Whatever happened to Asbury Park?

Book looks at causes for demise of

BY KATHY HALL Correspondent

BY KATHY HALL
Correspondent

Historian and travel writer Helen-Chantal Pike loves a mystery, so she set out to solve “the case of the lost resort.”

Pike grew up in Long Branch and remembered Asbury Park as a thriving community.

“Monmouth County in the ’50s and ’60s … [Asbury Park] was the city where everything took place, unless you went to New York,” Pike recalled. “It had department stores, specialty stores, movies and cultural offerings.”

When she returned to Asbury Park in 1991 and saw the change, she was “dumbfounded.”

“I wanted to know what happened,” she said.

Helen-Chantal Pike Helen-Chantal Pike Her new book, “Asbury Park’s Glory Days: The Story of an American Resort,” uses a mix of first-person interviews, archival photographs and historical research to reveal what caused the resort Pike describes as a “seashore Shangri-La” to become “Beirut on the Jersey Shore.”

Pike spent nine years researching the project that covers Asbury Park’s history from its founding in the 1890s through 1980.

The book is divided into seven chapters, each tracing a different aspect of the Asbury experience through its four major periods of popularity: the 1890s, 1920s, 1940s and 1960s.

Memories of Asbury Park as a thriving seashore resort prompted author Helen-Chantal Pike to investigate the causes for the city’s decline. Her book, “Asbury Park’s Glory Days: The Story of an American Resort,” includes vintage illustrations like the postcard of the boardwalk scene in the early 1900s. Memories of Asbury Park as a thriving seashore resort prompted author Helen-Chantal Pike to investigate the causes for the city’s decline. Her book, “Asbury Park’s Glory Days: The Story of an American Resort,” includes vintage illustrations like the postcard of the boardwalk scene in the early 1900s. “I ended the book in 1980,” Pike explained. “In 1990 the emotions were really raw. People didn’t have enough perspective on that decade.”

She brings the story up-to-date in an epilogue dated 2002.

Pike holds a bachelor of arts degree in English and French from Principia College in Elsah, Ill., and a language certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris. According to her Web site, her hyphenated first name, Helen-Chantal, was the result of a naming tug-of-war between her French mother and Yankee father. Pike’s father, educator, writer and photographer Dr. Robert E. Pike, inspired her to pursue a career in journalism.

After a stint at a local newspaper, she left the area in 1982 to earn a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University in New York. She lived among the remaining potato farmers and bay men on Long Island’s North Fork, covered the technology industry, and in 1991 started a freelance career as an international travel writer and photographer, principally for the Boston Herald. Her work also appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, Vermont Life and New Jersey Monthly magazine.

“Asbury Park’s Glory Days” is the fifth book on New Jersey that Pike has written since returning to the state to care for her father, who had Alzheimer’s disease and died in 1997.

As chair of the 325th anniversary of Eatontown in 1995, she wanted to preserve the history of her community for the next generation. Research on one town led to information about other towns, she said, since many local families moved within the area.

Arcadia Press published her history of Eatontown/Fort Monmouth in 1995. It also published her book on Long Branch in 1996 and a volume on the founding history of Asbury Park in 1997.

Pike originally proposed a four-book series to Arcadia on the complete history of Asbury Park.

“There had never been a nonpartisan history written of Asbury Park.” she explained

As a former travel writer, she was also interested in helping today’s tourists understand the resort’s geography.

“I had done enough research to show how Asbury Park was founded,” she said. “I found a way to lay it all out so people could understand it.” [Today’s] visitors couldn’t find their way around. This was a great way to map it out visually so people could have some kind of an idea of what used to be there or what the original looked like.”

A four-book series on one town did not fit into Arcadia’s publishing plans, but the Arcadian volume on Asbury Park’s early history was a success.

“It did pretty well, and I just kept researching,” Pike said. She approached Rutgers University Press with an idea for a history of New Jersey based on her series of articles on the New Jersey Coastal Heritage Trail. The book would be illustrated by postcards from her personal collection. Pike has collected postcards since she was a child and has more than 6,000 depicting New Jersey.

The book titled “Greetings From New Jersey: A Postcard Tour of the Garden State” won the 2003 Authors Award from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance, which praised the author for bringing “a new understanding to New Jersey history and culture.”

When Pike turned in the “Greetings From New Jersey” manuscript to Rutgers, she mentioned her Asbury Park project to the editor. “He was very interested” she said.

In preparation for the book, Pike used conventional research methods by consulting libraries in New York City and at Rutgers as well as the Library of Congress. She visited the film archives at the University of California at Los Angeles to find old newsreel clips, including one of Asbury Park’s famous baby parades filmed by Thomas Edison. She also used her postcard connections.

“We have postcard shows and various clubs also have ephemera shows,” she said. “There’s one in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and one in New York where dealers come from all over the world. A couple I got to know had [Asbury Park] memorabilia: menus, matchbooks. Some of the [collectors] started to call me up. The city started to come together.”

Thanks to Pike’s networking skills, she was able to capture memories from all components of Asbury Park’s community. Growing up in a multicultural family gave her a sensitivity to diverse cultures.

“The stories were there,” she said. “My mother was a foreigner, so I hear the accent, I see the foreign cultures.

“There wasn’t any one person who had everything,” she continued. “The African-American community had a couple of points of view, depending on where they were in the economic scale; Italians, depending on if they stayed or moved to the suburbs.”

Pike also interviewed representatives of Asbury’s Jewish and Greek communities.

She had no problem getting people to talk about Asbury Park’s past.

“For the majority of people it was like therapy,” she said. “Anybody who owned a store in the ’90s would report people coming in and telling stories. There seemed to be a collective need to exorcise what had happened in the last 30 years.”

According to Pike, the most difficult story to tell was how politics was conducted, and the most surprising thing she learned was the fact that although Asbury Park was promoted as a dry, family resort, alcohol was readily available from the beginning.

“People were constantly selling alcohol,” she said. “In everybody’s shorthand history talk, it was founded as a dry town but in fact there was a lot of alcohol.”

The explanation for this anomaly lies in Asbury Park’s diverse religious communities.

“Grand Avenue was mainline Protestant, elsewhere were Catholics. The non-Protestants didn’t have a problem with alcohol,” she explained.

“Asbury Park’s Glory Days: The Story of an American Resort” contains 22 color and 190 black-and-white photos and is published by Rutgers University Press.