4th of July, Asbury Park

by Daniel Wolff

  The problem was that while the city council could try to maintain the status quo, the status quo couldn't maintain the city. The shopping district was in serious trouble. By March 1956, Bamberger's department store anchored a new cluster of shops outside the city. Forty-three acres had been purchased on Route 35 to build the Eatontown Shopping Center. The Monmouth Mall would open in 1959. Malls were easy to get to by car, safe, plus they had the excitement of the new. And thanks to a 1954 revision of the U.S. tax code, developers could write off some of the real estate costs, helping shopping centers undercut prices at local stores.

  As for the beachfront, without Bingo and the other games, the boardwalk was, in the words of longtime beach commissioner Kendall Lee, "dead." The publicity around the Convention Hall riot didn't help, but the beachfront hadn't been self-sustaining for years. And far to the west, another blow struck Asbury's economy: a blow from so far away it may not even have been felt, at first. Two weeks after Bill Haley played the Casino, a new promised land opened. "Here," its founder declared, "age relives fond memories of the past. . . and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America."

  If that sounds like James Bradley, the dream that Walt Disney built on 160 acres in Anaheim, California, shared a lot of Asbury Park's original values. It was set off from the outside world. It promised safety and reassuring middle-class fun. It looked backward. In many ways, what Disney created was a replica of small­town America. Or, more accurately, a replica of towns like Asbury that sold nostalgia for those good old days. Brass bands, sounding like John Philip Sousa's, toured Disneyland's spotless streets. Places like Asbury, Disney pointed out, had gotten "honky tonk with a lot of questionable characters running around." Disneyland replaced those characters with its own— Mickey Mouse and Snow White— and that first summer drew four million visitors. The way the malls would drain Cookman Avenue, the new theme parks would help empty Asbury's boardwalk.

  By the Fourth of July, 1956, the question was what vision could possibly revitalize the dying city. Or, as the Asbury Park Evening Press put it, how to "go forward instead of back." The editors counted themselves among those who still believed in Asbury Park's future. After the Convention Hall Riot, they could " visualize a vital, growing municipality." But the only path to that which they could muster up was a variation on the Merchants' Vision. "Asbury Park is a multimillion dollar business," the editors wrote, "owned by some 18,000 citizen-stockholders." Not a promised land. Not a moral community. Not even a city, really. Asbury was a business, like Disneyland, and it needed a business model. That, the editors wrote, or James Bradley's dream would become "a moribund political sub-division to be looted and then deserted for greener fields."

  But that was already happening. The West Side had been looted for decades. And white families had been deserting at least since school desegregation. What rock 6k roll helped reveal on Asbury's boardwalk were divisions that no business model addressed. The voice that did evoke an alternative vision— that called on the city to "dedicate [itself] to the fight against social stagnation"— came from a guest speaker at Asbury Park High School. Four years after the rock 6k roll riot, in the spring of 1960, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in Asbury to address the General Baptist Convention of New Jersey. Civil rights sit-ins were sweeping the South. Dr. King argued that the nation's fight against social stagnation had to include "the subtle and hidden segregation in the North." It wasn't enough to be a citizen-stockholder. To succeed, any vision of the future had to combine business concerns with moral ones. "We must learn to live together as brothers," he told the thirteen hundred listeners packed into Asbury High, "or we shall perish as fools."

  It's easy to imagine the West Side responding with a simple "Amen." As to the city's businessmen, they might be willing to make some concessions. You could see the city was dying. Cars whizzed by for the bigger, cleaner, safer beaches farther down the shore. Joe Mattice, who was now emerging as Asbury's new boss, had come of age in the era of Hetrick and Tumen. He was willing to work with Detective Sergeant Smith. He might let the Tilt-A-Whirl be open to all— as long as you paid your admission. But that didn't mean living as brothers.

  And what about Asbury teenagers? After all, they were the ones who'd fought on the boardwalk. They might be forgiven if they heard in Dr. King's words an echo of Frankie Lymon's. The one declared that a separate society like Asbury's made self-destructive fools out of them all. The other came snapping out onstage, admitting from the start that, yes, of course, they were fools. Then singing what sounded like nonsense, he kept returning to the same unanswerable question. An apparently ridiculous question. And in some ways, the only one worth asking. Why do fools fall in love?

  FOURTH OF JULY, 1970

  ASBURY DIDN'T EXPLODE in 1964. Jersey City and Paterson did, in what a presidential commission called "a series of extraordinary and probably unprecedented racial disorders." The next August, it was Watts: the routine arrest of a drunk driver led to six days of rebellion and thirty-four deaths, almost all of them African-Americans. In 1966, it was Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. Still, Asbury remained quiet. Then, in 1967, it was Newark.

  On a Wednesday evening eight days after the Fourth of July, two white cops roughed up a black cabdriver with the generic name of John Smith. "The spirit and the feeling of the moment a rebellion breaks out," Newark native Amiri Bar aka would write in TKe Autobiography of Leroi Jones, "is almost indescribable. Everything seems to be in zoooom motion, crashing toward some explosive manifestation. As Lenin said, time is speeded up, what takes years is done in days, in real revolution. In rebellions, life goes to 156 rpm and the song is a police siren accompanying people's breathless shouts and laughter."

  By Wednesday, July 12, thousands of Newark's citizens were singing that song. Though most of them couldn't have quoted Lenin, their target was clear. They shattered the plate-glass windows of (especially) white-owned stores, looting and celebrating. New Jersey governor Richard Hughes described Newark as "a city in open rebellion. This amounts to criminal insurrection against society." By the end of the weekend, with twenty-six dead, a thousand injured, another fifteen hundred in jail, and an estimated $5 million in property damage, the governor-told the press, "The line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as any place in America."

  And then the rebellion spread. Sunday, Newark experienced its first quiet night in five, but Jersey City erupted. At the same time, in Plainfield, eighteen miles south of Newark, a white cop was shot and beaten to death in what the mayor called "planned, open insurrection." New Brunswick and Paterson followed.

  Asbury Park was next in line. It had, as the Asbury Press wrote, its own share of the "injustice and the frustration that provoke riots." After another decade of being looted and deserted, the city barely had an economy. Typical of the deterioration on the boardwalk, the Casino had burned the year before and still hadn't been fully restored. Across the tracks, thirty-five percent of the city's black population was living below the poverty line, and that number was rising. Plus, the West Side had a close connection to what went on in Newark, fifty miles to the north. Some Asbury residents belonged to Newark's Muslim mosque; others were in contact with its Black Panther Party. "Yea, I paid attention to Newark" is how one teenager explained it.

  Five days after the Newark rebellion and the night after Plainfield's, Asbury's city officials called a special meeting to discuss the situation. Mayor Frank Rowland heard a member of the city's housing committee describe the West Side's mood as "explosive." Word was on the street: what had started in Newark was coming to Asbury. It was only a matter of time.

  The recently appointed acting police chief, Thomas Smith, rose to deny that. According to a fellow Negro officer, Smith had been owed the chiefs job for a while. After going to the black side of Bangs Avenue Elementary School and then to Asbury High, Smith spent two years at Howard University. When
he returned from serving in World War II, he rejoined the city's police force, working his way up to captain in the detective bureau. Booker T. Washington was one of his inspirations, modeling how a Negro could achieve by working within the system. When Smith took the police officer's exam, an African-American colleague recalled, he'd come out first, but town officials had balked at making him chief. Instead, they'd asked the middle-class leaders of the Negro community to take Smith aside. "Tell Tommy the town ain't ready for him" is how the whisper supposedly went. "[That he's] a good captain of detectives . . . stay there." But now, as one officer put it, the riots had scared them all: "After Plainfield, shit! They saw the writing on the wall. They got out, and it was, 'Hey, Tommy! You can stop anything.'" So, Smith rose to assure city officials that he could, indeed, stop a rebellion. And some of the other blacks in the room remember exchanging looks as he spoke. If this was what having a black police chief meant . . .

  Councilman Vaccaro spoke next. Clearly, the West Side needed more jobs for youth, more recreation, and better housing. The all-white council, including the Democratic boss, Joseph Mattice, listened quietly. The Vaccaro family, with fourteen properties, was the largest single landlord in the ghetto. The day before, in its lead editorial, the Asbury Park Sunday Press had lambasted the local government for decades of delay on the West Side's urban renewal. "It has been next to impossible to define accountability," the Press complained, "[but] it has been apparent for some time that those with a voice in either project [there was also supposed to be a new middle school] have not shown enough impatience to get action. No one is asking for miracles. At the present rate of accomplishment, less than a third of the urban renewal area has been developed in 10 years and there is no Middle School after almost half that time. It may take a miracle to see these projects completed."

  Joe Mattice had controlled Asbury's government at least since his election in 1957, and the newspapers had been going on in this way for as long as he could remember. Look magazine would describe Mattice as "standpat," leading a city council " unresponsive to the needs and demands of the growing black population." What he'd learned from more than a quarter century in Asbury politics was the power of silence. Mattice kept quiet now, as Donald Hammary, the representative of the Monmouth Community Action Program (MCAP), stood to speak.

  A black activist with a charismatic, fiery personality, Hammary was pure street. And as someone paid by the federal government rather than the city, he could say what others in the room couldn't. He began by making clear that the West Side was past any easy or slow solutions. "The youth today," he declared in his rough, high-pitched voice, "aren't gonna take what their fathers did." A lot of them were smoking reefer just for something to do, and they'd beg, borrow, or steal to get the money for it. "Families," he went on, "have to rent two or three apartments," because there weren't enough decent-sized ones to go around. And what they could rent were run-down and disgraceful. "People on the West Side can't take no vacations to get away from it," he said to the well-dressed councilmen. " . . . [They're] ready to explode . . . And the young people are saying to hell with it."

  "We'll handle them" is how Hammary remembers Tommy Smith's law-and-order response. "We have enough police to keep any kind of disorders down."

  "Man," Hammary jumped in, "when people get angry enough, a cop ain't nothing but another man!"

  The argument went back and forth. Arthur Polite, a Negro businessman, weighed in on Springwood Avenue's moral sins. "That," he said, "will be the crux of any trouble." There were dealers hanging outside Cuba's bar on Friday night, and what Polite called "faggots" showing off their wigs and rings: their numbers "out of proportion" to the size of Asbury Park. "These people on the block," he concluded in disgust, lumping all into one, "have a code of language all their own. Many have been in Freehold jail or prison together." They were what the assistant city attorney, Norm Mesnikoff, called "a different kind of black," not solid Republicans like Polite.

  In national reports, sociologists had recently labeled this "the riffraff theory." It held that the majority of Negroes were law-abiding citizens and that these riots weren't political rebellions at all but, as a governor's commission in Louisiana wrote, "formless, quite senseless," and so, "meaningless." As applied to Newark, the riffraff theory blamed "young people with nothing to do and nothing to lose" and "outside agitators." Maybe, one Asbury councilman wondered out loud, if they could just close down certain places, or arrest certain people?

  About then, the black police detective in charge of youth, David Parreott, decided to say his piece. Parreott basically agreed with Hammary, but where the MCAP employee let loose with a street hustler's fury, Officer Parreott was a broad, levelheaded man who spoke in measured tones. The people on the West Side, Parreott explained, "want something to do other than to stand around on the corners." This was no new breed. "They are seeking," he went on in his soft but firm voice, "the same things that their fathers sought: security, love, affection, social status, and new experiences."

  Parreott looked at Mattice, at Mayor Rowland and the other councilmen, trying for what seemed like the thousandth time to explain what living on the West Side was like. The kids stole cars to prove themselves. They joined gangs for status, security. "They can't take a trip," he said, searching the faces in the room, "so they turn to glue sniffing, drinking, and drugs." Parreott had said it all before, but maybe now, with Newark still smoking, they'd listen. There were three "outstanding fermenting complaints," he concluded, trying to win them over with the urgency in his voice: "housing, recreation, and jobs."

  In the end, nothing was resolved, and the meeting broke up near ten P.M. At about that time, across town on Springwood Avenue, a group of twenty teenagers had started throwing rocks at the side of a building. A brick went through the plate glass at Etoll's Grocery on Prospect; a bottle broke inside the open door of the New Asbury Liquor store. But acting chief Smith was right— this time, anyway. Extra police were called into the area, and by midnight, quiet had been restored.

  The next weekend, other cities went up across the country. In Detroit, it took seven thousand National Guardsmen to restore order: 43 people were killed and 450 injured. New York City's Spanish Harlem burst into flame; so did Rochester, Birmingham, and Cambridge, Maryland. By the end of 1967, there had been nearly four dozen "riots" and more than a hundred cases of something labeled "civil unrest." Historians would categorize these insurrections as "the greatest wave of urban violence the nation had ever seen." But Asbury Park had stayed quiet. As quiet as the empty lots, long ago leveled for urban renewal, still gaping on the West Side.

  The next spring, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. There were rebellions in 110 U.S. cities; fifty-five thousand troops were called up. The Sunday after the shooting, with the national death toll at twenty-four, Asbury Park held a silent protest march. Two thousand people (mostly Negroes according to the local paper) walked the length of Asbury's boardwalk, from Casino Hall to Convention Hall, carrying candles and trying, through their silence, to bring this national issue home.

  A year later, in May of 1969, Joseph Mattice was elected mayor. His victory over Frank Rowland made the city's long-term shift in power official. By then, Eugene Capibianco had been city judge for decades, and Councilmen Vaccaro and Albarelli were serving with Mattice. The children of Asbury's ditchdiggers and gardeners were now in power. Born and educated in Asbury, with a law firm on Mattison Avenue, Joe Mattice devoted his first public pronouncement to denying one of the central facts of the city. "There is no east or west side as far as I'm concerned," said the new mayor. "I'm going to work for the best interests of Asbury Park."

  As Independence Day, 1970, approached, the page-one headline in the Asbury Park Evening News confidently predicted A TRADITIONAL 4TH. It was true, the story went on to say, that "human events these days are causing most Americans to pause apprehensively to reassess the state of the union . . . [but the Fourth] still is basically a happy occasion."

 
The apprehensive pause wasn't only because of a half decade of urban uprisings. By 1970, a series of political assassinations had left many wondering how— if— democracy could function. They saw a law-and-order national government whose power was based on Asbury's kind of racial and economic division. And then there was the war in Vietnam. Over forty thousand U.S. military personnel had died there, with more than a hundred deaths just in the week before the Fourth. There were peace protests all across the country, and death there, too: four students killed at a protest at Kent State in May, two students shot to death at Jackson State ten days later. Over a million men had already been drafted, and coming into the Fourth of July weekend, the Selective Service conducted its second national lottery to determine which eighteen-year- olds would be next.

  In New Jersey over the past decade, the population had increased by eighteen percent, much of it in the suburban rings expanding around New York City and Philadelphia. Jersey had become the eighth most populous state and exemplified the trend away from manufacturing jobs to what was starting to be called the service economy. By 1970, this trend helped Jersey "shift towards a more unequal income distribution." Asbury Park, of course, had had a service economy since the days when Stephen Crane said it made nothing. By now, nearly thirty percent of the city's population was on welfare. While the sixties had continued to hollow the town out, Asbury's exterior looked much the same. The antique carousel still spun; there was still the smell of saltwater taffy, the ping of pinball machines, the "dark rides" in the Palace. True, beachfront renewal had never happened. On the other hand, the decay had been long-term, so that tourists used to coming down for their traditional Fourth of July visit found something sweet and familiar in the fading city.