4th of July, Asbury Park Read online

  4TH OF JULY,

  ASBURY PARK

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke

  Work Sonnets

  IN COLLABORATION WITH ERNEST C. WITHERS

  The Memphis Blues Again

  Negro League Baseball

  4 TH OF JULY,

  ASBURY PARK

  A HISTORY OF THE

  PROMISED LAND

  DANIEL WOLFF

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 2005 by Daniel Wolff

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or

  reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

  from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied

  in critical articles or reviews. For information address

  Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable

  products made from wood grown in well-managed forests.

  The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental

  regulations of the country of origin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wolff, Daniel J.

  4th of July, Asbury Park : a history of the promised land /

  Daniel Wolff.-1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-59691-942-6

  1. Arts— New Jersey— Asbury Park— History. 2. Rock music— New Jersey—

  Asbury Park— History. 3. Rock groups— New Jersey— Asbury Park— History.

  4. Asbury Park (NJ.)— History. 5. Asbury Park (NJ.)— Intellectual life.

  6. Asbury Park (NJ.)— Social conditions. I. Title: Fourth of July, Asbury

  Park. II. Title.

  F144.A6W65 2005

  974.9'46-dc22

  2004026965

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury USA in 2005

  This paperback edition published in 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America

  by Quebecor World Fairfield

  For the ones who have a notion

  Fellow Citizens: Pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called to speak here today? . . . This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

  —Frederick Douglass

  Rochester, New York

  July 4, 1852

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1870

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1885

  AMERICAN DAY, 1892

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1903

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1924

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1941

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1956

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1970

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1978

  EPILOGUE: FOURTH OF JULY, 2001

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1870

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1885

  AMERICAN DAY, 1892

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1903

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1924

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1941

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1956

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1970

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1978

  EPILOGUE: FOURTH OF JULY, 2001

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS IS THE history of a place that never existed.

  This is a history of the promised land.

  There is a city called Asbury Park, a" place on the Jersey shore occupied by real people, where actual buildings stand in various stages of decrepitude and renewal, where the Atlantic Ocean breaks on the sand. And this book tells what happened there over the past 130 years.

  But the purpose of this book is to tell the history of what Asbury Park promised.

  These days, most of us know that promise through the music of Bruce Springsteen. If we've heard about the city at all, it's as the beat-up shore town where Springsteen came of age. From his first album (which he called Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.) to his breakthrough record, Born to Run, Springsteen's jangly, almost ragtime rock & roll kept evoking the vision of a collapsing seaside amusement park. Lovers threw each other in the sand; calliopes wheezed in the background. And as his sound evolved, he also refined the way he used Asbury Park. It became a "town full of losers ' the ultimate backwater, the exhausted remains of the American dream. Against that romantic landscape, Springsteen cast himself as the young rock & roller "pulling out of here to win."

  The music made Springsteen famous— and Asbury Park famous, again. Soon millions of fans here and abroad could sing along with every word. When Mary's dress waved on "Thunder Road," when her front door slammed, audiences cheered the dream of breaking free. Somewhere out on the highway, Springsteen promised, there was the chance to see if love was real. And though he made it clear that chance involved leaving the dusty beach town, Asbury Park was where it all started: the beginning of the run toward freedom.

  Farm kids who had never seen the ocean, kids from nice suburban homes who were born to stay put, took Asbury as their own. We recognized the fortune-teller, Madam Marie, and could find our way along the dinging boardwalk. When Springsteen sang about driving the circuit— down Kingsley Avenue and back up Ocean— we were with him, steering with one hand, nonchalant. We knew the backstreets, the darkness at the edge of town.

  And that's because Asbury Park never existed.

  At the peak of its popularity, in the early twentieth century, it wasn't really a city at all but an amusement. The economy was driven by spectacle: one hundred thousand people showing up to watch the annual Baby Parade, where hundreds of toddlers dressed up as adults and competed in a kind of miniature Miss America.

  Before that, the great American writer Stephen Crane saw his hometown of Asbury Park as a symbol of the young nation's hopes and its hypocrisy, late-nineteenth-century America summed up in the smiling, sunburned tourists paying to ride wooden horses in circles.

  And even before that, at its founding, 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. The town rose on the Jersey dunes as a model religious community: a sort of mirage shimmering above earthly temptations. At the same time, the city's founder, James Bradley, saw it as a park. Not a community for its residents as much as an attraction that aimed to draw, entertain, and milk distant urban populations. For years, Asbury Park condemned "fun" as just another drug to corrupt the masses, meanwhile pushing that drug with every Ferris wheel and band concert.

  So when Springsteen arrived, a hundred years after the founding, he moved into a city that was already a symbol. It had been put up not just as a place to live but to mean something. Generations of musicians had already used that symbol to make popular music. From turn-of-the-century oompah bands through the early days of jazz to the beginnings of rock & roll, Asbury Park had been part of a shore sound— beach music— that was all about the sometimes contradictory ideas of freedom and fun and democracy.

  If anything had changed by Springsteen's time, it was the understanding of what those promises meant— and how they'd been broken. Even as his E Street Band was forming, Asbury's ghetto erupted into flames. Visitors tanned on the beach while the inner city burned, and the New York Times editorialized that this racial violence had a "particular irony." But that was only true for those who had refused to see behind the grinning mask of amuseme
nt. For the people who lit the fires, Asbury's runaway American dream was as old as its history.

  While this book traces that history in some detail, the narrative skips from decade to decade. That's because it's following the idea of the place: the changes in meaning. How the Methodist dream became a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. How the principles of capitalism were rooted in the Mob. The different signals that Asbury is giving, today, when it promises a "shorefront revival."

  The specifics are the story, and Asbury Park is a unique place. But this isn't just a local history. The brand of Northern racism that characterizes Asbury Park is only exceptional to the degree that it was publicly debated and held up as a national example. Other characteristics that seemed to set the nineteenth-century resort town apart became, in the twentieth century, commonplace. Asbury pursued the trickle-down theory of economics before the name had been invented. It ran a service economy while much of the United States still saw its future in manufacturing and agriculture. It helped create the model for Las Vegas, Disney World, the mall.

  Is Asbury Park, then, a typical American city? At first glance, no. Although, like communities across the country, it was shaped by the major issues of the day— from Prohibition to the Great Depression to the invention of the teenager. Maybe Asbury isn't as special as it's always claimed? Maybe every city, from Dubuque to Paris, is a kind of promise?

  Easier to answer is the question of whether Asbury Park's history can stand in for the nation's history— the way Springsteen used it. The answer is yes, of course. That's what the place was built to do.

  Finally, this book is, in a couple of senses, rock &L roll history. For one thing, Asbury's music has always been key to what's going on, and the story of the city inevitably traces the origins of the rock & roll sound and attitude. But also, the history of Asbury Park has the shape and feel of rock &. roll. It keeps jumping to what moves us, hurrying to the next climax, deliberately repeating itself as it tries to get and keep our attention.

  So, this is the history of a particular city on the Jersey shore. Which is a history of the promised land. Which is a place that never existed— and has proved almost impossible to leave.

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1870

  A BURNT-OUT, middle-aged businessman is walking down Broadway. Day in, day out, for more than a decade, he's run a brush factory: hairbrushes, horse brushes, paintbrushes, scrub brushes. The business, which he started from scratch, has made him rich— and has taken its toll both physically and spiritually. He's just turned forty, is married but childless. Self-made, he wonders why he worked so hard and sacrificed so much. Even his deep Methodist faith doesn't seem able to sustain him.

  Coming up Broadway, he notices a fellow Methodist, and the two men stop to chat. The friend is the treasurer of a brand-new real estate venture on the Jersey shore. The businessman asks how it's going, and his friend is all optimism. Well, very well; in fact, if he puts his name down now, early, he can have his choice of building lots at a special price.

  The last thing the brush manufacturer wants is more responsibility. But for a while now, his doctor, his wife, and his friends have been advising him that he needs a break. They all seem to agree that sea air and a trip out of New York City would make all the difference. In fact, he'd been planning a trip to Europe.

  "Well," he answers, without giving it much thought, "put me down for two."

  A few days later, he and some of his friends decide they'll go look at the development and pick out his new lots. Taking a ferry across New York harbor to Port Monmouth, he rides from there to Eatontown, New Jersey, by train, has dinner in a country inn, and then travels on what he calls "one of the worst roads that could well be imagined." It's a turnpike, a new one, but in May of 1870 even a new road is a backbreaking mixture of sand, mud, plank supports, and potholes. And the most common means of transportation, something known as a Jersey wagon, is a square, straight-sided contraption with hard flat seats and unforgiving wooden springs. "As free from graceful lines as those of a readymade coffin," one contemporary described it, and it helped make the trip down the shore "a weariness to the flesh and spirit." At the end of the long ride, "the more robust were generally able to climb out but the feebler ones . . . had to be lifted." Given the businessman's health, he may have needed assistance.

  He's set down in a stretch of empty sand and scrub oak. Construction on the new town hasn't begun, and between the green flies buzzing around his head and the dunes stretching on like a desert without shade or structure, the businessman might well have turned right around, gone back to the city, found his so-called friend, and asked for his money back. Instead, he is, in his words, "completely taken" and decides to return as soon as possible and set up camp.

  The very emptiness calls him. It appeals to his sense of adventure, his nose for business, and his religious beliefs: the qualities that have carried James A. Bradley this far in life. Born on Valentine's Day, 1830, at the Old Blazing Star Inn, in Rossville on Staten Island, Bradley was the son of an Irish farmer with a drinking problem and an English mother. He was baptized a Catholic. When he was five, his father died, probably from drink. Two years later, his mother married Charles Smith, and they followed the stream of people moving into Manhattan. In those years before the Civil War, the city's population was exploding, from 130,000 people to more than a million.

  The Smiths moved to Cherry Street on the Bowery, once a fairly exclusive neighborhood catering to "Gentry and Seafaring men alike." But in 1837, the year they moved, a general economic panic had embraced the city. That April alone, 128 firms went under. Railroads fell, banks collapsed, and building construction stopped. The city's working class crowded into tiny, miserable tenement apartments. The poor sewer system and primitive health services led to massive outbreaks of typhus and cholera. Bradley's stepfather set up a notions store to sell a little bit of everything: groceries, meat, clothing, shoes. He and his seven-year-old son (now known as Jim Smith) had a peddler's wagon. Their favorite spot was down on Catherine Street outside the new specialty store, Lord &L Taylor.

  The panic of 1837 fed a growing evangelical movement. Preachers predicted doomsday and railed against the evils of drink. They also attacked the immigrant religion, Catholicism. New York City's Catholic community was still small— accounting for only eight of the city's 150 churches— but it was easy to blame the "papist" minority not only for corrupting morals but for taking jobs. At grade school, Jim Smith would have studied textbooks full of anti-Catholic prejudice. Did people know he was Catholic? Sometime in those early years, he began insisting that people call him Bradley, but it isn't clear whether he let on about his religion.

  As a teenager, Bradley hung with a rowdy, immigrant crowd. He was a Bowery Boy (which designated both the geographical area and one of the gangs that ran the Lower East Side) and soon developed what he called "a fondness for wine." That was only one of Cherry Street's temptations. By the early 1840s, the Bowery had become a working-class pleasure zone. Cockfights were staged next to billiard halls. Hookers waited outside former mansions. And the small hotels offered free "vaudevilles" to attract customers. These included a little bit of everything, from ventriloquism to dancing, circus acts to comics.

  The young Bradley loved the shows, often going to three a week. As a thirteen-year-old, he was in the right place to have witnessed the development of one of the most popular styles of the day: the minstrel show. In a Bowery theater in February 1843, a quartet of white performers put on blackface and, using a heavy "nigger" accent, helped start what would become a national fad. The Virginia Minstrels played reels and jigs, told down-home plantation jokes, and loped across the stage in what they called the Virginia Jungle Dance. Negroes were barred from Bowery theaters, but minstrel shows became the rage. Soon, Bradley's mother, Hannah, decided that her teenage son was learning too much too fast and needed a change of scene. She shipped him out to Bloomfield, New Jersey, across the river and north of Newark, where a friend from her childhood owned a farm. Ji
m spent a year in Jersey milking cows and feeding chickens. He hated it. Twice he ran away and was caught trying to catch a ferry back into the city. Finally, at the age of sixteen, he returned to the Lower East Side. Apparently, he'd been straightened out. He got a job, anyway, as an apprentice to a local brush manufacturer and began his career.

  It was hard, hot work in a cramped space that stunk of hog bristle and glue. The animal hair had to be washed by hand, dried in a hot room, bleached, sorted for length, shaped, tied, glued, and inserted into a handle. Depending on the type of brush, a man might make six to eight dozen a day. The hours were long, and when work was over, Bradley returned to a crowded, narrow tenement life amongst thousands of others fighting to survive.

  His transformation from worker to successful businessman began when he was eighteen. That year, his older sister died. At the funeral service— held at a Methodist camp meeting outside Brooklyn— Bradley saw the light. His mother was Methodist, and now he converted to what was, in that era, a "distinctively middle-class creed." Leaving behind his immigrant religion was a move up and out— a chance to reinvent himself— and Bradley went at it with a fervor. He became a model employee. By the time he'd turned twenty-one, he was foreman at the brush factory. He married Helen Packard, an educated Rutgers student: timid, gentle, and devout. The two of them resolved to start their own business and, through extraordinary self-discipline, managed to save one thousand dollars. That, a visitor would recall, was an enormous sum, especially from "one of a class which save so little."