Helen Pike

What one reviewer had to say:
In her book, "Asbury Park's Glory Days", author Helen-Chantal Pike has fulfilled a long-standing need: A biography of one of the Jersey shore's most significant seashore towns. The hsitory of Asbury's rival resort, Long Branch, had already been chronicled by the WPA's writer's project, back in the 1930's. Those forgotten writers did a thorough job with the Branch's storied past. But Asbury lacked a significanct memoir. Pike has taken on the task, and aced it beautifully. The book, published by Rutgers University Press in 2005, is a treasure chest of souvenirs, written and photographic, of the Park's fabulous past. Even the hard cover, beneath the jacket, is reminiscent of a fine old family trunk in the attic. The jacket itself is a colorful array of scenes of significnt spots from within Asbury's borders and past. The contents are crammed with wonderful characters, places and incidents that filled Asbury Park's history.

The town of Asbury Park has stumbled along a troubled path as well, and Pike looks at it all with a comprehending eye. She understands the problems of municipal government and changing demographics, and writes about them comprehensively. Her book is valuable in many ways, but three came through to me clearly. This is a book for everyone interested in New Jersey history; for everyone interested in the evolution of resorts areas; and moreover, for everyone who wants to know how cities crumble from within, and succumb to inner city blight.

Happily, Asbury Park is struggling to make a comeback, and is well more than halfway there, and Helen Pike's "Asbury Park's Glory Days" is on top of it all. Don't miss this one!

~ Art Scott
Flagstaff, AZ
2007

The Asbury Park Trivia Test:
1. What realism author, journalist, and war correspondent has his teenage home restored as America's only museum devoted to his life?
2. Grand Central Station architect Whitney Warren was hired to design Asbury Park's signature boardwalk buildings and what other notable building?
3. Atlantic City launched the Miss America pageant to lure visitors back after the wildly successful pageant for what age group in Asbury Park?
4. What famous partner in a comedic duo was born in Asbury Park? [hint: his partner was also Jersey-born.]
5. "It slices! It dices!" - what is the name of the uber TV salesman who learned the art of the sales pitch at his uncle's Fourth Avenue arcade?
6. What rock club began as a seasonal hot dog stand? [hint: it's not the Wonder Bar.]
7. The Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City is only one of two marquees left with the family name on it. Where in Asbury Park is the other one?
8. One of ragtime bandleader Arthur Pryor's compositions made it into "The Wizard of Oz". It is the backdrop for which famous scene featuring Toto?
9. "The Morro Castle" went up in flames and ran aground within 10 feet of Convention Hall in 1934, forcing Cole Porter to rewrite the ending to what Broadway-bound musical?
10. Asbury Park has been the down-and-out setting for such recent cinematic efforts as "City by the Sea" with Robert DeNiro, "Earthly Possessions" with Susan Saradon, and HBO's "The Sopranos". What movie starring Rodney Dangerfield shows the interiors of Asbury Park's once glorious projection houses?
11. She lived on Sixth Avenue when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Who was she?
12. He wrote "With Lawrence in Arabia" at his father's house on Fourth Avenue. Who was he?
13. He drove Einstein's brain across the country. Can you name that pathologist from the Medical Arts Building on Grand and Monroe Avenues?
14. He was the opening act for Cheech and Chong at Convention Hall. Who was he?

Prologue: 1982

I left the north Jersey shore and my newspaper job at the Asbury Park Press in 1982 to attend graduate school at Columbia University. By that time, Asbury Park was generating memories mostly for day-trippers and rock band groupies. Old-timers told fabulous stories about men in tuxedos and ladies swathed in evening gowns strolling the nighttime Boardwalk, about thrilling movie premieres at the Mayfair and Paramount theaters, Frank Sinatra’s career before and after his break with band leader Tommy Dorsey, and shopping for bargains or going to the clubs along the vibrant, ethnically and racially mixed, Springwood Avenue, likening it to New York City's Harlem.

But as the 1980s progressed, Asbury Park’s status as a popular resort began to decline. The mayor was trying desperately to find a buyer for the city's once thriving Boardwalk. The amusement circuit’s two vintage carousels were sold and shipped out of state. The jazz and rock clubs were going to seed. Record scouts, once noticeable in the wake of Bruce Springsteen's maiden album, "Greetings From Asbury Park", were hard to spot. Mysteriously set fires continued to claim vacated buildings, and all over the city, huge empty blocks sprouted weeds, broken glass and the detritus of drugs and street sex. The mentally ill, liberated from state institutions without appropriate housing or services in part of a nationwide trend, arrived here, as they did elsewhere, and wound up panhandling on the Boardwalk and on side streets. They checked in to previously comfortable boardinghouses and motels that were struggling to stay financially solvent as the public’s travel habits changed. As the twentieth century came to an end, another government policy -- the promise of safe, affordable low-income, high-rise public housing -- soured. Plan after plan for a civic revival failed to take hold.

Just when everyone thought the city's decline couldn't get any worse, it did. When I returned in 1991, Asbury Park resembled a ghost town. It was routinely referred to by some Beirut on the Jersey Shore and by others as Dresden. The terms reflected a generational distinction between those whose referece points was World War II and those whose images of war centered on the Middle East, but the shared implication - bmbed beyond recognition - was clear.

The nearly deserted streets made Asbury Park a convenient commuter drive-through. Highways originally paved to carry vacationers to and from the Shore were now arteries to the newly built Interstate 195. The city's wide streets became short cuts for employees who lived on the coast but worked in Trenton or elsewhere in the burgeoning Mercer County. Meanwhile, school children, unaccustomed to seeing much traffic, routinely crossed against the flow in what seemed to outsiders a careless disregard for the changing lights. It was not uncommon to see drug deals in broad daylight. Women, residents and visitors alike, found themselves propositioned by men cruising in cars and trucks in even the more stable residential neighborhoods.

Asbury Park had a police department so wracked by corruption that one enterprising detective ran a private security business from his desk inside the squad room. A mayor was arrested for buying cocaine in a bar across from City Hall after a council meeting. The Board of Education was ill-prepared for implementing more and more state mandates to provide social welfare programs and raise test scores.

Real estate money went elsewhere. After all, there are one hundred twenty-seven miles of coastline between Sandy Hook and Cape May and more hospitable, even eager, investment climates. The redevelopment of Atlantic City, with large hotel "showrooms", was finally underway thanks to the special casino account that was part of the state referendum to allow restricted gambling in New Jersey. The boardwalk in North Wildwood maintained its stability largely thanks to two generations of the Morey family, while four generations of Gillians in Ocean City anchored the northern end of the boardwalk in the historically "dry," and skillfully promoted,and family-friendly Methodist resort community. The state's oldest seashore resort, Cape May, was firmly established as a bed-and-breakfast destination, capitalizing on reclaimed Victorian splendor, its business and civic leaders working together to find an alternate plan for housing the mentally ill.

I spent the 1990s writing about New Jersey’s travel and tourism industry, and noticed that Ocean Grove, Asbury Park's twin city, was experiencing a revival as a result of an aggressive move by business owners to shut down illegal boardinghouses and tighten zoning codes. Even Long Branch, Asbury Park's historic competitor in the local travel and residential markets, was shaking itself out of a decades-long slump with construction of the north Jersey shore's first significant beach hotel in decades and Miami-style high-rise condominiums.

But Asbury Park remained locked in the embrace of an out-of-state developer whose fortunes were tied to New England banks. Changes made in 1986 to New Jersey investment tax laws and the country's regional recession of the early 1990s put his grandiose plans for the Boardwalk and the eight blocks of parallel real estate on hold. Meanwhile, the city, grinding into bankruptcy with millions of dollars in unpaid property taxes, was poised to become the fourth urban center - Camden, Newark and Jersey City - to be supervised by state officials.

The glamorous, exciting Asbury Park that had drawn wealthy vacationers and celebrities existed only in people’s memories. New generations had been born who did not know what it meant to ride the entertainment circuit, buy freshly baked bread on Springwood Avenue, or take pride in a high school academic and athletic program that once dominated state competitions. Even fortune teller Madame Marie had moved from her Boardwalk booth to a two-story brick building on State Highway 35 in Ocean Township, one of the city’s many post-war suburbs.

Driving through the devastation that ravaged both the East and West Sides of the railroad tracks, one couldn’t help but wonder what had attracted people to Asbury Park in the first place.

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"Ms. Pike spares neither villain nor hero in her saga of her favorite resort. There are mobsters and stand-up clergymen; showgirls and shopkeepers; restaurateurs with class and the classy people who kept them in business. Most of all, there are the little stories told by just plain folks interspersed throughout Ms. Pike's historical narrative." ~ New York Times