The Berkeley and the Lost Grand Hotels
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
The tall brick hotel on Ocean Avenue is the last survivor of Asbury Park's gilded age. The Berkeley-Carteret opened in nineteen twenty-five, an elegant oceanfront palace often credited to the same architectural circle behind Grand Central Terminal. In its golden years its guest book glittered.
Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Marilyn Monroe stayed here, and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig dined in its rooms in the nineteen twenties. It even hosted the Miss America Pageant in nineteen thirty-four and nineteen thirty-five. During the Second World War it was pressed into service as a station and hospital for the British Royal Navy, nicknamed the H M S Asbury.
In nineteen eighty-five, a local entrepreneur even talked the singer Johnny Cash into helping buy the place. Today it endures, restored, as the Berkeley Oceanfront Hotel. Most of its rivals were not so lucky.
The Metropolitan Hotel on Asbury Avenue, where a hotel had stood since the eighteen eighties, closed in nineteen eighty-nine and was demolished in two thousand seven. The turn-of-the-century Belmont Hotel simply burned to the ground in two thousand six. Fire and decay erased nearly all the great hotels, leaving the Berkeley to stand alone.
