Asbury Park
STANDING near the empty corner of Kingsley and Fourth on a bright afternoon
as another summer was draining away, Dennis Dubrow got that wistful look in his
eyes that people here tend to get when they start talking about what Asbury Park
once was, when everybody was younger and nobody believed the summers would ever
end.
“Riding the circuit, on a summer night, around and around,” he said, nodding
toward the wide, untrafficked boulevard as if he could conjure again the slow
parade of cruising cars — a mile down Kingsley and then, one block over, a mile
back up Ocean Avenue along the back side of the boardwalk, and then around again
and again until you found what you were looking for.
Looming now between Mr. Dubrow and the boardwalk was the ragged landscape of
change: dirt hills, rubble mounds, utility trenches and shiny, hopeful signs
announcing new condominium towers. A pile driver beat a slow, steady bass line.
Behind him stood the old vaudeville theater from which he had just emerged — the
long-dormant Baronet, which Mr. Dubrow helped to open again as a $2 movie house
a few weeks ago, and which the City Council, at its meeting on Wednesday night,
may vote to seize by eminent domain.
“We saved a little bit of Asbury Park’s history here,” he said. “What’s going
to happen now, I don’t know.”
The Baronet and its two neighbors on an otherwise barren block have emerged
as the site of the latest skirmish in the long-running battle over Asbury’s
future. Next door is the Fast Lane, the shuttered nightclub where an impossibly
young U2 once played and where an unknown Jon Bon Jovi once
opened for Mr. Dubrow’s own long-forgotten band. Next door to that is Asbury
Lanes, a bowling alley that at night becomes a retro-hipster music scene, with
punk-rock karaoke nights and bands on a stage set up over the four middle lanes.
But the businesses stand in the way of the city’s ambitious waterfront
redevelopment plan, adopted with much fanfare and optimism in 2002 after two
decades of limbo — two decades during which corrupt officials, a bankrupt
developer, dueling lawsuits and economic uncertainty left this once-grand resort
to molder and crumble. The condos going up near the boardwalk are the first of
more than 3,000 planned for the waterfront, including the Baronet’s block.
“You can’t do the plan unless you’ve got the land,” said Deputy Mayor James
Bruno, an Asbury native and retired firefighter who, like many other longtime
residents, says he believes his hometown has endured too many rough years and is
not inclined to throw roadblocks in the way of the waterfront developer, Asbury
Partners. “We have an agreement with Asbury Partners — if they need properties
for eminent domain, we have to take them.”
The city has taken a handful of properties so far, but none was ever host to
the Three Stooges, live — as the Baronet once was — or provoked so many people
to protest at council meetings.
“The redevelopment plan is inherently flawed, and this is a great example of
why,” said Councilman James Keady, a five-year resident, who says the plan
neglects the rest of the city in favor of an upscale waterfront. He is opposed
to using eminent domain in this case. “It didn’t protect and enhance an
architectural and cultural asset like the Baronet Theater,” he said.
Built for vaudeville in 1913, the Baronet was screening triple-X movies by
the 1980’s. Patrick Fasano — Mr. Dubrow’s business partner, who has been
redeveloping properties in Asbury for a decade — bought the theater and the Fast
Lane for $575,000 apiece in December. Mr. Fasano made, by his account, $100,000
worth of repairs, and by July the vintage 1933 carbon-arc projectors were
showing real movies again. The Fast Lane remains closed, and Mr. Fasano’s plans
for it remain vague.
“We’re good enough to be here when nobody else wanted to be here, and then
when it’s all new and shiny, there can only be Olive Garden and Red Lobster?”
asked Mr. Fasano, who rejected an offer from Asbury Partners for the two
properties that was less than what he paid. (Asbury Lanes is not part of the
current eminent domain case.)
Larry Fishman, the chief operating officer of Asbury Partners, expressed
skepticism about Mr. Fasano’s motives. “The Baronet Theater and the Fast Lane
were both closed for many years before being acquired by the current owner and
were only opened in order to extract added value from the properties,” Mr.
Fishman said.
For now, though, Asbury Park once again has a movie theater, and the
Baronet’s spiffed-up facade is attracting the occasional curious visitor, like
the one who showed up a few weeks ago while Mr. Dubrow was working there.
“I said to him, ‘Jon Bon Jovi, you did a little bit better in the music
business than I did,’ ” Mr. Dubrow said. “And I told him, ‘If you ever want to
strap on a guitar, this stage is yours.’ ”
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