4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land

by Daniel Wolff

The story of the boardwalk town Bruce Springsteen made famous-and a quintessential portrait of small-town American democracy. When Bruce Springsteen called his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, he introduced a generation of fans to a fallen seaside resort town that came to represent working-class American life. But behind this archetypal small-town landscape lies a complicated past. Starting with the town's founding as a religious promised land, music journalist and poet Daniel Wolff plots a course through 130 years of entwined social and musical history, touching on John Philip Sousa, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and Frankie Lymon on the way to the town Bruce was born to run from. Out of the details of local history-the boardwalk in the Gilded Age; the celebrities who passed through, from Stephen Crane to Martin Luther King; sensational murder trials; the birth of Mob control; and a devastating mid-century "race riot"-emerges a universal story of one small town's fortunes. Told with grace and full of fascinating detail, Daniel Wolff's tour across thirteen decades of the Fourth of July in Asbury Park captures all the allure and heartbreak of the American dream reduced to blight and decay, with gentrification as the one hope for a return to its glory days.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Music, American History

256 pages, Hardcover

First published July 4, 2005

About the author

Grammy-nominated author Daniel Wolff's latest book is "Grown-up Anger: Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913." His previous books include "The Names of Birds," "The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back," "How Lincoln Learned to Read,""4th of July/Asbury Park" and "You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke.""

Reviews

[Paul Haspel · Rating 4 out of 5]

“4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” has always been one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. I love how the wistful quality of Danny Federici’s accordion part complements Springsteen’s gentle, downbeat delivery of a story of love-against-the-odds in a fading New Jersey beach town: “For me, this boardwalk life’s through, babe/You ought to quit this scene, too/Oh, Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us/This pier lights our carnival life on the water/Oh, love me tonight, and I promise I’ll love you forever…”

And therefore, I was delighted to find, in the local-interest section of a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Paramus, New Jersey, Daniel Wolff’s 4th of July, Asbury Park – a book that tells a compelling story of the rise and decline of the town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, as refracted through the song lyrics of the town’s most famous son.

Wolff has written a variety of works on American culture – often with an emphasis on music as an illustration of that culture, as with his book You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke. It is no surprise, therefore, that Wolff invokes the work of Bruce Springsteen in order to relate the story of Asbury Park as “the history of a place that never existed.” It sounds suitably Springsteen-esque when Wolff suggests in his introduction that Asbury Park’s story “is a history of the promised land” (p. 1).

It is surprising – though, in retrospect, it makes sense – to consider how Asbury Park got its name. Wolff points out that “Asbury Park was as much vision as reality. The contradictions were built right into its name. It was Asbury to honor Bishop Francis Asbury, the pioneer of American Methodism” (p. 2). And when New York businessman James A. Bradley undertook to bring the community of Asbury Park to life, he was said to have brought to the project “a vision of community not only, but of a particular kind of community, a wholesome community, a moral community” (p. 21).

The program for moral purification that leading Methodists like Asbury and Bradley brought to their design for Asbury Park was exceedingly austere. Ocean Grove, a town close to Asbury Park, had “prohibitions not only against music and dance, but liquor, tobacco, Sunday bathing, card playing, bicycle riding, peddlers, theater, cursing…” (p. 17). Asbury Park wasn’t exactly like Ocean Grove, but “Overall the city was designed to be a (religious) model for urban reform. As one historian put it, ‘Bradley viewed landscape as ideology’” (p. 22).

And yet, as early as 1885, there were signs of trouble in Bradley’s seaside Methodist paradise. The city was strictly segregated between a white east end, looking out from the boardwalk onto the sea, and an African American west end where services were minimal or nonexistent. Wolff records how deep and ugly the segregation of Asbury Park was: “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” (p. 70).

And the tourists who flocked to Asbury Park wanted amusement more often than they sought moral uplift. A young Stephen Crane, growing up in Asbury Park, was balefully amused by the hypocrisies of what Wolff calls “the Methodist war against amusement” (p. 55); and in a number of his early stories with an Asbury Park setting, Crane, who “heard the boardwalk’s promise of excitement, pleasure, desire”, chronicled a “battle not so much of good versus evil as morality versus sensuality” (p. 53). Here, as elsewhere, the future author of The Red Badge of Courage excelled at chronicling the contradictions between what people say they want and what they show they want.

James A. Bradley never gave up on his program of moral uplift – he ran successfully for the state senate, and in March of 1894 he cast the deciding vote in favour of a bill that “prohibited gambling in the entire state” (p. 70). But as the years went on, the apostles of moral uplift in Asbury Park took on a different look, particularly when the post-World War I years saw a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. “[W]ithin New Jersey, as one researcher noted, the Klan ‘felt most at home among the Methodists of Asbury Park’” (p. 97). Even as Asbury Park’s West End became a center for jazz and ragtime, the Klan intensified its recruitment efforts on the Jersey Shore. And all the while, “Asbury Park did its best to cover up these deep streams of hate. They weren’t, after all, good for business” (p. 104).

By 1956, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Garden State Parkway had opened, improving access from the big Eastern cities to the Jersey Shore. Wolff states that in those changing times, “There was something reassuringly nostalgic about Asbury, but by standing still, the city had also gotten seedier” (p. 143). Ironically, improved access made it easier for people to day-trip to Asbury, not spending the money they once would have on fancy dinners and overnight hotel stays. And that time in Asbury Park’s history was also linked with a big fight on the boardwalk – people called it “the Convention Hall Riot.” The fight was linked with an increasing presence, in Asbury Park, of teenage culture and its associated rock-and-roll music.

A race-related civil disturbance in 1970 hastened the decline of Asbury Park, in a turn of events that sounds a lot like what Springsteen chronicled in his 1984 song “My Hometown”:

In ’65, tension was running high
At my high school
Was a lot of fights ’tween the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night
In the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed – in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown….

Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows
And vacant stores….

And in a paradoxical development, Asbury Park’s troubles meant that (a) club owners were more willing than they might otherwise have been to book rock-music acts at their clubs and (b) aspiring rock musicians could afford to pay rents that had been lowered by necessity. A surprisingly active music scene in Asbury Park quickly brought forth a new young star, 20-year-old Bruce Springsteen. And when Springsteen invited the African American saxophonist Clarence Clemons to play a leading role in his new E Street Band, it made an important statement in the racially divided and sometimes violence-torn community of Asbury Park.

Springsteen’s first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973), was rich with stories of tough-luck young people, scraping by as best they could in the decaying beach town. Wolff’s appreciation for the way the young Springsteen made his town a vital part of his songwriting is palpable; he writes that “it would have been understandable if Springsteen had shied away from small-town subject matter” after the poor sales of Greetings from Asbury Park, “but his second record, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle, does just the opposite. Its ‘cast of characters,’ Springsteen would later say, ‘came vaguely from Asbury Park at the turn of the decade’” (p. 202), facing racial tension, economic decline, and long odds against success. The album draws a grim picture of a dying town where the “boardwalk is the opposite of a tourist attraction; it’s a place to leave” (p. 202).

And then Springsteen recorded Born to Run (1975), and his career took off; and while he continued to record albums of songs that told stories of the struggles of working-class Americans, those stories generally ceased to be linked specifically with the struggles of Asbury Park. Instead, Springsteen became a chronicler of the troubles of working-class Americans in economically and socially troubled Asbury Park-style towns across the United States.

Yet Wolff points out that Springsteen did eventually return, lyrically speaking, to his musical hometown. His 2001 song “My City of Ruins,” written specifically about Asbury Park, refers to “boarded-up windows” and “empty streets” as the song’s speaker laments the absence of a loved one – “Now, there’s tears on the pillow, darlin’, where we slept/And you took my heart when you left/Without your sweet kiss, my soul is lost, my friend/Tell me, how do I begin again?/My city’s in ruins” - and the song took on new significance in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Weeks after the attacks, Springsteen sang the song at a September 11th telethon, something that Wolff sees as an example of how “Springsteen once again uses Asbury to reflect the state of the nation” (p. 237).

Wolff concludes this thoughtful and well-written study with a description of the troubled state of Asbury Park as of the book’s publication, and the reader finishes 4th of July, Asbury Park hoping that, one way or another, this often-unlucky city by the sea will heed Springsteen’s “My City of Ruins” admonition: “Come on, rise up/Come on, rise up.”

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walk into just about any Barnes and Noble in the U.S., and you'll find a local section towards the front with a decent amount of fluff- regional attractions, legends and ghost stories (not that there's anything wrong with legends and ghost stories), books generally oriented towards tourists. And considering the resemblance of this book's cover to a postcard*, you could be forgiven for assuming that it's another superficial and hastily cobbled-together collection of photojournalism designed in this case to promote the Jersey Shore. In fact, it's a serious-minded and quite critical look at the now over 150-year history of my hometown, where I lived until I was 14.

Five years ago, I had no interest in reading about Asbury Park. After all, I vaguely remember thinking, what kind of loser ends up pushing 40 right back where he started, instead of getting back out there in the world? As soon as this pandemic is over... Right. But now that I am exactly that kind of loser, at least for the present moment, now that I jog through Asbury (usually along the boardwalk) 2-3 times a week and have even committed to the horrible cliche of setting what I hope will be my first finished novel in the town I grew up in, I've been growing unexpectedly obsessed with it. Wolff's book was a good reminder that there's a hell of a lot I don't know, even about a place that you'd think would be intimately familiar to me.

Even the fact that Asbury's founder James Bradley originally imagined the place as a buttoned-down Methodist community was news to me, and a little hard to square. After all, I've always associated local excessive morality with neighboring Ocean Grove to the south, a small "dry" town run by a religious cul...I'm sorry, a religious community, big difference, my mistake...run by Methodists in any case, and where I worked as a beach-badge checker for two summers during college, '04 and '05. One of my responsibilities was keeping people (beach-badge or no) off the sand on Sundays until 12 noon, which was either supposed to encourage church-going or morning masturbation. We were all left to draw our own conclusions about that, though it was probably the former now that I think about it, and I always had the impression that the other days of the week were nearly just as much of a laugh riot for the residents of Ocean Grove, most of whom are old enough to remember when they first heard about that rotten Hitler fellow stirring up trouble in Germany.

James Bradley, when he purchased the land that would become Asbury Park back in 1871, evidently intended a similar kind of civic life for his city, with bans on drinking, smoking, card-playing, cursing, dancing, listening to music that bypassed the intellect and made a direct appeal to "the sensory center", lying too close to your lover on the beach, and basically on anything else that makes life remotely worth living. Unfortunately for him, as Wolff reports here, Asbury had by 1885 "over 100 illegal saloons", which I have to pause and note is a little mind-boggling to me. "Illegal" after all suggests something that's out of the way, hidden, but where the hell would you hide 100 illegal saloons in Asbury Park? I feel like you could barely fit 100 saloons in plain sight, in a row, from the north end to the south. Wolff calls Asbury a "city" throughout this book, and a google search tells me that technically this is true- a "small seaside city", according to Wikipedia- but it is not a city in the way that, say, Denver is a city. To be clear, Asbury is less than 2 square miles, there are currently about 15,000 residents, and in 1885 the city had not yet even annexed the West Side (more on this in a second). I really don't know where you'd hide 100 saloons. In any case, you can only imagine the pain the Methodists felt when they read, in 1886, this (awesome) line about Asbury Park in The New York Times: "They do say...that it is one of the wickedest places in the world." The writer Stephen Crane, who lived there in the last decades of the 19th century and enjoyed mocking Bradley in print, perceived that there was a battle going on in the city between "morality and sensuality."

Predictably, I couldn't help finding something very romantic in Asbury's long history of "decadence", corruption and crime- especially when it came to things that shouldn't actually have been crimes. Learning, for example, that the city became such a center for rum-running during prohibition that our stretch of the Jersey shoreline was dubbed "The Rum Coast" had me pumping my fist. I'm sorry, but old-timey crime featuring guys with names like "Diamond Jim Fisk" is the best. Less romantic was the presence of the Klan, who had a bigger presence in New Jersey than I'd realized, and who also, according to a researcher quoted by Wolff, "felt most at home among the Methodists of Asbury Park." I've probably already gone too far without mentioning that segregation seems to have been built into Bradley's conception of the city from the very beginning, and maybe the proof is in the pudding. I was born 104 years after Bradley founded Asbury, in 1985, and even as a kid I understood intuitively that the West Side, across the train tracks and cut-off from the boardwalk, was the poor, disadvantaged and black side of town (though the East Side wasn't doing great in those days, either).

Bradley basically ran the city for about 30 years- and then, around the turn of the century, a group of businessmen staged a coup, using quasi-legal means to wrest away control of the valuable beachfront. What Wolff describes as the "Merchants' Vision" of the city differed from Bradley's in that the merchants were willing to accommodate the vices of the masses by allowing for Satanic amusements such as slot machines, pinball, the sale of liquor and so on; but they were similar in believing that the city's economy should revolve around the boardwalk's service industry, and that wealthy white tourists would only come if they felt "safe." And it's in that respect that Bradley's "moral" vision, the merchants' mercenary drive, and the openly racist beliefs of the KKK all aligned, since "safety" for wealthy white tourists meant keeping blacks and other minorities confined to one small area of the beach- or preferably to the other side of the railroad tracks, where living conditions lagged far behind those on the East Side.

There are more Springsteen lyrics analyzed in greater depth here than I would normally desire in a reading experience (I grew up at the Jersey Shore- I don't need "Born to Run" lodged in my head any more than it already is), but it could be much worse- Wolff could have talked about Bon Jovi- and of course it's quite appropriate, since Bruce is practically synonymous with Asbury. It's also of a piece with the way Wolff highlights the city's musical history, many of the contributors to which I was completely ignorant of. But I think music is such a big part of this book not because Wolff means to wow readers with the legacy of celebrity, but because he wants to show how official resistance to "anarchic" and "ethnic" forms of music over the years- from ragtime and jazz in the early 20th century even to Springsteen's early r & b-influenced rock n' roll- though of course couched in talk of morality, in fact always reflected a determination to not think about "the complicated world right outside", a determination to ignore the reality of the way other people had to live. City officials' greatest fears must have seemed to be coming true after Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (a "crossover" group with minority members who nevertheless "appeared and sounded" white) performed at the Convention Center just before the Fourth of July in the summer of '56, a concert that ended with fighting in the streets and which led to the immortal newspaper headline CITY TO BAN ROCK 'N' ROLL.

By the Fourth of July, Asbury's local paper was less interested in the cause than the cure- which struck them as obvious. The City needed more law and order. "Whereas psychologists might help explain it", the Asbury Park Evening Press editorialized, "only police vigilance will prevent recurrences." Never mind conditions on the West Side...the council felt it knew the cause of the trouble. It wasn't substandard housing or segregated schools. Acting mayor Hines had been right there in Convention Hall when Frankie Lymon had started singing. He'd seen that strange look come over the teenagers. He knew it was the music that had done it. The government of Asbury Park unanimously agreed there would be no more teen dances that summer...

This is a short book, under 160 pages, but I've never felt so old as when I opened it and saw how small the print was. There's actually a lot of information here, and a lot of ideas swirling around. But in short, by choosing a handful of Fourths of July from the past century-and-a-half, I'd say that the story Wolff tells is one in which the profits derived from the boardwalk never make it to the rest of the city, and never actually benefit the long-time residents. Some of the leaps in time are a little jarring- towards the end of the book for example he jumps from 1978 in one chapter to 2001 in the next, which actually leaves out the entire time I lived in Asbury, but he also uses the vantage point of 2001 to describe the changes of the preceding decades. In 1970, when "the city barely had an economy" and 35% of the black population lived below the poverty line, a good deal of the city burned down in what were then called race riots. It probably goes without saying that the response of local government and police, by and large, was not to try to understand or address living conditions on the West Side, but to respond with force. By 1980, unemployment was over 12%, and a quarter of all the city's residents were living below the poverty line. What scant social services there were became fewer once Reagan got into office. Wolff quotes the black owner of a West Side market from that time: "Reagan is reality. People have got to understand Uncle Sam is not your uncle...it's now sink or swim." And by the time I was growing up in Asbury, in the early 90s, it was honestly a pretty scary place, full of boarded-up buildings and faded grandeur. Looking back, there was something very eerie about how deserted the beachfront always was, particularly with the giant creepy clown face of "Tillie", the city's mascot, staring at you from the green exterior of Palace Amusements. In his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, Screaming Trees singer and seasoned drug-procurer Mark Lanegan described feeling unnerved one night in the early 90s, while walking along the boardwalk and looking for someone to buy heroin from in "the dying tourist town of Asbury Park."

There's an additional chapter in my edition of this book from 2020, in which Wolff describes the rise of the "new" Asbury Park, the one I jog through a few times a week these days. Lots of tattooed guys who look like they're in black-metal bands and their good-looking girlfriends. Lots of openly gay people, for that matter (I highlight this only because, when I was a kid, Asbury was not exactly a mecca of alternative culture or sexuality). Every ethnicity and every color. Of course, you have to pay to get on the beach in Asbury now (between Memorial Day and Labor Day you do, anyway). It's no longer littered with garbage and hypodermic needles, after all, but mostly rather with affable middle-aged Jerseyites from out-of-town, 2.3 kids and coolers in tow, wearing industrial-strength sunscreen and listening to Bon Jovi, Foo Fighters and Taylor Swift for a few hours before heading to one of the boardwalk bars for plastic cups of Miller Lite and a Met or Yankee game. But I can't lie; the boardwalk used to be a scary place, and I think it would've been even if I'd been a 40-year-old man at the time. And sometimes I catch myself preferring the banality of suburbanites to the fear of getting mugged or worse, to the possibility of violence that always seemed close to the surface in the old Asbury.

And yet Wolff's account of the changes also gave me a lot of pause. I have to admit that I initially rolled my eyes a bit at some of his commentary towards the beginning of the book, at the notion that the story of Asbury could somehow stand-in for the story of "America itself"- I'm a little tired of the idea that you can't just learn about an interesting out-of-the-way place for its own sake without having to turn it into a referendum on the whole damn country, and I just figured that Wolff was understandably trying to draw in as many non-local readers as he could- but in the book's overall theme of a "morality" that contains no actual moral wisdom but is instead just a front for the acquisition of wealth, power and authority, and of that authority's perpetual refusal to address the needs of everyday people, responding with coercion and force instead, I think he does tell a story that is at least broadly relevant, if not the only possible one.

Regarding the "new Asbury", the first line of Wolff's last chapter is "The future has landed." We learn that new Asbury's beachfront condos go for anywhere from $400,000 to a million dollars, and come with the incentive that residents need not pay taxes towards the city's public schools. And we learn that the revitalization of the beachfront, despite the local government's claims that tourist revenue will "trickle down" to the rest of the city, has had basically zero effect on the percentage of residents living in poverty (29% in 2000 to 30% in 2020). Considering such realities in the context of the way financial inequality has exploded in the last half-century in the country at large, it's hard not to see the similarities between the new Asbury and the old one, as well as- more broadly speaking- between today's Gilded Age and the one over a century ago. The blurbs on the back of the book of course acknowledge Asbury's problems while concluding with flourishes like "...the song Wolff hears is still one of hope", but I'm not sure I finished this account particularly hopeful about the future. Call me a cynic, but Asbury's wealthy beachfront archipelago that does nothing to bring the rest of the town along with it, and whose constituents will no doubt respond with force if made to feel the slightest bit uncomfortable (while the town's history is sold to us in the form of $25 t-shirts), seems a lot like a harbinger. Or maybe it's just already overly familiar.

(* = this formulation made a little more sense when I thought I was reviewing the edition with the Convention Center on the cover. Seems this is the edition with the majority of reviews, though.)

[CB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asbury Park was my main haunt while I lived in New Jersey. The first time I drove through Asbury Park, it was just surreal. The rusted, unfinished skeleton of a highrise condo loomed out of an eerie fog rolling in off the ocean. The place was a mess, the decaying remains of a Victorian-era amusement park and resort town.

I loved it. It was full of broken dreams and bad deals. It reminded me of Cleveland.

[Rich Flammer · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have an interest in history, music, the New Jersey Shore (sans Snooky and The Situation), capitalism, segregation, Puritanism, racial issues, religion, Stephen Crane, literature, Asbury Park, urban renewal, municipal government, political corruption, Bruce Springsteen, or the tragedy and vacuousness of American values and hope, I'd highly recommend this book.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent much of my life every summer visiting Asbury Park, so I can verify that the author has done his research and has captured the spirit of the city on the Jersey shore. Author Daniel Wolff has woven together tales of James Bradley, the founder of Asbury Park; Stephen Crane, the author of Red Badge of Courage, who spent his formative teen years as a resident; of course, the beginnings of Bruce Springsteen and members of his E Street Band; all under the umbrella of race relations throughout the years. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

[Freddie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid history of the former and returning Resort town. Covers a lot of its beginnings, the racial tensions, and the hope that would eventually bring a new life to the town. Also clearly written by a fan of Bruce Springsteen's.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book by historian Daniel Wolff, which uses the 4th of July date to frame several points in the civic and musical history of this famous city by the shore. Two minor shortcomings: parts of the book are a little dense with detail, and the history ends at 2005 (the book was written in 2009). I would like to see an updated paperback version that takes in Asbury Park's current revival.

[Jeffrey Falk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This well-written, entertaining chronicle is not sufficient to learn the history of this fascinating, monumental little city. For example, it omits it's pre-city history as a borough, and the "SS Morro Castle" disaster is barely mentioned. It is a necessary read for all interested in its subject, however.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting read about the history of Asbury Park, how it came to be, and it's slow and steady collapse. There are some definite oddities to the town yet it also sounds like many other boomtowns across the USA.

[MaryEllen Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book! great weaving of local Jersey shore history, music history and social history.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing up in an area in economic, physical, and social decline, "you gotta get out while you're young."

[Mkmsales · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating info on a place I visited often. Adds a different perspective on events I saw from way outside. Very insightful.

[E · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eloquent and depressing, about a city that has captured my imagination. Slightly more dry than I would prefer, but overall fascinating and thoroughly researched.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't really like it.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful history of what Asbury Park always aspired to be but never quite managed.

[Carol Lutjens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating read!