4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  Bradley blamed some of the shore's problems on growth. "I give it as my opinion that if not another house should be erected during the next two years from Sandy Hook to Barnegat Inlet it will be of great advantage." The shore was no longer a desert where a man could rest awhile. It was overbuilt and underdesigned. Ocean Avenue, also known as the Golden Road, followed the boardwalk down through Long Branch past mansions and estates till it became Asbury's promenade. But periodically, the sea would simply take it back: the Long Branch stretch had to be rebuilt three times before 1862. And Long Branch's spectacular eight-hundred-foot-long iron pier, completed in 1879, was washed away just a few years later.

  But the sea, Bradley reasoned, could be controlled. Sin was another matter. As an 1880s editorial in the Asbury Park Journal put it, while "the history of the town has been one of unexampled prosperity throughout the long years since 1869 . . . in this pleasant place, as its popularity increased, Satan came in his worst form." Asbury's religious overtones had become, to the New York Times anyway, a "hypocritical cloak to hide all kinds of iniquity. They do say," it reported, "that this is one of the wickedest places in the world."

  One major concern was liquor. Bradley included a clause in each lease that prevented the sale of alcohol, but a growing number of "pharmacists" had found a loophole: medicinal alcohol. "A man has nothing to do but walk in a drug store and ask for a soda with a stick in it," wrote the Times, "to get a whole telegraph pole if he wants it." Hotels, catering to Gilded Age patrons, became bootleggers, and hard cider was sold openly. "In spite of the utmost precaution," Asbury's Daily Journal concluded, "rum got an underground but firm hold in Asbury Park in the first decade of its existence." The impressive row of churches that stretched down Grand Avenue did nothing to stop it. "Six days in the week," a contemporary account tells us, Asbury "does enough mischief to condemn any ordinary, unhallowed resort like Long Branch."

  Bradley wrote and distributed thousands of copies of an anti-alcohol paper called The Artesian, lobbied to get tougher anti-drinking laws passed, and personally supervised raids. It became a common sight to see him racing down the city's streets after illegal beer wagons. The chief of police hired Pinkerton men to help patrol. But a local judge fought the law, and a firm of liquor dealers from Red Bank set up shop in one of Asbury's premier hotels. By 1885, Asbury Park had nearly a hundred illegal saloons.

  It was, in short, a party town. While Bradley opposed all of this, some citizens were willing to look the other way when it came to the more genteel visitors— the ones who came down with their families and rented a suite of rooms or a cottage for the season. But on peak summer days, fifty-five hundred visitors would pay a dollar each to take special excursion trains out of New York and Philadelphia. Disembarking at Asbury's Main Street station, these day-trippers would set out to find as much sun and good times as they could squeeze in before night. The railroad companies provided their own destinations: "excursion houses" with dance halls, skating rinks, and billiard rooms. Asbury's small businessmen supplemented those with restaurants, bathing pavilions, and other diversions. The Surf Palace roller-skating rink, at the corner of Lake Avenue and Kingsley, featured a 100-by- 190-foot floor that looked across Wesley Lake to the ocean, a restaurant, and an ice cream parlor. Nearby, the Epicycloidal Wheel was actually four huge wheels that carried sixteen people at a time in eight dangling gondolas.

  At least this honky-tonk aspect closed down at night. But then there were the menials. Granted, someone had to do the laundry, work in the shops, sweep the beaches, and generally maintain the infrastructure of the booming city. But some of these laborers, instead of leaving when the season was over, became permanent residents. Not in Asbury Park proper, but in a second city that had grown up in the shadow of Bradley's promised land.

  The way Asbury had been designed, the beach itself was for visitors. Other shore towns had mansions on their beachfront, but Bradley owned Asbury Park's and operated it as a business. Merchants could lease space to sell saltwater taffy or rent beach umbrellas or run changing rooms, but Bradley kept control of the real estate. The grand hotels and boardinghouses were set back from the beach. Then came the residential area where Victorian homes with mansard roofs and shady porches sat on relatively small building lots. Here, topsoil was brought in so roses could bloom, and carriage houses were added with the servant quarters up above. This is where the architects, doctors, and lawyers lived. Then came the commercial district. Bradley's dream was carefully sectioned off, controlled.

  It ended at Main Street, where the railroad tracks ran. But there was a city beyond that. Once you crossed the tracks, heading away from the shore, you entered what felt like a different country. Here, on unpaved streets, workers had thrown up what many had first thought of as temporary dwellings. It wasn't officially Asbury Park, and there was no sewage system or garbage pickup. The center of this shadow city was a broad avenue at the very south: a wilder, ethnic version of Cookman Avenue. Here, many of the Jewish merchants had their small shops. And here is where the Negro population lived, drawn up North by jobs as chambermaids, porters, and dishwashers in the big hotels. By 1883, there were enough children on this— what locals called the West Side— for a separate Colored Free School.

  In the summer of 1885, a Morristown lawyer named Frederick Burnham bought 135 acres on the wrong side of Asbury's tracks and started a development called West Park. Burnham was a staunch Republican and devout Christian and, like Bradley, wanted to help establish moral order. A year later, he'd donate land in upstate New York as a refuge for "wayward boys." But his Asbury purchase was pure investment. On the Fourth of July, 1885, there was every indication that Asbury would keep growing. Which meant its shadow city would, too, creating economic opportunities and, as it turned out, a national sensation.

  Independence Day was still pastoral in Asbury Park. Farm wagons rolled into town, and there was a bicycle race at Wesley Lake with Henry Steinbach donating "a fine Jersey Bicycle Shirt" as a prize. Elegant dances were scheduled at most of the shore hotels. And as a reporter for the Shore Press captured the scene, "Everybody felt happy. The beach was crowded with bathers and sightseers. The ice cream saloons and soda water dispensaries enjoyed a lively trade; the Auditorium, Ocean Grove, resounded with patriotic singing and orations; the small boy was happy with his torpedoes and firecrackers." That evening, an overflow crowd gathered to watch fireworks over the beach. "Rockets, Roman candles, Greek fires, and Chinese bombs filled the air with their variegated brilliancy, and illuminated the ocean to a considerable distance from the shore." It was a long way from two men lying naked on a stretch of empty beach.

  The problem, as outlined a few days later in the lead editorial of the Daily Journal, was a group of "impudent and unmannerly men and boys." They had taken to standing around the pavilion every evening, smoking "vile cigars and cigarettes," and staring at the passing ladies. What's more, wrote the Journal, the typical ruffian seemed to expect each woman to take "as much notice of him as he aims to do of her." In some ways all this was harmless: an extension of the surf-romping flirtation that took place during the day. The difference— according to the editorial— came down to class. "The average specimen . . . apes the manners and fashions of those better able to afford them." The chief of police should clear out these loiterers, who (the local paper made clear) were "white as well as black."

  A week later, however, the focus had narrowed.

  The headline of the Journal's July 17 editorial made it clear enough: "Too Many Colored People." While it was "a disagreeable thing to say," and while the editors wanted "to give the colored people their full rights and privileges," the fact of the matter was that "the colored people are becoming a nuisance in Asbury Park . . . We allow them to vote, to have full standing and protection in law," the editorial went on, "but when it comes to social intermingling then we object most seriously and emphatically." After all, Asbury Park was a "white people's resort and it derives its entire support from white people." Colo
red people followed, as servants, but then they began "intruding themselves in places designed only for guests." Specific mention was made of the pavilion, the promenade, and the seats along the boardwalk. To top it off, excursion trains were bringing in Negro day-trippers. "Some days," the editors concluded in disgust, "the whole beach seems given up to them."

  The solution was clear. The promenade, the pavilion, the entire beach from Ocean Avenue to the low-water mark, were private property. Unless the number of "colored monopolists" became smaller, the paper was going to urge the owner— James Bradley himself— to bar them.

  This was a little misleading. The Journal was Bradley's paper: he had almost certainly okayed these editorials and may have helped write them. When the paper reported, "The matter has been talked over thoroughly by local property owners," it was probably Bradley talking to himself. And when the editorial concluded, "It was thought best to see what a little agitation would do before adopting more radical measures," it's the town's founding father warning his children to get in line . . . or else.

  Both the New York Evening Post and the New York Times gave the issue prominent coverage. In a front-page piece, the Times claimed that what had brought the problem to a climax was "a big colored picnic" thrown by a group that had come in on the excursion train from Newark. Having "taken possession" of the beach, the picnickers "strewed it with peanut shells." Which may not have sounded so awful but was part, the Times explained, of a larger pattern:

  "White people from the cities felt offended because as soon as the day's work was done colored women flocked by the hundreds to Bradley's beach, jostled for room on the plank walk, and said impudent things to persons who resented any effort at familiarity. By 9 o'clock every evening the negro waiters from the hotels would join them, and by giving full play to the spirits natural to the race, drive white persons back to the cottages and hotels long before Mr. Bradley's 10:30 limitation was reached."

  This was not supposed to be in the dream.

  "The colored folk indignantly deny the charges," the Times pointed out. They weren't "impudent" but good Christians; many of them good Methodists, in fact. There was nothing wrong with the behavior of colored people, the Reverend A. J. Chambers of the local Bethel Methodist Church asserted. Three thousand African Methodists had attended a jubilee meeting in Ocean Grove just the Thursday before, and their behavior had been so exemplary that Ocean Grove had invited them back. If they were good enough for Ocean Grove, why weren't they good enough for Asbury Park?

  Because in the one case they stayed to themselves, and in the other they were an "intrusion" on the white beach. This distinction, as with many of Bradley's beliefs, was drawn from his religion. At a Methodist conference Bishop Asbury himself had organized in Baltimore back in 1780, preachers had declared that the institution of slavery was "contrary to divine and human justice." But the split in Methodism had begun just seven years later. At St. George's Church in Philadelphia, five free African American congregants were asked to please stop praying on the main floor and move up to the gallery. They'd refused and, after being forcibly removed, vowed never to return to the Church.

  One— Richard Allen from New Jersey— founded and became bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

  The second racial split in the Methodist Church occurred fifty years later. During the general conference of 1844, a group of white Methodists formally rejected founder John Wesley's belief that slavery was an "evil." Ordered to free his slaves, a bishop from Georgia refused, declaring that manumission was illegal in his state. The result was the establishment of the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. This "snapping of the ecclesiastical cords binding North and South together" helped lead the way to the Civil War. During that war, two thirds of the Negroes who were still members of the southern Methodist Church left it. The resulting African Methodist churches became organizing centers in the era of Reconstruction— and targets of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Six years after Bradley founded Asbury Park, the northern and southern branches of white Methodism had met down the shore in Cape May and reunited under a "Declaration and Basis of Fraternity." But Asbury's roots were in the abolitionist northern wing, and that, according to the New York Post, made the city more liberal on the "color question [than] any other place along the coast." In Asbury, the Post declared, the "negro population," estimated at two thousand, "mingled freely with the white promenaders on the beach, skated in the rinks, and listened to the music in the pavilion." But that liberal tradition drew the line at "large parties of negroes gathering upon it day after day." The fact is, the Post went on, "that the overwhelming majority of white people prefer not to come into contact with black people on anything like terms of social equality. Everybody knows this is true of the South, and Asbury Park shows that it is also to some extent true of the North."

  Bradley's moral community had been built to set an example. Now, the Post argued, Asbury Park offered a case lesson in how difficult integration really was— and how unrealistic the North had been in believing that an "off-hand act of Congress" could solve the colored question. Asbury's racial politics on this Fourth of July, 1885, were part of a larger debate on the limits of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the recently abandoned experiment of Reconstruction.

  Asbury's Daily Journal reprinted this editorial approvingly and suggested "a thoughtful consideration of the facts." Then, it restoked the fire by declaring that their resort town was in danger of gaining the reputation of being "run by the colored people, and white people are not wanted."

  By the end of July, the controversy had spread nationwide. The Galveston, Texas, Daily News carried an article that described the Asbury and Ocean Grove population as "good people who like to mix a little summer religion, camp meeting, and Bible instruction with their surf bathing." The Texas paper sarcastically attributed the area's liberal racial attitude to high religious morals and then got to the heart of its criticism. These same "sentimental religionists of the Jersey coast," who frequently and loudly criticized the South for its treatment of blacks, panicked at the thought of prolonged integration. Especially inflammatory, it argued, were boardwalk flirtations across the color line, as "colored beaux . . .

  laid siege to the hearts of. . . pale-faced damsels. If the affair had come in the South," the Galveston paper concluded, "it would have raised tempests of denunciation . . . Now, Ocean Grove and Asbury Park are taking their own medicine, and both are very sick indeed."

  Bradley went to Europe during the summer of 1885. According to the New York Times, this supported the assumption that he was behind Asbury's segregation campaign: "Bradley always goes off on a little trip after breaking out with one of these assertions." But as founding father, he had yet to weigh in publicly. According to a columnist in the Shore Press, Asbury had long since been divided into "two distinct factions," with Bradley representing the old antiliquor, anti-gambling fundamentalist school while the hotel owners and other merchants fought to modernize. When Bradley returned to the shore that fall, the welcome-home dinner in his honor at Educational Hall was something of a peace offering. The evening began with a rendition of "Old Folks at Home," that "good old plantation song." Then, everyone from a member of the electric-light company to town commissioners lauded the fifty-five-year- old Bradley. In his remarks, Bradley professed amazement at the town's prosperity and wondered aloud, "What will be the outcome of all this?" The question— which, by implication, included the city's racial problems— remained unanswered all winter.

  That spring, eight miles north of Asbury, an African-American in his sixties was accused of attacking a twenty-four-year-old white woman. Samuel Johnston was a stable hand in Eatontown, where Monmouth Park was located. Most people knew him as Mingo Jack. He was arrested around seven on the evening of March 5, 1886. The local constable checked his cell at ten, then went home to bed. Early the next morning, Mingo Jack was found hanging by his neck in the jailhouse doorway, his hands tied,
his face so badly beaten that one eye had burst its socket. According to the New York Times, it was the first lynching in New Jersey since the Revolutionary War.

  Most of the local people, including the constable, immediately declared that this was a crime that would never be solved. An editorial in the Eatontown Advertiser even called on the prosecutor and the coroner to stop any investigation, "as the people of Eatontown didn't want the identity of the lynchers discovered in the court." Witnesses would later say they saw two wagons, each carrying six men, heading toward the jail after a rowdy gathering at the local saloon. But when the coroner was asked if he'd gotten testimony from the alleged victim's father and brothers— who'd been parading around town vowing there'd be a lynching— he replied, "Why should I subpoena them?" When, three weeks later, the constable was arrested on manslaughter charges for leaving the prisoner unguarded, there was public outrage. The district attorney called the investigation "uphill work" and added, "not a single person in the community had in any way assisted in securing evidence."