So who are you quoting and what do I have to do with it? I moved to
NJ, October, 1970, 3 months after the riot. I wasn't here for Asbury
Park's "Glory Days". In 1960, I was only 15 and in high school. My
glory days were at Xavier, in New Orleans. When I arrived, the
downtown was still vibrant and booming. The furniture store on Main
St., (Bankers), was a burned out shell. The Army-Navy Store, Pix
Shoes and Bob & Irvings Mens Store, was what's left of that block of
Main St., now, where the Municipal building stands.
Asbury Park has less than 18,000 residents and I had just moved from a
City of half a million! Are you comparing apples with oranges? Tell
me something I don't know! A place as small but famous, is what I do
know of this place. Ask the Blacks on the West Side, what Asbury Park
means to them! I would never delight in the failure of a place
struggling to restore itself.
> I just can't understand being seemingly obsessed with ap's
> progress or lack of when you don't live here. to the point of brutal
> criticisms.. .
I touched on this with Sharon a while back vis-a-vis New Orleans. You
don't have to live someplace to either want desperately for it to
succeed or to take delight in its failure. Asbury Park is,
unwittingly, the figurative repository for all the hallmarks of the
continuing "great experiment" that is America. Race, class,
capitalism, aspirationalism, regionalism, crime, culture, government,
etc. It's all there in one tiny square mile.
--- In AsburyPark@yahoogroups.com, "sandpiper15" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > what is hanging in my mind is this idea of the "promise" that
> > sandpiper pointed out to me, and my own lack of understanding about
> > how people have mythologized this place, expect so many things from
> it
> > etc.
>
> Well that's exactly it. Among outsiders, those who "remember"
> Asbury's "glory days" and wish for them to some day "come back" are
> doing just that - mythologizing. Baby boomers who spent their
> childhood summers in Asbury Park likely did so mostly on the
> boardwalk or the circuit, with the occasional foray onto the old
> Cookman. They were promised, via the chronological sleight-of-hand
> that is youth, that not only was Asbury Park a cotton-candy
> summertime fantasyland, but also that its status as such would last
> forever. They remember the technicolor images you see on the
> postcards for sale on eBay. The carousel and the tilt-a-whirl and the
> motorboats on Wesley Lake and the Skee-Ball and the ionized air of
> the bumper cars. But what 9 or 10 year old visitor in 1955 or 1960
> was going to stop to consider what life west of Main Street must be
> like? What postcard ever featured the segregated entrances to the
> Bangs Avenue school? If the last memory of actually being in Asbury
> Park that outsiders have is of riding the carousel and playing skee-
> ball, and that represented a very happy time in their lives, then the
> realization that those rides and amusements disappeared in such a
> violent and un-fantasy-like manner will naturally inspire the wistful
> hope for the return of that fantasyland to some degree. The promise
> was broken. They want it fulfilled.
>
> > I just can't understand being seemingly obsessed with ap's
> > progress or lack of when you don't live here. to the point of brutal
> > criticisms...
>
> I touched on this with Sharon a while back vis-a-vis New Orleans. You
> don't have to live someplace to either want desperately for it to
> succeed or to take delight in its failure.
------------------------------------
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