he's said, live "in the middle of a community under siege." You could be excused for thinking that the title of the record, Darkness on the Edge of Town, referred to the West Side or to Asbury's racial problems in general.

  But the songs don't bear that out. If anything, Darkness is whiter-sounding than Born to Run: the music tilted away from dance beats toward urgent, punkish guitar— and its characters drag racers and factory workers. The multiethnic funk of "The E Street Shuffle" is gone. Instead, Springsteen focuses in on the white working class and on the darkness that is left to them once the work is gone.

  Two years had passed since Born to Run. In that time, rock 6k roll had bankrolled Springsteen's escape from Asbury Park. Financially, he was doing fine, but the new record grappled with what the twenty-eight-year-old called his "sense of accountability" to those he'd left behind. While there's hope on Darkness— and the shouted demand that "these badlands start treating us good"— the characters are older, the odds of getting free even slimmer. As Springsteen says, he deliberately kept out "any hint of escapism."

  From the first lines, "Lights out tonight / Trouble in the heartland," the theme is set. For the first couple of songs, we could be any place that's racked with fear and in any family where a son inherits his father's sins. But on the album's third song, " Something in the Night," when Springsteen wants to call up a landscape where all chance of escape has been cut off, he takes us back into Asbury. On a slow, harrowing melody, we're suddenly "riding down Kingsley . . . looking for a moment when the world seems right." It's almost dawn in the shore town, and the only people in sight are "wasted" kids. The narrator tries to get away, but he's stopped at the state line. Behind him, on the inside, are all "the things we loved . . . crushed and dying in the dirt."

  The rest of Darkness either refers to other parts of the United States— the Utah desert, little towns in Louisiana— or, more often, leaves the landscape generic. Springsteen's "streets of fire" run anywhere people are tricked and lied to; his "mansions of pain" exist wherever the factory whistle blows. And though he borrows the title of "The Promised Land" from Chuck Berry, Springsteen's song isn't nearly as specific— or as cheerful. Berry played on the idea that the payoff to the American Dream lay west, in California. Two rock 6k roll generations later, Springsteen defines his promised land in the negative: where you aren't "lost and bro­kenhearted," where your dreams don't "tear you apart," where your blood doesn't "run cold."

  Springsteen's dream isn't James Bradley's moral community: upright, separated from the world, segregated. In fact, what Springsteen wants can only be found in the ruins of that kind of place. Not on Main Street, down Kingsley, or up in suburban "Fairview," but "in the darkness on the edge of town." There, you can see what's gone wrong and who's been left out. There you "pay the cost." Which is why, in that darkness, there may finally be a chance of taking an honest stand. It is, in its own way, as religious a vision as Bradley ever had.

  Darkness marks the end of Springsteen using Asbury Park as a metaphor. It'll be twenty-five years before he writes another song about the city. He moves on, not so much changing his subject matter— it's always that question of whether love is real— but extending it out across the horizon. This Fourth of July, as Lang's Guest House burns in the rain— as the Gambinos sleep in their luxury suite— Springsteen's career has taken him far from the Jersey shore. On tour in Los Angeles, he w
atches the fireworks from the Santa Monica pier. Eight years before, he'd climbed a water tower and watched Springwood Avenue burn. Now, he climbs to the top of an office building where a huge billboard advertises Darkness. It stretches his face across half a block, and Springsteen jokes that it's "the ugliest thing I've ever seen in my life." So he and Clemons and Tallent and some of the others celebrate the Fourth by spray-painting the billboard with graffiti.

  By then, Darkness has gone gold, shipping more than half a million units, and Springsteen is a star, whether he likes the image or not. Asbury Park is behind him. He's started performing a new song about leaving that past behind. He calls it "Independence Day": a sort of bookend to "4th of July, Asbury Park [Sandy]." No fireworks boom, here. Instead, a son says good-bye to his father and their town. It may be Asbury Park, if you go by the calliope sound at the beginning. It may be Freehold. It could be anywhere. It opens with the son telling his father, "There's a darkness in this town that's got us, too." It's time to leave. "They ain't gonna do to me," the son says, "what I watched them do to you."

  Then the landscape broadens. It's not just the son who's going to quit this scene. All the rooms are empty down at Frankie's joint; the highway's deserted. Everyone's leaving, and Springsteen tries to explain what's happened. "There's just different people coming down here now," he sings. "Soon, everything we've known will just be swept away." The song moves to a familiar funereal beat, like the one Springsteen used in "Factory": that slow, inevitable march Stephen Crane heard in the workingmen's parade.

  The song's chorus keeps calling out, "Say good-bye. It's Independence Day." But nobody says it. As if nobody can leave. Finally, there's a last confession. It's about how generations pass, about the other side of progress, about the way each vision of a better world destroys the one that came before. And it's about how we are bound to each other. The son knows all the things his father wanted. And looking out over this empty promised land, he swears, "I never meant to take those things away."

  EPILOGUE:

  FOURTH OF JULY, 2001

  You CAN READ the future at Frank's Deli. Up at the counter, the locals sit: a black woman with braided hair, a Hispanic woman whose English is slow, an Italian-American guy with a loud voice and dark glasses. Someone's left a copy of today's Asbury Park Press — July 4, 2001— and that's how you read the future. It says there's going to be a parade in Ocean Grove and something called an Oceanfest over in Long Branch. Asbury Park will be hosting a sand-castle competition, and at one P.M. a bunch of local bands will play Convention Hall in "A Call for Freedom" concert. To end child slavery in Sudan.

  A waitress talks with a gray-haired woman: "They're gonna have a whole beachfront fair today."

  The gray-haired woman nods. "Used to be so many people that my kids would get lost."

  "Oh, I remember."

  In the back of Frank's, they've hung framed pictures from the 1940s and '50s: Convention Hall, the boardwalk, the train station. It's eight-thirty in the morning, and the oldies radio starts playing "On Broadway" by The Drifters. The song's so familiar that the lyrics tend to blend with the room's general chatter: how when you walk down Broadway without enough to eat, "the glitter rubs right off, and you're nowhere."

  Out on Main Street, some stores have closed for the holiday, and some are closed for good. Driving north toward Deal Lake and the end of town, you can hear the local radio station playing the air force anthem and then, in honor of the holiday, John Philip Sousa.

  Across Deal Lake, the houses sit quiet and prosperous in the morning light. But here, on the Asbury side, it mostly feels abandoned. Down the length of Asbury's coastline, the beachfront looks like a war zone: Ocean and Kingsley avenues reduced to rubble and ruined buildings. Nearby, the James A. Bradley Motor Inn has been shuttered and painted a uniform military brown; its only speck of color comes from an orange-and-black sign: No Trespassing. In the distance, Convention Hall and the Berkeley-Carteret occupy emptiness. At Fourth Avenue, the gaping skeleton of an unfinished high-rise dominates the skyline. The beachfront might look like a war zone, but it isn't. There's been no fighting here. For the past quarter century— longer— the city's leaders have made agreements, exchanged handshakes, and signed contracts. That's what produced this landscape: not war, business.

  As you start down the boardwalk, it's all but deserted. Its planks— laid in a chevron pattern— are rotting out at the ends. The old concession stands have been nailed shut: white paint peeling off, leftover signs reading THE CUCKOO'S NEST and JOE'S #I. Out on the rock jetty, three men are throwing lines into the mist. A few words of Spanish drift back to shore. Beyond them, the hum of fishing boats is pitched a little lower than the onshore air conditioners. Lifeguards set warning flags and tip their tall white chairs upright.

  In 1978, when Springsteen's Darkness came out, Asbury's city council was calling for a new, comprehensive waterfront- redevelopment plan. Two years later, the government officially declared the boardwalk a blighted area, making it eligible for state funds. That was the year Samuel J. Addeo became city manager, a position he'd hold into the nineties.

  Addeo, along with Mayor Frank Fiorentino and a council that included the ex-police chief Thomas Smith, managed a city on the skids. Of Asbury's seventeen thousand residents, a quarter lived below the poverty line. The median annual household income in 1980 was about $17,000; on the West Side, it was half that. Unemployment in Monmouth County was around seven percent; in Asbury, it was over twelve percent. And of the city's eight thousand housing units, almost eighty percent were rentals. By 1980, white flight had helped make Asbury's "minority" population the majority, but the people who stayed in the city didn't own it. Out-of-town landlords did. Services were few and, with President Ronald Reagan starting his first term, getting fewer. As the black owner of a West Side market put it, "Reagan is reality. People have got to understand Uncle Sam is not your uncle . . . It's now sink or swim."

  Asbury didn't swim. It took four years for the city to adopt (unanimously) a Waterfront Area Redevelopment Plan. In 1984, as Reagan swept into his second term, the city declared that it was changing direction. The beachfront would no longer be a honky-tonk tourist attraction. Instead, Ocean Avenue would become a pedestrian block surrounded by condominiums and apartment buildings. The city's central article of faith was unshaken: the economy had to begin with the beachfront. But now it would draw people to live, not just visit. The way the local paper reported it, Asbury Park would be "exchanging its character as an amusement-oriented seaside resort for that of a residential community." And when its ship came in— not the burnt hulk of the Morro Castle, but a string of condominium towers and town houses— the real estate boom would trickle down from the shore to the rest of the city. That was the theory.

  The 1984 redevelopment plan covered the 240 acres along the beach and inland to Grand Avenue. Changing this area to the city fathers' definition of "residential" would mean displacing the current residents, many of whom were the "elderly, deinstitutionalized, and handicapped." After accidents like the fire at Lang's Guest House, the state had tried to improve safety by issuing loans to boardinghouse operators. Taking advantage of this, landlords had enlarged the dead space. Soon, Asbury Park had seven hundred state-licensed beds for ex-patients and an uncounted number of unlicensed ones. Asked what would become of these people under Asbury's new development plan, City Manager Addeo said it was the state's problem. Asbury had done more than its fair share, had been so welcoming to "the socially disadvantaged," Addeo said, that "the Statue of Liberty should have been restored and set on our beaches."

  Up on Fifth, between Ocean and Kingsley, the redbrick wings of the Berkeley-Carteret Hotel still stand. During the early eighties, the old hotel became the model for Asbury's future. Two local brothers, Henry and Sebastian Vaccaro, bought the fifty-year-old landmark for $325,000. Their immigrant grandfather had worked there as a gardener. (Meanwhile, buying up property across the tracks until, by 1980, his widow was the largest single lan
dlord on the West Side.) Though local banks refused to finance this rags-to-riches story, the Vaccaros managed to raise some $16 million, including over $3 million in an Urban Development Action Grant and a reported $8 million of their own funds.

  A lot of it was rock 6k roll money. Henry Vaccaro was one of the founders of the Kramer Guitar Company, known for electric guitars with patented aluminium necks. Kramers were hip enough to be endorsed by the new generation of guitar heroes, Eddie Van Halen included, and produced big profits. By the time he was investing in the Berkeley-Carteret, Henry Vaccaro had been elected chairman of the board, and Kramer Guitar was heading for over $15 million in annual sales. Vaccaro parlayed his music connections to convince rock 6k roll pioneer and country-western star Johnny Cash not only to invest in the hotel and maintain a suite there but to promote the reopening with a concert appearance in the fall of 1985.

  The Vaccaros claimed that the renovated Berkeley-Carteret was soon operating at seventy percent capacity and was "booked for every weekend until 1990." Asbury's city fathers could almost taste the influx of new money. A federal spokeswoman cited the project as a prime example of Reaganomics: "the private sector working to benefit the public." But by the beginning of 1986, the beachfront still looked much the same, and the total value of Asbury's square mile of real estate had declined to $164 million. City wide unemployment was at twenty percent. That spring, Mayor Fioren-tino and Manager Addeo signed a $500 million contract with the Vaccaro brothers. It called for the construction of twenty-four hundred residential units between Grand Avenue and the beach. "The start of a new Asbury Park," said Addeo.