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Coffee Bar Coming to the Asbury Park Library? TriCityNews December 2009 Wouldn’t that be insanely great?! A shot of espresso would put the library at Grand and First Avenues on the map as a hip place for free thinkers. A rival to the Monmouth County Library System’s eastern branch in suburban Shrewsbury. ‘Whenever [coffee] has been introduced it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink…its function has always been to make people think,” says William Ukers in ~ what else? ~ the book “All About Coffee”. Libraries have the same effect: Revolutionary thought. They are the level playing field in any community. People of all races, abilities, genders, and religious beliefs can meet there to pursue new ideas. As library director Bob Stewart and his staff mull the possibility of serving a pot of coffee with their tomes of prose, here’s what else is brewing on Library Square: Hosting a music exhibit from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. That’s right. The Smithsonian. Coming to Asbury Park. With the hard work of Dennis Carroll from ArtsCAP, Tom Gilmour of the UEZ, Johna Karpinski of the Asbury Park Historical Society (fresh from its uber success with the Morro Castle 75th anniversary commemorative), and an assist by yours truly who’ll loan items from the Pike Archives. Want to know who else is supporting this revolutionary initiative to bring our nation’s treasures to the shore’s capital music city? Cindi Donofrio, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce. She’s got the perfect drum-beating job to help businesses come up with fresh, new music-related promotions and site events. She’s considering breakfast meetings whose guest speakers come from the music biz. Hey, you guys teaching music management at Monmouth University: Call Cindi if you want the mic. The Smithsonian’s New Harmonies ~ hard not to insert the word Jersey there ~ highlights the roots of American music. So, we’re reaching out to Tyrone R. McAllister. He’s the man, according to the Director of Good Times (a/k/a Tom Gilmour) who, when not upholding law and order in the city-by-the-sea, is responsible for bringing the heavenly voices of gospel out of the churches and into the public arena. Speaking of the word of God, we’ve included Trinity Episcopal as a site for musical concerts. Rev. David Stout’s house of workshop shares Grand Avenue frontage with the library. Any other churches want to buy in? We stretched our reach even further to ask Robert Taylor of the Monmouth County Boys and Girls Club to involve the children because the New Harmonies’ through-line explores the cultural processes that have made America the birthplace of more music than anywhere else on the planet. Asbury Park’s youngsters have always heard music. Thank the city’s founding families. Once they started birthing babies, a permanent, year-round settlement was established. On Monroe Avenue Taylor offers all kind of after-school programs, including music. The club has a chorus! Holler, Lorraine Stone and M’Zume, if you want to be a part of this! Also on our contact list is APHS principal Tyler Blackmore. He’s especially instrumental because teachers think ahead when designing lesson plans. Better than any other profession, they know how to motivate teenagers through long-range projects. Especially ones that have a unit on producing work the public can see. If you own a downtown or oceanfront business, think about how you might collaborate with APHS students so it’s a win-win-win situation. Let out-of-towners experience Asbury Park’s future through the work of its young adults. Who else? Though Boardwalk events maven Pasqualina Delucia wasn’t able to make our strategy session, we got big plans for the Paramount. We’re hoping Madison Marquette will reprise the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. It last performed in Convention Hall in 2007 when the city celebrated its 110th anniversary of municipal independence from Ocean Township. Why Paragon? Because its musical director, Richard Benjamin, owns the largest archive of sheet music written by Arthur Pryor, the touring bandleader who 100 years ago made the executive decision to put his ragtime roots here. His choice brought the kind of attention to Asbury Park that makes a publicist’s work a cakewalk. Sixty-six years later Bruce Springsteen would repeat the marketing magic with his debut album cover Greetings From Asbury Park. Which brings us back to the Asbury Park Public Library and why we picked it as a site for the three-month traveling exhibit. Sure, it’s got the Springsteen Collection. And selections from that compilation would make for a brilliant companion exhibit. More than that, though, the library also meets all the criteria asked for by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, especially the 800 square feet of space needed for the five mobile kiosks. It’s NJCH that’s vetting all the applications on behalf of the Smithsonian. Yes, it’s a competitive process. We’re up for the challenge which is why we volunteered our time to get this started. Want to know what other radical idea we fomented? We picked the first quarter of 2011 as the timeframe for hosting the exhibit. Why? The reason is simple and two-fold. First, the obvious: It’s the earliest slot available. Asbury Park would reap the benefits of the initial rush of media publicity. And could then use that attention to promote the next quarter’s worth of events planned for 2011. Next, the more important reason: We’re drawing a line in the sand to start a long overdue dialogue. We want to shift public perception. We want Asbury Park to be known as a year-round destination. Not just a summer-only resort with some holiday weekends thrown in. To achieve that long-term goal, we’re borrowing a page from the suburban play book (yes, I’m owning up to that) by inviting the civic leaders (see list above) to participate in this initiative. We’re targeting the late winter/early spring because it’s a season that traditionally is dominated by school programs: Martin Luther King Day, Presidents’ weekend, St. Patrick’s Day, Black History Month. Now we’re inviting them to buy in to this cultural opportunity intended for the public at large. It’s a dialogue that begins with what everyone has in common: Music. After all, it transcends race, gender, age, religious affiliation, and pocketbooks. Who better than Asbury Park citizens to host the Smithsonian? Follow up 2010 I returned from the Pacific on January 16 to learn that Asbury Park did get picked to be a site for the New Harmonies exhibit in 2011! ************************************************* 
The Noodle Factory: A primer for multiple use development in Asbury Park?
triCity News, February 19, 2009 Not so long ago, noted real estate historian Charles Lockwood analyzed mixed-use development, or what we’re calling MUD. Lockwood discovered that MUD financially outperforms suburbia’s cookie-cutter standard-use development model. SUD for short. In other words, MUD makes more money than SUD. In every measurable rubrique: office and retail lease rates residential prices and apartment rents land value for the site and neighboring properties. What does MUD look like? It’s a developed property with combined uses: residences businesses that hire local folks community interaction either through retail or entertainment. MUD is almost always in a neighborhood that is walkable and is usually close to public transportation. Take 15 Sea Street in Eastport, ME, as a MUD example. It’s a 1907 canning factory with brick walls, high arched windows, and tall ceilings. Nine investors pooled their money to renovate this one-time sardine processing plant according to green standards. Later in 2009 when the make-over is finished, the first floor will include a variety of artisan- and marine-related retail businesses. The second floor will house a boutique hotel with 21 rooms, a meeting space, and a spa. The third floor will feature four penthouse apartments for long-term lease and/or timesharing. A little retail. A little hospitality. A little residential real estate. A whole lot of ROI (return on investment) from a MUD. The investors aren’t taking a flyer on this. They’ve already proven MUD can make them money. With an even older structure. Five years ago they re-opened a two-story office building constructed in 1887. They called their first MUD project "The Commons". The ground floor has an art gallery, several offices, and a public-meeting room that can be rented by the day as either a classroom, a studio, or a conference room. The second floor has two rental units available by the week from June through October (this seaside town’s high season); and by the month or the week from November through May (they’re pitching the units as ideal for professors on sabbatical). All the way across the country in Oakland, the Northern California Land Trust (NCLT: use link above to learn more) has renovated an industrial warehouse as a MUD. Located at 1255 26th St., the Noodle Factory features a rehearsal studio and fully equipped performance space totaling 2700-square feet. It also has an art café and sponsors single-night events, often functioning as an underground dance club for San Francisco’s East Bay community. The Noodle Factory also has 11 live-work units, nine below market rate, for qualifying artists. With just $10,000 down, an artist making $27,000 a year can afford to buy a studio that doubles as a residence. NCLT work crews took the Oakland warehouse down to its original frame and then reused a significant amount of the historic timber in the reno. They also went green, adding a solar electric grid that now meets 75 percent of the Noodle Factory’s energy needs. [Heads up: there’s one more month to go in the Tri-City News challenge about finding solar and wind power examples in Long Branch. Who’s looking?] I discovered the Eastport and Oakland examples because one of my favorite buildings in Asbury Park is the Buchanon & Smock lumber mills…ah, make that mill; the turn-of-the-19th-century property on Second and Langford appears to be disappearing, brick by brick. I was last in there when it was the Vaccaro Guitar Company. That was a decade ago. Back then I thought Asbury Park would lead the tri cities in the kind of progressive reno of industrial lofts popping up all over Hoboken and Jersey City. High ceilings, tall windows, exposed brick, lots of light. The Second Avenue property comes with history as well as classic industrial architecture: nearly all the original houses in Asbury Park came from Nelson Buchanon and George Smock’s lumber business. But authentic mixed use development has yet to happen in Asbury Park. Maybe it’s because the city needs a bonafide zoning code for MUD. Not a code that says mixed use is restricted to retail or white-collar office use on the sidewalk level and residences on the upper floors. But rather a code for a real mix of uses that engages the public in an activity, provides jobs for residents, creates affordable living space, and produces a ROI for the investor. A property that visually retains Asbury Park’s history while demonstrating a builder’s progressive vision for a neighborhood. A code for the future that advances what’s good about the past. A MUD, because anything else would be a dud. 
Want to know how to go green to make green?
Green Edition 11/17/08 There’s no doubt about it: Conventional energy costs continue to climb. In the last six years uranium prices have gone from $7 to $80 a pound; coal from $22 a ton to $55 a ton, and natural gas from $2 per million BTUs to $12. The corresponding escalation in end-users’ utility rates follows those prices. Fees to use another historic natural resource, water, also are rising. Kick the ball down the hill, and transportation expenses associated with the drive for work as well as mass transit are escalating, too. Even the cost for food and drinks are not immune as suppliers pass the charges along to consumers. Arguments for offshore drilling, natural-gas pipelines, the merits of nuclear energy, and the promise of more foreign oil some time in the future divert public discussion from pragmatic solutions needed now. It is essential to diversify our fuel choices today so we can earn a return on our investments when the economy rebounds tomorrow. So, what lessons can we learn from New Jersey history? Let’s start with the intrepid Dutch trading companies which came here to extend their whaling industry. They built our first settlements. When the whaling business went elsewhere, they adapted and turned to farming, creating new communities in the process. Fast-forward 300 years and 40 percent of Garden State real estate is occupied by cities, industries, corporate research campuses, and housing developments. Three years ago the U.S. Green Building Council extended its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) criteria for sustainable construction with a checklist for the retrofit of existing buildings (LEED-EB). Tenants, new and old, will be taking a hard look at energy costs as the 21st century moves ahead. Commercial and industrial real estate managers owe it to their tenants as well as their bottom lines to adapt more efficiency options in their leases. What are the costs associated with saving water, installing efficient heating and cooling, and using renewable building materials to reconfigure space for new occupants? Run the numbers on the special promotion run jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency called Energy Star. From light bulbs to appliances, it is also ideal for small to medium-sized businesses looking to maximize their energy savings. Follow the footsteps taken last year by state agencies using Energy Star products. Known as the Invention State thanks to Thomas Edison, Seth Boyden, Robert Wood Johnson, and John T. Dorrance, New Jersey led the 19th century Industrial Revolution by meeting the demands of a growing nation. In the process they created thousands of jobs. Again technology is bringing solutions to a nation pursuing new business opportunities and creating employment possibilities in the process. This time the innovation lies in ecology. The state’s main incubator is the public-private EcoComplex in Bordentown, an environmental R& D facility run by Rutgers University at the municipal landfill. Research here supports work related to water resources, solid waste management, renewable energy, and controlled agricultural endeavors, including hydroponics and genetic engineering. Three companies have graduated from this facility, generating green-collar jobs as they establish themselves in the 21st century marketplace: * Acrion Technology cleans landfill gas, converting it to methane for energy use; * HydroGlobe removes metals from water; * Terracycle converts worm castings into fertilizer. Still in the development phase are such diverse start-ups as Four Seasons Orchids, Human Natural, Carbozyme, Internet Creation, MicroDysis, U.S. Biomass, and Garden State Ethanol which could become the East Coast’s first ethanol facility. It’s obvious the demand for green-collar jobs is here. It’s in the manufacture, installation, and maintenance of solar panels and wind turbines of all sizes. It’s in performing energy audits. It’s also at the executive level within companies. Want a lead to follow? Two of the largest software companies whose products are used throughout New Jersey are AutoDesk and Adobe. Both have vice presidents of sustainability. With our crumbling highway infrastructure and long hours spent on the road, hasn’t the time finally come to implement a telecommute strategy? Innovative managers who can design tasks and projects that utilize laptops, cell phones, and PDAs need to be rewarded for designing new productivity outcomes and shifting schedules so more employees can work from home and offices can save on energy costs. Our state’s hospitality industry can also go green. It has to in order to remain competitive with nearby states that have amped up their marketing campaigns to tout organic ingredients in menus, recycled water to maintain golf courses, and the advantages of energy efficient rooms enhanced by solar panels and wind turbines. After all, we have hotels, B&Bs, and restaurants located in some of the most breathtaking vistas in all of the United States. Organic farming, too, goes hand-in-hand with hospitality and the state’s longest-running ecology program, Jersey Fresh. Locally grown foods cost less than produce shipped from out-of-state. They also leave a smaller carbon footprint. Furthermore, buying local strengthens local economies. The Organic Consumers Association lists 69 different retailers within 20 miles of my 07724 zip code. Last, but certainly not least, firms need to take advantage of government incentives. The state lists 29 different programs suitable to businesses of all sizes in New Jersey Green Programs; 10 are from the Board of Public Utilities including four in partnership with the Economic Development Authority. Want to make green? Go green first. Helen Pike lectures in the development of mass media at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She is the author of New Jersey: Crossroads of Commerce, a book that examines how key industries evolved, including the Garden State's green initiatives. She is a member of the Eatontown Economic Development Advisory Committee. 
Xit: Artzene Summer 2008 By Helen Pike “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is Hollywood screenwriter Joan Didion’s most quoted line from “The White Album.” In her autobiography of life in 1960s Los Angeles, Didion discusses, among other mind-blowing experiences, her attendance at Black Panther Party political meetings and a Doors’ recording session. Stories like hers are how we understand the world around us. They open a window to human behavior among people we might not know personally but recognize from headlines or as role models. Large and small, stories that tell of a shared history also illuminate what we have in common more than what’s different. Too, many use Didion’s essays as a lens through which to gain clarity about the chaotic‘60s. But what if your story that, like Didion’s, also examines parental duty amid tumultuous cultural upheaval, yet can’t find a publisher? If a family narrative that starts before 1964’s Civil Rights Act and 1972’s Title 9 and concludes with six self-sufficient daughters carrying their widowed father’s casket to his grave isn’t deemed compelling? What if your story written two years before Didion’s 1979 book is released attracts no commercial interest? Who sustains the greater loss: the writer who has written this unpublished story or readers denied the opportunity to read about a part of America’s heritage that is female first and black second? “Our culture is still more misogynist than it is racist,” observes Yvonne S. Thornton, the third of six sisters initially raised in the housing projects of Long Branch. “If you were a black man in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and you didn’t have a son, you were ostracized by the black community. Daddy was determined we were going to make something of ourselves.” For 18 years, and with her father’s same tenacity, Thornton, a double-Board certified specialist in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine, persisted until a publisher finally agreed to print her autobiography. “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters: A Black Family's Astonishing Success Story” recounts how Donald Thornton, a Long Branch High School drop-out and Fort Monmouth laborer, forcefully inspired all six of his girls to achieve independence and noteworthy careers. “My father was a consummate student of social science,” continues Thornton, who now lives in Teaneck. In 1965 and as a protective parent, he wouldn’t let his 18-year-old daughter attend Barnard College in far away Manhattan. Instead, he walked into the office of then-Monmouth College president William G. Van Note, in West Long Branch, and persuaded him to enroll Yvonne. “He was a combination of Rocky and Bill Cosby,” Thornton adds. But as long as it took Thornton to find a publisher, in less than two short years her story was turned into a telefilm. It aired in 1997 on the Family Channel, televangelist Pat Robertson’s hugely popular cable network. The made-for-TV movie prompted Thornton’s appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Today Show,” and “Good Morning America.” The public will have a chance to see “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters” on the big screen when it airs at 7 p.m. Friday, July 25 at Asbury Park High School as part of the Newark Black Film Festival. The six-week series, which also travels to Trenton and Camden for the second year in a row, showcases independently made films that tell the stories of African Americans. Admission is free. The Newark Black Film Festival opens with “The Promised Land,” one of the segments originally broadcast on the highly acclaimed PBS series, “Eyes on the Prize.” The episode from this television documentary looks at the Civil Rights movement. The festival’s historic highlight for this year is “Hallelujah!” the first all-black film made in 1929. It also will be featured in a series of stamps devoted to vintage black cinema that the United States Postal Service plans to unveil in July. “Hallelujah!” was the first sound film made by legendary director King Vidor, a one-time freelance newsreel cameraman and cinema projectionist from Texas who went on to direct such landmark films as “Stella Dallas,” “The Fountainhead,” and “War and Peace.” Johnny E. Jensen, a Dane by birth and a cinematographer by training who has worked with directors John Singleton on “Rosewood” and Martha Coolidge on “Rambling Rose,” directed “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters.” “Being an immigrant in this country and growing up in a time and place without any experiences of racial prejudice, this country was eye-opening,” Jensen wrote via e-mail. “I have taken so much from this story, especially with raising four children [of my own]. This film hopefully will inspire more families to examine the relationships between parents and their children facing the challenges of education.” Working in the television format presented its own set of technical challenges, according to Jensen, including, perhaps, the toughest one of all, compressing 50 years into 100 minutes. “One takes certain liberties in regard to production values due to the small screen. I hope the film can withstand the scrutiny of the big screen,” Jensen wrote. He credits another Long Branch native, the film’s screenwriter, Paris Qualles, with delivering a wonderful script. “The book was so full of emotion from the whole family,” Jensen wrote, “and pairing it down without losing and sometime even gaining additional strong feelings was a marvelous job.” Added Jensen, “My hope is the audience will be totally involved in the story about the family headed by Donald Thornton.” “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters” has gone through 17 printings with more than 300,000 copies in print. In March, Kensington Publishing issued a new edition under its Dafina imprint with an updated foreword and afterword written by Thornton who now divides her time as a medical consultant and motivational speaker. She will be in Asbury Park to talk after the film’s airing and to sign copies of her memoir which will be for sale. Dr. Thornton paired with Jo Coudert of Califon to write both “The Ditchdigger’s Daughters” and “Woman to Woman: A Leading Gynecologist Tells You All You Need to Know About Your Body and Your Health.” Thornton also wrote a medical text, “Primary Care for the Obstetrician and Gynecologist.” “I love the smell of books!” adds Thornton, who spent many formative hours reading stories in the Long Branch Free Public Library and later at the college’s Guggenheim Library. By the time she entered Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons College in New York, “I was well read.” 
Creating buzz on the north Jersey shore: Michael Barker (left) and Tom Bernard, the a-typical co-presidents of Sony Pictures Classics.
By Helen Pike Xit: Artzene Summer 2008 The digital age has arrived. We telecommute. We order food for home delivery. We find mates on social networking sites. We have more than 400 channels of cable and satellite available for viewing. Through our computers and MP3 players we can import movies on demand. So why go out? For the thrill of discovery. How? In a journey of the imagination. Where? In a darkened cinema. When? Months before a film’s magic is reduced to a digital download. Viewed with friends or complete strangers who share your secret passion for the unknown, you are the millennium’s new intrepid explorers. “There’s something about watching movies on the big screen and communally that you can’t duplicate at home,” observes Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, the independent film distribution arm of the Japanese media conglomerate. “Movie goers are having fun because they love finding new films before anyone else.” The two forums for participating in the big-screen movie hunt are festivals and art houses. Monmouth County is blessed with both. The newest entrant is the two-year-old Ocean Film and Arts Festival, a multi-organizational partnership which includes Monmouth University’s Urban Coast Institute, the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art in Long Branch, and the Two River Film Festival. There is also the Red Bank International Film Festival at the Count Basie Theatre, the traveling Newark Black Film Festival, the Garden State Film Festival in Asbury Park, and the Two River Film Festival, a multi-venue event in which the Middletown resident is involved. The Basie and the Paramount in Asbury Park, the area’s two restored 1920s movie houses, have ideal acoustics for cinema, adds Bernard, because they weren’t built as concert halls. Proof that residents are turning out in record numbers to see art films, sometimes within two weeks of their world premieres in New York City, are in the box office receipts at the Clearview Red Bank Art Cinema on White Street. According Bernard, who makes new work available there under the aegis of the Monmouth County Arts Council, the intimate Red Bank theater is the second most profitable in Clearview’s New Jersey chain; the first is in the more densely populated northern community of Montclair. Another thrill of discovery is picking out which films may be nominated for an Oscar. In 2006 audiences had the chance to see “Capote.” That film won actor Philip Seymour Hoffman an Academy Award for his portrayal of the New Yorker writer who cravenly wanted fame in 1965 by recounting the story of the murdered Clutter family. Nominated this past year, and seen on White Street, have been the Spanish-language “Volver,” the French-Iranian animation “Persepolis”, and the American-made “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” Bernard shares viewers’ pursuit of unique film stories not made with big studio budgets. “Festivals are a great chance for discovery,” he says from a mobile phone before resuming his bicycled trek between theaters at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. “I’m seeing five or six a day for ten days. I have to sort out which films to buy and bring back to the States for people to see. “Two or three might be worth buying,” he continues, “because I’m looking for filmmakers with something to say. They have to connect with the audience. They have a message. They have to say it in an artful way.” Because the Internet has trivialized a lot of cinema, the current crop of aspiring film authors don’t have much originality, he adds. “They just want to become pop stars.” Still, the Internet is not an altogether bad invention. The on-line world make movie-goers better informed. “Audiences are using the Internet as film schools,” Bernard says, and as a result “they are more sophisticated in what they want to see.” 
The Players Club on Gramercy Park in New York City.
triCity News September 18, 2008 Cities that thrive with culture are as much known by the arts they support as for the addresses of those who generate it. Boston, Chicago, Austin: To go any one of those destinations means a chance to rub shoulders with genius. The Players Club on Gramercy Park in New York City is where those who love theater can shake hands with actors and playwrights. It is the home of Edwin Booth, the first actor to claim the title of America’s foremost interpreter of William Shakespeare’s plays. He lived on the third floor of this Stanford White-designed townhouse while allowing the rooms below to be used as a club for thespians and dramatists. During the mid-20th century, rooms were rented to actors, providing shelter and meals during periods when there wasn’t enough lettuce for the salad days of a career. Today there are still kitchen privileges for members and a roster of lunch and dinner performances, lectures and readings open to the public. Booth’s living quarters remain preserved as a museum. A lot of us history geeks revel in finding the six (or less) degrees that separate seemingly disparate pieces of cultural history. So we also appreciate Players for its connections to the Jersey Shore when actors came here for a summer’s break from grueling tours, often in poorly ventilated theaters. Maggie Mitchell, whose house on Norwood Avenue in Oakhurst, is still in private hands, performed with Booth’s brother, John. Circus performer Dan Rice, whose modest farmhouse at the foot of Brighton Avenue on Norwood in West Long Branch, had a brief stint working in the theater company managed by Booth’s first father-in-law, James McVicker. McVicker had sold his summer home to Mitchell. See how it goes? Here’s another one from the hurly burly decades before and after the Civil War. Theatrical extravaganzas were the main staple of a still-young nation. For every classically trained actor like Edwin Booth, there was a vaudeville equivalent rooted in ethnic and American nativisim that appealed to the masses. Those who made it into popular history were fronted by shrewd managers. P.T. Barnum teamed up with James A. Bailey’s traveling circus. Flo Ziegfeld launched his stage career by managing Prussian bodybuilder Eugen Sandow. Nate Salsbury added sharpshooter Annie Oakley to Buffalo Bill Cody’s all-male line-up. That might be the extent of what we’d know about Salsbury if it weren’t for a happy coincidence of preservation, philanthropy, and a nine-year-long (and counting) artistic endeavor that is re-instating Long Branch as a national theater destination. When he was in clover, Salsbury made some canny real estate choices in The Branch. He built a seashore colonial overlooking an estuary that feeds Pleasure Bay, where once a fabled 19th century amusements compound by the same name had a floating stage for Gilbert & Sullivan productions. He married an actress, had four children, and by 1900 was reportedly involved in the city’s civic affairs. That, too, might be all that we’d know about Salsbury if it weren’t for the growing playbill of Equity actors storming the stage at the New Jersey Repertory Company on Broadway…in Long Branch…and who need a place to stay for the run of a show (and because public transportation in New Jersey isn’t anywhere as ambitious as the theater’s programming, but that’s a rant for another time). SuzAnne and Gabor Barabas established NJ Rep in 1999, and nurture into production original scripts that professional actors clamor to perform and that local audiences increasingly want to see. Plays which have premiered here are regularly produced throughout the country; a few notables have made it to Manhattan. Talents scouts come here, too, looking for new properties for star names. The Monday night play-in-hand series when authors, known and up-and-comers, sit to talk with the audience after actors have done a walk-through of their work is the best opportunity to rub shoulders with the creative process. If you missed the night that Israel Horovitz, America’s most prolific living dramatist, showed up for a reading of his play “Sins of the Mother”, well, at least now you know where to look for genius on the Jersey shore. After crunching the numbers, the Barabases made the economically smart move and bought a house, a dingy, ramshackled, three-story structure sitting on an untended lawn down Liberty Street from the theater. Then Gabe put on one of his better charm shirts to ask the audience for help. And they obliged by the truckload, furnishing the old gal, floor to attic, beds to books while professional restorers tackled the hardware. The actors for the current production of “Poetic License” are now in residence. But leave to a fellow history geek to unearth the Salsbury connection. Credit goes to Beth Woolley, a trustee of the Long Branch Historical Association and a NJ Rep Guild member who connected the number of degrees between the city’s past and its future. Question for history fans: What did Maggie Mitchell name her summer estate? 
An alum of Fordham and Seton Hall, and a retired communications professor, Lloyd McBride has sat in the catbird seat of history nearly all his life. Here he is at table no. 1 in the Adriatic Restaurant on Kingsley Street. His most frequent dinner companion was one-mayor and former Fisher's Bakery employee, the late Frank Fiorentino.
McBride Looks Back at the Boardwalk The Asbury Park amusement names are legendary: Zimel Resnick and the Palace on Wesley Lake; Abe Ruben and his electric bingo known as Fascination in the Third Avenue Pavilion; Madame Marie and her fortune-telling booth at the head of Fourth Avenue. “She lived in a rooming house on Lake Avenue,” Lloyd McBride said, “before the bumper cars were put in. She moved her booth to the Boardwalk after the Hurricane of ’44.” McBride would know. He’s lived here nearly all his life and started working on the Boardwalk in 1949, two years after graduating from Asbury Park High School. His boss? Bob Fountain, who operated Bubbleland, the popular kiddie rides at the head of Third. Those were the good years after the end of a war: when the black-out curtains were removed from the Boardwalk and vacationing families returned in droves to reclaim childhood’s lost innocence and follow thousands of rainbow-glossed orbs from Fountain’s bubble-making machine. “The amusements always attracted dreamers,” McBride said. His own dreams led to buying Bubbleland for $54,000 in 1974 after Fountain died. Back then a quarter bought a child three rides from the nine. McBride described them as the “non-horse or German merry-go-round” rides. There was a train, an airplane, a turtle, a kiddie whip, later replaced with fiberglass fire engines, the junior cars, and the spinning mixing bowls. The named rides were Bulgy the Whale, the Star Jets, and the Traffic Circle. The most popular? The rides in which children could imitate adults, he said. Meanwhile, trade shows at Convention Hall captured their parents’ imagination. “The ceramic and boat shows were big,” continued McBride, who was studying communications at Seton Hall University in South Orange, and would later return with a masters degree from Fordham to teach at his alma mater and advise the student-run radio station. But McBride’s summers always belonged to Asbury Park. The beach and the boards were a reunion rendez-vous, he observed. Third and Fourth Avenues were lined with hotels that catered to families staying for an entire week or two. They’d spend the day on the beach or on the boardwalk benches catching up, and after dinner, the adults would return with their children for the rides. “Or, they’d sit on the hotel porches and talk,” he added. It was a simpler time with plenty of people to hire for the fall travel season that lasted until Columbus Day. As Fountain’s general manager, McBride had a list of 100 employees to draw from, adding adults when teenagers went back to school after Labor Day. But once the Garden State Parkway opened in 1956 and vacationers could travel by car instead of by train, the slow trickle away from Asbury Park would gradually turn into a torrent. The parking meters didn’t help, McBride noted; by the 1970s, visitors were coming to the Boardwalk only for the weekends. “It used to be that 50 percent of our business was done by the Fourth of July,” he continued. Bit by bit, the city raised the Boardwalk rents and the insurance companies upped their policy premiums. By 1987 three rides cost 75 cents at Bubbleland. Thirteen years after he bought the mechanized rides, McBride lost his Boardwalk dreams to eminent domain and the city’s attempt to revive the beachfront with a hotel whose bridge was to span Ocean Avenue. It was an ill-fated imitation of the walkway that once connected the Berkeley hotel to the Sunset Avenue Pavilion in the 1930s, and it didn’t come to pass. However, “the city cancelled my lease,” McBride explained, and another high school alumnus, Sam Vaccaro, bought four of the rides and moved them to First Avenue. But by then the city’s Boardwalk had lost most of its appeal as heavily branded theme parks like Great Adventure with Bugs Bunny, Hershey Park and its candy-inspired rides and architecture, and Disney World with Mickey Mouse and the casts from dozens of popular TV and movie cartoons exerted an enormous influence over families’ vacation decisions.' Bob Fountain’s oft-repeated line - “I guess we’ll stay in our own backyard” – according to McBride, seemed a self-fulfilling prophecy in retrospect. The parade of increasingly sophisticated travelers passed by a seashore resort that had turned inward, trapped by old habits. “Asbury Park will come back,” added McBride who can sometimes be spotted at his favorite table at the Adriatic on Kingsley Street. “In five years it will look different than it does now.” He paused. “It will look different in 10 years.” ************************************************* |
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