The Shore, Boardwalks, Barrier Islands, and the Summer Republic

In New Jersey, you do not go to the beach. You go down the Shore. The distinction matters, it is a phrase that carries an entire social world inside it: the shore house rented by the same family for forty years, the smell of boardwalk funnel cake in August humidity, the ritual argument about which town is best, the Friday night traffic on the Garden State Parkway that compresses two hours into five.

The Jersey Shore runs well over one hundred miles from Sandy Hook at the northern tip, past Asbury Park and Belmar and Point Pleasant, down through Long Beach Island and Ship Bottom and Barnegat Light, and on to Cape May at the southern end, a Victorian resort town that has been welcoming summer visitors since before the Civil War. The shoreline is mostly barrier island, narrow strips of sand separated from the mainland by bays and salt marshes that are among the most productive coastal ecosystems in the northeastern United States. Those marshes filter runoff, absorb storm surge, and shelter juvenile fish and migrating shorebirds along the Atlantic Flyway.

The resort economy arrived in the mid-eighteen hundreds, when railroads made the coast accessible from Philadelphia and New York to a growing middle class. Asbury Park, developed by New York brush manufacturer James Bradley in eighteen seventy-one beside the Methodist camp meeting at Ocean Grove, was kept a dry town. It attracted temperance lecturers and family vacationers.

It also, a century later, produced a young guitarist named Bruce Springsteen, who turned the Shore's bars and summer light and working-class dreams into one of the enduring American musical mythologies. Hurricane Sandy in October of twenty twelve reminded the Shore that the Atlantic is a landlord who does not negotiate. Barrier islands flooded to their rooftops; boardwalks were reduced to splinters.

The Shore was rebuilt, as it always has been, because New Jersey summers without it are simply not New Jersey summers.