Ruin, Rainbow, and Revival

For thirty years after nineteen seventy, Asbury Park looked like a city that had given up. The Garden State Parkway had already pulled tourists to newer beaches, the unrest drove families out, and by the year two thousand nearly a third of local families lived in poverty. Grand redevelopment schemes collapsed one after another.

An eleven-story concrete condo skeleton stood rusting on the waterfront for about fifteen years, and a later luxury project called Esperanza, meaning hope, stalled unfinished when the housing market crashed in two thousand seven. But there was a quieter revival already underway, and much of it was driven by the LGBTQ community. Gay visitors had come to Asbury Park since the nineteen thirties, and when New Jersey barred discrimination based on sexual orientation in nineteen ninety-one, the state's first Pride celebration was held right here in nineteen ninety-one.

In nineteen ninety-nine, the producer Shep Pettibone opened the Paradise nightclub in the old Empress Hotel, deliberately drawing the community back. Gay-owned businesses restored block after block of the downtown. By the twenty tens, hundreds of millions of dollars had poured in, the boardwalk buildings glowed again, and the town welcomed over a million visitors a year.

Asbury Park had come back from the dead.