Nyack, N.Y.
THIS Fourth of July on the Jersey shore, fireworks will bloom over a little
city called Asbury Park, as they have for more than 130 years. The rockets' red
glare will show whole blocks in ruins, as if they had been bombed or washed
away. And here and there, between the rotting casino and the welfare motels, you
will be able to make out the vague outline of new luxury condos rising, of
restaurants bustling with valet parking. It's an all-American landscape. In a
nation that's taken to measuring its economic health by the number of housing
starts, Asbury bears all the marks of a city that's coming back. But as what?
And for whom?
Those questions have echoed throughout Asbury Park's history. Back in 1870,
the city's founder, James Bradley, a New York industrialist, set out to create a
residential resort that was a "moral community." A strict Methodist, Bradley
dotted his beachfront with hand-painted signs calling for "modesty of apparel."
He ran beer wagons out of town to make sure Asbury stayed dry. And he argued for
keeping "coloreds" off the beach.
Bradley claimed to have nothing against "colored people." But his resort
catered to a certain class of tourist. If he allowed the races to mingle, it
wouldn't do "justice," as he wrote, "to the huge amount of capital invested in
Asbury Park." For him, it wasn't an issue of prejudice; it was just good
business sense. Why, the same would apply to Italian ditch-diggers. Bradley was
against what he called "all nuisances white or black."
The novelist Stephen Crane grew up in Bradley's city, rebelling against his
widowed mother's own fervent brand of Methodism. Crane believed Asbury's
"elementary sanity" would lead to a particular kind of American ruin: a "mental
death." To thrive, Crane thought, democracy needed the lively, honky-tonk mix he
saw on July 4, 1888: "It was almost impossible to move. Baby carriages made
confusion; babies made noise; likewise the torpedoes and firecrackers, rockets,
candles and toy pistols. The Pier was alive with people."
Bradley's vision won out. He built what today we would call a service
economy, with a gated community on the city's east side. "Asbury Park creates
nothing," as Crane put it, explaining how out of place working people looked in
the resort town. "It does not make; it merely amuses."
Inland, across the tracks and out of sight, lived the black cleaning women,
the Italian laborers, the Jewish merchants who made the city work.
As it turned out, an economy based on exclusivity functioned in fits and
starts — and only for some. It was the developers and the city officials who got
rich. From the powerful influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920's through the
race riots that leveled the West Side on the weekend of July 4, 1970, the city's
divisions only grew. By the time Bruce Springsteen was using the imagery of
Asbury's boardwalk to sing about "the runaway American dream," middle-class
whites had mostly fled to the suburbs. The 2000 census found three-quarters of
Asbury's roughly 17,000 residents were members of minority groups, and 30
percent of its citizens lived in poverty. It had become a miniature, seaside
version of inner cities across the nation.
Today, Asbury is betting its future on high-end development. It plans to
secure its beachfront with more than 3,000 luxury condos. The Palace Amusements
park has been torn down and in its place are town houses advertising "secure
garages." There's a $1.5 billion plan to remake the boardwalk as a retail and
entertainment complex that, according to Asbury Park development literature,
will "preserve the area's historic character."
As Asbury Park celebrates its past, it hopes not to repeat it. But the
assumption is that the beachfront will have to cater to those who can afford
million-dollar apartments. That's just good business sense. And it's not clear
how the anticipated flow of revenue is supposed to reach inland to the empty
blocks of the West Side. Can a city determined to do justice to capital also do
justice to the people who live there today? Or are they, in the new Asbury Park,
the same old nuisance?
"Rise up," Bruce Springsteen calls out in his most recent song about Asbury,
"My City of Ruins." After 9/11, the lyrics took on new meaning. And as he sang
it in New Orleans this spring, the crowd swayed and wept in recognition. The
questions at the heart of the Asbury Park story are as old as Independence Day,
as familiar as fireworks. How do we build a nation with liberty and justice for
all?
