The Rope

by Alex Tresniowski

  CHAPTER 3 A New Eden

  June 1870

  Ocean Grove, New Jersey

  Forty years earlier, on a spot not far from the Wanamassa woods, two men stripped off their clothes and lay naked in the sand by the Atlantic Ocean.

  One of them, a white man, thought about wading into the water, but the tide and the darkness of night scared him off the idea, and this was the best he could do—lie safely where the waves ebbed and the surf gently lapped his body. This was enough for him to feel what he had come to the ocean to feel.

  Cleansed by God.

  The white man, James Adam Bradley, was tired. Not just from the journey to the seaside, which had rattled his forty-year-old bones—across New York Harbor in the steamer Red Bird, a train to Eatontown, and from there a horse-drawn carriage over eight miles of a new “turnpike” that was little more than rocks and planks of wood.

  Bradley, a burly man with a soft expression, was exhausted by life, physically and spiritually broken.

  He grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, on its dense streets and dirty alleys, in the 1830s. His father, an Irish farmer, and his mother, who was English, were poor. Bradley fell into the lawless life of a Bowery Boy, skipping school to drink wine and sneak into playhouses with chums, and this, it seemed, would be his lot in life—“drifting upon the rocks of intemperance,” as a newspaper later put it.

  That, however, would not be his fate. One day, one of Bradley’s young running mates drunkenly offered to fight anyone brave enough to come forward. As a joke, the mischievous Bradley accepted. He put up his fists and, at the last moment, turned and fled, certain he could outrun his drunken friend. He made it a half block before a blow to the head knocked him down. His chum, it seemed, had only pretended to be drunk. Sober, he beat Bradley bloody.

  The beating knocked Bradley straight. After that, he took his first job at fourteen, earning a dollar a week monitoring a pot of boiling lead in a brass foundry. At sixteen he answered a “Boy Wanted” sign in the window of a brush manufacturing plant, and apprenticed for the brush-maker Frances Furnold. Over the years he rose to shop foreman, and, with several hundred dollars saved from his wages, he opened his own small brush factory in Manhattan, at the age of twenty-seven.

  But now he was forty, and despite his vast wealth—the result of a surge in demand for military brushes during the Civil War—he felt drained. The long hours in the factory, the stench of horsehair and bleach and glue, had got to him. Bradley’s doctor told him he was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Even his quiet, Boston-born wife, Helen, who otherwise stayed out of her husband’s affairs, urged him to take time away, not only from the brush business, but from New York City.

  By chance, around this time, in 1869, Bradley ran into a friend on Broadway.

  The friend was leasing undeveloped lots in Ocean Grove, a bare-bones summer campground site founded by Methodist clergymen on the rugged New Jersey seashore, sixty miles south of Bradley’s Brooklyn home. Bradley saw it as his chance to escape the soullessness of urban life, and impulsively bought two lots for eighty-five dollars each.

  It would be there, in the roughness of nature, Bradley hoped, that “my wearied body and brain might rest, lulled to sleep by the murmuring sea at night, and awakened in the morning by the songs of birds in the pine trees”—the dream of a tenement boy turned factory man.

  It was also the aspiration of a God-fearing soul.

  Bradley was baptized Catholic—the immigrant religion—but as an adult he left behind his church, and the poverty of his youth, and became a Methodist. He saw it as a step up in class. Here was an evangelical movement that stressed living a life of purity and holiness, which struck Bradley as a more refined and middle-class pursuit, and more in line with his hearty self-discipline. To be Methodist was to seek a purer, closer, more authentic connection with God.

  So, in 1870, Bradley took his first trip to his new property on the Jersey shore. He brought along John Baker, the assistant, cook, and companion he called “my colored man.” Formerly enslaved, Baker escaped a Virginia plantation at the start of the Civil War. As a free man in his mid-forties, he learned to read and write. To Bradley, their partnership was not unlike the Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe, with him as the fictional adventurer stuck on a desert island, and he saw John Baker as Crusoe’s companion, Friday, the uncivilized black native Crusoe converted to Christianity.

  Yet Bradley also considered Baker a friend. “Though his black face and his unmistakable African features left no doubt as to his origins, he completely refuted the argument of some who say the colored man is thick-skulled and stupid and only fit to be used as a servant,” Bradley wrote. Their friendship surprised many, including one reporter who “was struck by Mr. Bradley’s manner and treatment of his colored servant.” Just a few years after the Civil War and the emancipation of four million enslaved people, their bond was not a common one, neither in the North nor South.

  Yet there they were, together reaching the nothingness of Ocean Grove at nightfall on June 9, 1870.

  They parked their horses in the barn of a local, Charles Rogers, and made their way on foot through a half mile of briar and bush, finally emerging into a man-made clearing. It was too dark to search for wood to use as poles for a tent, so they slung their tarp over the roofless beams of a structure under construction near the ocean. It was the first and only structure in all of Ocean Grove, soon to be the two-story building that housed the Ocean Grove Association. For now, it was a fine makeshift shelter for the two men, who ate a few crackers in the dark before going to sleep on carriage cushions they used as beds and pillows.

  In the light of morning, John Baker awoke to the full realization that his boss’s dream destination was a wasteland.

  “Mr. B,” Baker said forlornly, “this is a wilderness place.”

  “Oh, don’t be cast down,” Bradley answered.

  That day they pushed farther south, through desolate sand dunes and marshes, and arrived at Bradley’s two empty lots by a lake that bordered the ocean. They pitched their tent and dug a hole in the ground to use as an icebox. They spent the next several days in the almost complete solitude of Ocean Grove, occasionally spotting workers in the distance. Sometimes they traveled the six miles to Long Branch, the nearest real town, for canned food.

  One night, Bradley and Baker went for a walk along the Atlantic.

  “How about a bath?” Bradley suggested.

  “No, no,” Baker said.

  “Remember, John, cleanliness is next to godliness.”

  With that, Bradley stripped off his clothes and walked naked to the surf. Baker waited farther back.

  At the waterline, Bradley hesitated. He considered “the way bathers usually enjoy the surf, the waves crashing over their heads.” But the vastness of the ocean, endless, unknowable, was too intimidating. Instead, Bradley lay in the soft sand and let the water rush past. He felt a strange kind of melancholy, even loneliness, as he surrendered to the ocean. It was perhaps more solitude than he had bargained for.

  In fact he was not alone. John Baker had stripped off his own clothes and made his way to the water’s edge. “He had plucked up courage by my example,” Bradley wrote. Baker lay down in the sand next to his friend, and together they let the waves bathe them—two men brought by different forces to the same ocean, to be baptized side by side.

  * * *

  Bradley’s dream of rejuvenation was not a dream he held just for Baker and himself. He envisioned a modern Methodist sanctuary arising from the scrub brush, sprouting from the sand. Where before there was nothing, now a town, a community, a resort—a haven for those who wished to flee the wantonness of secular society and be renewed, down to their weary souls, in the glow of the Savior. A new Eden.

  Bradley’s dream took root in Ocean Grove, which in 1870, when he first saw it, was merely a summer campground for Methodist groups and other denominational unions and gatherings. It was not a city or a town or anything. It was designed to be a s
easonal retreat, absent of buildings and bustle, drainage or sewage. Ocean Grove was isolated from the nearest town, Long Branch, by Wesley Lake on its northern border, and beyond that by five hundred acres of uninhabitable wilderness, a stretch of windswept land so thick with brush and briars, wildflowers and marshmallow plants, that not a single soul had seen fit to make use of it in the century America had been a country.

  Yet even the lake and the wilderness were not enough insulation for Ocean Grove’s God-fearers, given the unsavory character of Long Branch.

  The Branch, as it was known, was a drinking and gambling town. Operated by the portly stockbroker and robber baron James Fisk—Diamond Jim to most—it was known for its garish nightclubs and dance bands, prostitutes, and ample liquor. On July 4, 1870, around the time James Bradley first arrived in Ocean Grove, the 128-acre Monmouth Park racetrack opened three miles outside Long Branch, solidifying the resort’s status as the premier gambling mecca on the East Coast. With its proud debauchery, Long Branch was the spiritual antithesis of Ocean Grove.

  For that reason, the Methodist clergymen who established Ocean Grove considered buying the five hundred acres of wilderness between the two places, lest it fall into the hands of someone who didn’t share their pure intents. But the land was too rough, and the price too high. So the parcel sat. On one of his visits to Ocean Grove, James Bradley, curious about the scrubland, asked a Methodist clergyman, Rev. William Osborne, to come with him on an expedition through the brush.

  It was not an easy go. They had to hack through the thick briar and risk “having our clothes torn from our bodies,” Bradley wrote. Once they made it through the half mile of sand and marsh and overgrowth, they encountered another lake, which seemed to Bradley to be “as beautiful a stretch of water as can be found anywhere.” Maybe it was the hard journey through the woods that made the lake seem so heavenly to Bradley, as if the trek had been a kind of spiritual quest—which, of course, it had been, just as his entire New Jersey adventure was a quest. Or perhaps the water, which would come to be called Deal Lake, was truly as serene and shimmering that day as Bradley took it to be.

  Either way, beating his way through the brush and gazing upon the pristine lake changed the course of Bradley’s life even more than his purchases in Ocean Grove.

  His lots there were raw and undeveloped, but they were part of something man-made. The five hundred acres of scrub brush, though—these were truly untouched. They were the blank canvas Bradley had been desperate for. “Not a foot of cultivated soil in the whole place,” he marveled. After spending a few moments at Deal Lake, Bradley and Osborne walked back to Ocean Grove along the beach, and Bradley got to work setting up a company to buy the forsaken land. He joined with seven clergymen, who together pledged to raise the ninety thousand dollars (nearly two million dollars today) needed to purchase the acres.

  Then the deal fell apart. The clergymen backed out. “When the cool nights of autumn came around, it chilled their enthusiasm,” Bradley wrote. Yet even the winter freeze didn’t lessen his own. He borrowed ninety thousand dollars against his brush business, and bought the five hundred acres by himself.

  What followed was a feat of sheer audacity and will. Bradley paid to clear-cut the woods and level the unruly sand dunes. He paced the land with a measuring stick and blocked off where the streets and churches and parks would go. He planned for wide avenues and boulevards that would run parallel to the ocean and create pleasing open spaces. He dreamed of a vast public walkway along the water. He envisioned homes and hotels, small businesses and meeting halls, a library and a school. He created what he called “a perfect system of drainage,” pushing the existing technology to fashion fifteen miles of pipelines carrying waste from every home. He hired the state geologist to build artesian wells connected to an aquifer, providing his future residents with the purest water.

  Doggedly, Bradley dreamed his haven into existence, gouging it out of primal earth and christening it after the frontier missionary who helped bring Methodism to America—the eighteenth-century English bishop Francis Asbury. The bishop was a morbidly gloomy man who had nothing of Bradley’s optimism but instead was “a prophet of evil tidings,” as Asbury put it, firm in his belief that the only thing saving us from the absolute horrors of the world was “faith in a prayer-hearing, soul-converting, soul-sanctifying, soul-restoring, soul-comforting God.”

  So it was that on March 26, 1874, James Bradley, admiring of the bishop’s reverent soul and pioneer spirit, incorporated his five hundred rough-hewn acres and called his new township Asbury Park.

  CHAPTER 4 Blood Under a Black Skin

  1874–1910

  Asbury Park, New Jersey

  What began as Bradley’s pursuit of purity became, in just a short time, a one-man crusade against sin.

  Around him, Asbury Park flourished in ways Bradley couldn’t have dreamed. New railroad lines opened up the entire Jersey shore to New York City commuters seeking getaways by the sea. In 1877 Bradley laid the first planks of a narrow ocean walkway that by 1880 had been replaced by a wide and grand boardwalk. He built a pier and an orchestra pavilion, and provided generous financial assistance to interested entrepreneurs who further built up the town. Within ten years of its founding, Asbury Park was home to some two hundred hotels and boardinghouses, with rooms for many thousands of visitors. In 1888, it was reported that as many as six hundred thousand people spent time in Asbury Park.

  In 1869, Bradley’s land had been valued at a mere fifteen thousand dollars. By 1890, it was assessed at $2,500,000 (or nearly $50 million today).

  What drove its remarkable growth—from wasteland to wildly popular resort in fifteen years—was the culture of escapism and wholesome entertainment that quickly took root.

  An enterprising German immigrant, Ernest Schnitzler—modest and reserved except for a stocky mustache that connected to his even stockier sideburns—came to Asbury Park in 1888 with a vision of his own. He built a grand carousel, with dozens of ornate wooden horses and space for seventy-eight riders, inside a festive pavilion decorated with bright murals of the boardwalk. It was the first attraction in what would become Schnitzler’s sprawling Pleasure Palace Amusements complex, which, among such complexes, was “the largest, most unique and most complete under one roof of all found on the Atlantic Coast,” a local historian declared. Schnitzler created the Crystal Maze, a vast hall of funhouse mirrors that captivated visitors, and he sank many tens of thousands of dollars into pioneering electrical generators called dynamos, which brilliantly lit his arcade with two thousand thirty-candle-power lights.

  Another unique attraction soon followed—a fifty-foot-high wooden wheel called a roundabout. Riders climbed into passenger cars that rose and fell as the big wheel slowly revolved. It was designed by William Somers, who was influenced by William Forrester’s more basic epicycloidal wheel in Atlantic City. Somers’s design earned him a U.S. patent and contracts to build the wheel in Atlantic City and Coney Island as well as Asbury Park. One of the ride’s earliest passengers was George Ferris Jr., who, one year after experiencing it, built a similar wheel for Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair. Somers sued for patent infringement, but the case was dismissed—and the ride, fairly or not, became known as the Ferris wheel.

  Elegant hotels like the Plaza and the Marlborough came next. During the days, visitors enjoyed crabbing and sailing in leased yachts and bathing in the Atlantic salt water, and at night they flooded Schnitzler’s Palace and other pleasure halls. Some enjoyed strolling or riding bicycles past the majestic, candy-colored Victorian homes that lined the ocean-bordering avenues. The effect of a day at Asbury Park was dizzying, almost sensual, given the many opportunities for indulgence and amusement. Not quite the placid nature retreat James Bradley had envisioned, Asbury Park became, by the turn of the century, America’s most dynamic seaside resort.

  And yet, nearly from the start, not all was well in Bradley’s paradise. An 1880s editorial in the Asbury Park Journal, the local paper founded
by Bradley, described evil, undermining forces at work.

  “In this pleasant place,” the paper stated, “Satan came in his worst form.” That form was alcohol—something Bradley considered “the curse of America.” He banned the sale of alcohol and crafted hundreds of property deeds containing anti-liquor clauses. And yet, in the shadows, or even out in the open, dozens of illegal saloons flourished. Drugstores and pharmacies peddled medicinal alcohol, while roving “beer arks” supplemented liquor sales. Even legitimate hotels and restaurants discreetly served alcohol to customers who knew to refer to lager beer as “sea foam,” and whiskey as “cold tea.”

  Bradley gamely fought against them all, creating a Law and Order League of police officers and charging hotel owners with illegal sales. Often, he would chase beer wagons down a dark street himself. He also patrolled the streets and boardwalk at night, on the lookout not only for booze peddlers but also young couples engaging in what he called “summertime propinquity.” He posted handwritten signs around the village, warning against “evil forces” and quoting his favorite scriptures. “Jesus Saves From Hell Praise Him,” read one. He printed and distributed cards listing his rules of conduct for visitors, which included no peddling, profanity, or bathing suits “open to the suggestion of immodesty.” Even “questionable poses” were outlawed.

  Bradley pushed greatly for the innocent pursuits he preferred—spying sea lions and turtles on a whaling boat he anchored offshore, for instance—over the ones more naturally encouraged by the seductions of the sun and the sea. But that, in the end, would prove to be Bradley’s greatest foe—the tide of human nature, with its slow and steady pull.

  * * *

  Another built-in fault line in Bradley’s plan was race.

  Just as the hedonistic instincts that drew people to Asbury Park ran counter to Bradley’s puritanical urges, the very nature of what he was doing—creating, he hoped, “a white people’s resort”—required a subclass to cater to the well-heeled visitors: waiters, carriage drivers, attendants, street sweepers.