In a much more profound way than I could have imagined, the two places are diametric opposites. This is both good and bad, as I'll describe, but for both good and bad it's the central truth of the place.
If you've never been there, you've probably heard of it, at least as the faded, decaying seaside resort where Bruce Springsteen got his start (at the Stone Pony, which is still in business):
I visited once before, 14 years ago, for New Jersey Gay Pride. There was a parade up one of the main streets, past vacant lots and chain-link fences, toward an empty field near the ocean, much like the one shown here, where the Black Box woman sang "Everybody, Everybody" under a tent. There was one gay bar, with shabby plywood walls, a pool table and a neon beer sign. It was dreary beyond words.
A lot has changed since then -- the condos you see on the left side of this street are new, for one thing -- but Asbury is still, basically, dreary. It never was an atmospheric honky-tonk roller-coaster-and-salt-water-taffy place like Coney Island or Atlantic City, never mind places like Wildwood or Point Pleasant Beach that still make that formula work. Judging by the archeological evidence, it seems to have been a rather quiet middle-class place in its day, with a boardwalk but no real carnival midway. The boardwalk is bracketed by a partly ruined, partly restored convention center/auditorium to the north ...
... and a wholly ruined casino/carousel to the south:
The rest of the seafront is lined by a couple of restored hotels (the Berkeley, shown here, is at the north end near the convention center; the Empress, where we stayed and which I'll discuss further in a bit, is next to the casino) ...
... one or two modern buildings with upscale restaurants ...
... a couple of seemingly abandoned concrete shells ...
... and a bunch of sandwich and T-shirt shops set up in old shipping containers along the boardwalk.
There are many, many, many vacant lots in the oceanfront area, and a huge condo complex that seems to have been started and then abandoned before they got much past the first floor.
We stayed at the Empress Hotel, a '50s-modern, four-story structure at the south end of the beach that contains Asbury's main gay club and was recently purchased, restored and reopened by none other than Shep Pettibone, Madonna's producer in the '80s.
The architecture is mildly interesting if you like '50s modern; the lobby is comfortable; the rooms badly need to be updated. Out back is a large pool and deck, which got moderately busy with sunbathers during the day Saturday. A big second-floor deck with Astroturf gives a nice view down to the pool (notice the disco ball hanging over it) ...
... but if you turn even five degrees to the left, you get a much-less-nice view of the construction site behind it.
The 20 of us were arriving Friday in small groups, by car or train, and we were hoping that (like every other gay resort I've ever heard of) there was some sort of Tea where we could gather, mingle and meet the locals. No such luck. Even though drinks at the Empress's pool bar were only $3, no more than a handful of people were there by about 6p Friday. Because we had planned a group dinner that wasn't going to start until 9p, a few of us went looking for a snack, and more or less by accident stumbled into a wine bar across the street called the Watermark:
There, we started to see the good qualities of Asbury Park.
If the wonderful post-gay future we all claim to wish for ever arrives, it will have arrived first at the Watermark. This was the most diverse crowd I've ever seen: lesbian couples, twinky boys, bears, older straight country-club types, and Jersey Shore wanna-bes, all mingling happily and enjoying excellent, reasonably priced drinks and bar snacks (hummus, sliders, artichoke dip, etc.) on a beautiful rooftop, the ocean to our right, the town to our left.
I'm told that the Watermark just opened this year; it seems to be carving out a reputation as the place to go for happy hour in Asbury, and well it should.
We ended up, by now numbering 21, going to the restaurant an hour early just to see if they could take us. The restaurant was called Moonstruck; it's in a three-story 19th-century wooden house overlooking the body of water that separates Asbury Park and its neighbor to the south, Ocean Grove. Maybe 4 city blocks from the hotel. (It was a very nice house, but too dark for pictures.) One of us had called just that morning for a reservation. Not only could they seat us, an hour early, but we even got a private room (fortunately, as the rest of the place was pretty full). We must have been quite a handful, but the waiter (an older Irish-looking gentleman) was a great sport, and the owner came by to thank us for our patronage. The food (modern American) was terrific as well, though having left Manhattan and entered the United States of America, we did notice that we were now in the land of Big Food. One person's steak came on an oval platter that in my house is used to serve dinner for six.
We headed back to the hotel, and that was about it for the night. The hotel's nightclub, Paradise, was open but pretty much empty. There was a contest of six local drag queens, five of whom were terrible.
Saturday we hit what we were told was the gay beach, just south of the convention center (and, ironically, at the other end of town from the gay hotel). It wasn't impressive when we got there at noon; there were a few lesbians, and fewer gay men, but the crowd looked mostly straight. Over the next few hours it got gayer and gayer, and there were quite a few serendipitous bump-intos with local and New York friends who also happened to be in town for the day. But it's not a place to go if you're a beach lover. The sand is clean but coarse; the beach is interrupted every couple hundred feet by a ruined groin (you can see one in the picture above, as seen from the Watermark); it's crowded; and, this being New Jersey, you have to pay $5 per day just to use it. On beach quality, the Pines wins hands down.
Saturday night is definitely the night to go out to the Paradise. It's a nice club, actually, especially considering what you pay ($10 to get in, free to hotel guests; on Saturday nights the drink prices double to $6, still a bargain considering how heavy the pours are). There are three rooms; a dance floor larger than Splash's, with a bar of equal size off to the side; the smaller room (still at least as big as the Splash dance floor) with seats where the drag queens were the previous night; and the pool deck. On this night, with an unknown local DJ performing, all three spaces were about 2/3 full. They had Tony Moran the previous weekend and will have Ralphi Rosario on Labor Day. I'm told for such events they can draw up to 1,700 people, though that seems like an exaggeration.
It was fun. The music was good; the crowd was friendly in a low-key, non-cruisy way (though not, in terms of attractiveness, in the same league as the Pines); it's nice to be able to go outside for fresh air; the infrastructure is good (meaning, e.g., that the bars and bathrooms are of ample size to handle the crowd). Parts of it do feel a little hotel-ballroomy, but not enough to be a downer.
There is allegedly another gay(ish) bar in town, but we didn't try to find it after a FOAF we met at the pool that afternoon described it as a place where lesbians go to watch male strippers.
And that's really about all I have to say. Sunday was cloudy and showery and we didn't stay for the Paradise's weekly tea dance.
I do think Asbury has a lot of potential. But it also has a lot further to go to reach that potential than I had imagined. In theory, it could end up being something like an upscale Brighton Beach or Long Beach (New York, that is, not California), a place to own a condo by the sea in a walkable but urbanized town with good restaurants, shopping, beach-and-boardwalk, culture and a real mix of people. But right now, it seems more like a place for occasional weekend trips to a hotel than a place to own property and spend the season. Developments like the one containing the Watermark are promising but the downtown is still too much an urban disaster zone for my taste:
It could get there. But it will take 5 years and an economic recovery, minimum.
But while I'm not rushing to buy property in Asbury Park, I do plan to go back for more weekends. That much, it has already earned.
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