Love story on Park Avenue -- Asbury Park

April 11, 2015

It was a love story with an unhappy ending we didn't learn about until the second time we stumbled upon the house just south of Deal Lake.

We fell over it during our trip to the area the weekend after Christmas on a rather chilly stroll along the lake, and then back towards the center of town.

At the time, we were merely puzzled about the house and the front yard so overwhelmed with statuary, we struggled at first to make sense of it.

A corner house, the front yard had three gates, two of which seemed permanently closed, but guarded by matching stone lions at each -- faces worn smooth by weather and strewn over with the wintery remains of vines.

Peering over the gate from the Park Avenue side -- we glimpsed some of the statuary, many of which were various cupid characters, some with wings, some riding on the backs of beasts.

In winter, even the most normally lush yards seemed sad, and overgrown with the shredded remains of dying plants. But for some reason, this yard despite all of its pretensions seemed sad for other reasons we could not know.

By the time we came to the corner and the second gate, we could clearly see the front of the house where a pantheon of Christian saints stood in full glory on pedestals at intervals along the front fence. The corer gate had more lions, but we could see the yard better and that there were statues big and small of all sorts, sizes and shapes, most reflecting some sense of innocence and yet sensuality that seemed contradicted by the religions artifacts.

The front porch had a line of cupid statues, as provocative and innocent as the religious statues were defiant, raising many questions that trip would not answer.

We had, of course, run into similar -- if not quite as overwhelming -- properties in other places, including some in Cape May. But this differed in several important ways, a sense of purpose lay behind this collection, and it seemed to reflect a theme even if we could not desern what it was.

We move on -- driven from the place by the chill and a sense of extreme sadness.

We returned on Easter weekend, and were on the boardwalk along the north side of the Convention Hall when we ran into a couple of women walking their dogs.

We made friends with the dogs, and then moved on, taking the long walk we had taken on Christmas weekend, up to Deal Lake and back to that house on our way back.

The women from the boardwalk were there.

They said the house belonged to a gay man, a long time resident of Asbury Park, who had lived with another man for many years. When the other man died, the gay man started building this tribute to his memory, and even though many years had passed, the tribute continued, new pieces popping on the property from time to time, but always with this odd mixture of faith, innocence and sexuality.

The man never connected with anyone else, and apparently lived in the house along, morning the loss of the lover that had once shared this dream of living in peace.

It's a sad story, reflected on the faces and images of the yard, not one that we would have gotten in detail, but clearly one conveyed by the vast array, as if by sheer volume, the survivor continued to profess the quality and quantity of love.

As I said, it is a sad love story.

Springsteen’s footsteps

Thursday, April 09, 2015

Winter still licks at our heals, despite the date.

I open windows, put new screens up, and then close the windows against the chill.

This isn’t the same bone-cracking cold from a month ago, just a nagging reminder of what had been. We do not get weekdays filled with snow, but a persistent drizzle we must walk and drive through.

I spent most of the last two days rushing from one event to another with almost no time to breathe or think about what I might do next.

Still, I am nostalgic for a time when I had less to do and felt more concerned about the concept of making art.

I miss people like Roland and Michael, partly for their inspiration.

Even though I am mostly inspired by the people I meet everyday.

I went back to Asbury Park last weekend, where upon arrival, ran into a man named Michael, who was hurrying towards the boardwalk.

He had moved into the seaside city two years ago in order to become one of the handful of regular boardwalk performers. He was not going to perform that day – Holy Saturday – but set up shop for Easter when people were out and about after religious services.

Perhaps like many of the women I used to see in Hollywood, he’d come hoping to get discovered, a street performer straight out of a Joni Mitchell song, pure art that did not provide immediate profit.
This differs from the club performers we went to see at The Wonder Bar – for the second annual Dark City presentation – where more or less local professionals, put on their acts for money, aching to find fame in a place made famous by Bruce Springsteen and others.

We live our lives with the notion that history might repeat itself, and lightning strike the same place twice.

It rarely does. While many famous people came out of this city just as many did Liverpool a decade earlier, they were a product of that time and place, some magic produced by the right combination at the exact right moment.

We spent a good portion of this trip, seeking out the fingerprints Springsteen left (and still leaves on the place.)

Unlike Frank Sinatra who despised his home town of Hoboken and yet could not shed his growing up there, Springsteen retains his love for this place and that time, and like some spirit of the past must keep returning here, even though the place has ceased to be what it once was.

We visited the Asbury Park Press building – which is no longer an institution of my noble profession having fled with white flight to the suburbs – where Springsteen once did a video or book signing. He went to the upstage club that is no longer anything but a wreck, and could not even fine the remains of the beauty parlor whose owner once owned the club.

We did find the apartment where Springsteen inked most of the songs from his “Greetings from Asbury Park,” near where a museum had been set up in his honor. But there is the same sense of great change here as in Hoboken, where the culture each place once maintain no longer exists. Hoboken was a mecca of hardworking dock hands, finding comfort in a bar culture after long hours of labor. Asbury Park was the east coast equivalent of “American Graffiti,” a testimony to a way of life that came and went, and is no longer possible in this or perhaps any other place.

So we walked later the circuit that is no longer Thunder Road, visiting icons to a past that we wish could still exist, and exist because a few people who lived through it had the talent to preserved snapshots of that life in their art.

Ultimately, they define art for me, allowing us to cling to worlds that can no longer exist and generating feelings that are an important part of that culture.

But all of us who take this walk, but avoid making it over into the stations of the cross, turning art into religious obsession. If we take anything away from this place, it must be the inspiration to do what Springsteen did, create our own space, preserve our own history, and make sure that our art conveys the same important feelings of our experience while we walked this mortal coil.

A change in the air

Friday, April 03, 2015

The rain brings warmth instead of cold, a complete reverse of seasons that finally has allowed winter to let loose its grip on my world.

Normally, I would have walked in – the way I did earlier this week when the season still hadn’t completely changed – but Friday (good or bad) is production day for me, and I had to hurry into the office to finish up.

The world, of course, has changed.

Yesterday, Chris from the Bayonne office, retired – thus removing one more tie to the old paper before our chain purchased it.

The old paper started back in 1978 – just about the same time I decided to give up on a possible career as a musician and focus on what I did best – writing. The owner had come over from the daily newspaper that had an even longer history, but had been demolished in the corporate takeover that left only one daily with almost no interest in Bayonne.

His was an advertising vehicle with a ton a press releases and an occasional story.

But it thrived, because somehow it had managed to tap into the community in a way other weeklies I worked for over the years could not.

Chris wasn’t there from the start.  She started in 1988.

When our paper took over that paper in 2004 and I was assigned to cover Bayonne, the paper still had a number of people who had started with the original owner. But over the last decade, they wandered off one by one, leaving Chris as the last of the old timers.

Seeing her leave is like seeing the final end of the old paper – even though when I spoke with her this week she felt that I had become part of that tradition, too, bringing to the paper in the community what it had lacked in its own vestige.

“If you were to move down here and run for office, you could get elected,” she told me. “People respect you here.”

This is the Walter Cronkite syndrome. Do an honest job reporting and people may come to respect you.

I wouldn’t run for office here, there or anywhere. But it was nice to hear.

Since 2004, however, much of my job has been documenting a change in the city. I didn’t understand that the paper itself would change, and thus, so would I.

The move from the old office to the new office down there was traumatic, since it severed an important connection we would never regain.

I left after ten years covering that beat because it was time to move on, although I go back once a week just to work there.

But with Chris leaving, it won’t be the same.

Will you still love me tomorrow

The end of the world as we know it

March 29, 2015

It's not the end of the world, but there is a change in the air, and I'm not completely sure of what it means. A fire broke out in the east village yesterday, wiping out three buildings, more history vanishing before our eyes.

Certain eras breed this kind of change, where we see the face of the world we knew converted into something new, and many times, alien.

I spent well over two decades in Secaucus, first as a fotomac, and later as baker and finally as a journalist. But even prior to that, I passed through that town on my way to and from Manhattan. For the most part, the place remained unchanged except for moderate modifications. While the acme vanished from the center of town, the mark in its parking lot where the fotomat booth stood remains, as does the library building where I had to go to use the toilet when working there.

But even during that incarnation, I saw them raze the donut place and replace it will a string of stores.

The state, of course, made significant changes when they altered the path of Route 3, and so steered a course that avoided the center of town -- as was the case when I went to new york city in the late 1960s.

And the mayor at that time, bargained to rebuild this one time home of pig farms into an outlet and shopping mall mecca, but keeping these things on the perimeter of the town so that deceptively, this world never seemed to change.

Fundamentally it did. Tens of thousands of people came and went daily to and from the buildings that were not old Secaucus, while old Secaucus went on living with the illusion of sameness. They even installed a gate to block the only direct road from warehouse/outlet section to the residential section so as to maintain the fiction.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I often drove down the western spur of the New Jersey Turnpike to see my family in Toms River, and so from a distance I saw the changes that could not be seen so easily close up, the rise of towers along the western border, the loss of icons like the drive in movie theater and the demolition of the Peter Pan Motel. I saw the last farm vanish as the city fathers grew ashamed of their past and sought to remodel their town as a bedroom community for New York – hating the distinction of two world wars when it supplied food to the troops world wide.

But eventually, the heart of the town would get affected, and for me, the loss of the Plaza Diner became symbolic of the lost heart of the Secaucus I knew. When the Acme closed, I knew Secaucus had changed so fundamentally, it wasn’t same place I had come to admire, despite all the political rhetoric about taking it back. Some things can’t be restored.

Recently I noticed that the old Ideal Bar had changed hands again – the one time last testament to the string of nightclubs and taverns that had once populated the town. The town closed down many of them over the years, but this one held on – finally, like a number of other even newer institutions, making its way into a history book of people’s memories.

I guess this is the way it is for every place.

And why people flee their homes sometimes to avoid seeing their world change.

Remarkably, little has actually changed where I grew up, although my family fled the old house fearing the worst.

A sad testament to our lives, when we do not know which is right, to stay or go, to embrace change or to resist it.

Nothing ever lasts

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

We made the trip south in the rain again, although not the deluge we faced in the fall trip where we had to stop along the side of the Parkway in order to let the downfall relent.

Rain accompanied a number of trips to Asbury Park, but did not keep us away until rain turned to snow and ice, and we hunkered down in Jersey City to wait it out, coming south the way the geese come north, as a spring ritual.

Not all the trips south over the last year had come with rain, but generally, the parkway became a madhouse filled with insane drivers in a rush to get somewhere fast. This trip was different with only one or two of the weaving idiots to make the trip uncomfortable, and fewer still of the panicked pedestrians that clogged middle lanes for fear of onramps. So we made good time even though we had chosen to leave later, doing our chores before we left – and arrived slightly over an hour after the 2 p.m. check in at the Neptune motel.

These roads always make me nostalgic for those days I was the backseat passenger in my grandfather’s car and made our way to some shore community where he or my uncles needed to work on somebody’s boat, or for our own annual summer trip to the beach – always pausing on the way to get a basket of fruit and vegetables from the inevitable roadside stands – those inexpensive summer icons since replaced in the city by the ludicrously labeled farmer’s markets at five times the price.

This time, I thought on my last trip wandering aimlessly along Route 35 when I still owned my silver Pinto, and I took my mother and my uncle for a ride, even then aware of the changing landscape and how intrusive development had become, and how we had struggled to find a still-in-business roadside stand for us to stop at.

Routinely, we take the same route in and out of Asbury Park – a route made into myth in a Bruce Springsteen story from his 1978 New York City concert – and we park in the same place near the intersection of Kingsley, Cookman and Asbury.

Once the hub of amusement activity, the place has become a graveyard of memories, a vacant lot along one side, two parking lots, and misconceived condo development. But on this day, with a steady rain after a weekend of snow, this world was nearly devoid of all life. Even our Christmas weekend trip had filled the boardwalk. But as we made our way up to the casino, life did not seem to exist even inside the bars along one side or in the abandoned cavern of the casino itself.

As routine, we made our way to the other end of the boardwalk to the still occupied Convention Hall, where we hoped to get coffee, and found the place as vacant as the boardwalk had been with a few employees of the pub preparing for some wedding, and an occasional jogger or dog walker passing through. The coffee was closed tight for lack of interest. Apparently, people had not yet gotten over the impact of the snow and so did not believe the world would thaw as quickly as it had.

We made our way back towards the Casino, seeing a few more brave souls appear as darkness came. Wesley Lake glowed with the warmed reflections remaining buildings as we walked up the Ocean Grove side and crossed one of the bridges to access the eateries near Cookman. The beer garden had opened, but we avoided it in favor of the small pizzeria we had eaten at previously, and then made our way back down Cookman to the boardwalk again to wait out the hour or so before we could go to the Stone Pony.

A few more people moved along near Madam Maries. The wedding party we had seen earlier posing for pictures in the convention center was gone, and only a few regulars occupied the pub. We sat at the tables near the closed coffee shop and took warmth under the ceiling level heaters we alone appreciated at that moment.

Outside, darkness grew more intense with the gray rain, and before long, we were out again, moving towards the Stone Pony in the rain.
Later, after the music was over, we made our way back to the motel.

By morning, it was cold, but clear, demonstrating that winter still clung even if the snow did not.

As with previous weekends, we packed up, put our stuff in the car, and then walked to nearby Perkins for breakfast, before checking out, and making our way back to Asbury Park.

Since our purpose this trip was to see the Bruce Springsteen tribute band we did not linger long in the cold, but took a brief stroll along the boardwalk from convention center to the pier in Ocean Grove. Someone had replaced the little sailor doll at the end of the pier and so all seemed well with the world again, although when we got to Main Street in Ocean Grove, we discovered a pile of sticks where three stores had been gutted by fire in January – one more injury to a memory, although not as horrible as the one that leveled Sea Side Park.

Memories are meant to fade, not go up in smoke, or get bulldozed by greedy developers. But then, the important lesson in all this is that nothing ever lasts, nor should it, a memory is precious partly because it holds on to the residue of something important long after the reality.

Lovefest at the Stone Pony

 

Monday, March 16, 2015

I hadn’t expected to walk into a lovefest for white men, young and old, when I booked the tickets for Tramps Like Us at The Stone Pony.

We had heard the Springsteen tribute band sound check last fall just after finding Clarence Clemons’s memorial bench on the boardwalk, and took it as a sign that we ought to catch the act the next time it came to Asbury Park.

We missed Springsteen himself due to a severe ice storm that kept us prisoners in Jersey City while he did a 90 minute set with some old friends at the Paramount Theater a month ago.

So a tribute band was the best we could accomplish with the first warm day after the frost had passed.

Like our first time hearing the tribute band, it rained the whole day of our coming.

“How come every time we play here it rains?” said founding member and Springsteen-tribute-artist Mark Salore from the stage that night.

The rain casts Asbury Park into a gray haze. This was no deluge like one visit we made here, but a heavy mist to light rain that helped sweep the last of the previous snow storm out to sea.

By lovefest, I don’t mean “gay,” like you would find up the street at the Empress Motel.

This was a lovefest of mostly white men of every age, weight, fully-haired or balding, macho or not, gathered on the dance floor before the stage with wives, girlfriends, or in packs of friends, mostly working class, many wearing t-shirts and baseball hats, work boots, or thin leather jackets trying to look cool.

Yet for all the gathered testosterone, these men were infinitely polite (unlike the unruly packs that had gathered in the same space like fall for the Grateful Dead tribute band). These men moved with the grace of alter boys, and for good reason, because the Stone Pony for them had become a church, and their was a not-so-quiet reverence we felt the moment we came through the door, but which become all too evident the moment the music started, and these men began to sway – some raising fists in the air in tribute to the some unseen god evoked in this place by this band, some even casting “the finger” to one of the many oppressors that they face in their lives – here finding a hero (I’m no hero that’s understood) of a working class, New Jersey life that they could find in no other performer, songs filling the room with tales of their own lives and struggles, their voices chanting out words they knew as well as the singer did, having lived with them for decades – especially those icon tunes from the early albums such as “Born to Run” or “Darkness on the Edge of Town.”

This band and the singer their paid tribute to sang songs about what it is like to live and die as ordinary people in a place as ordinary as New Jersey – songs filled with angst of growing up in a place that other placed mocked, songs filled with every day issues that seemed unworthy of other singers, but had been made into myth by a man who had started his career out, not just in New Jersey, but in here, in Asbury Park, and had played on this stage for people just like these people.

In a year in which “black lives matter” became something of a theme, this moment in The Stone Pony took on ironic proportions since in some ways Springsteen’s songs are about how much white lives also matter, and how unheralded most lives are, white or black, man or woman.

But it is true that most of the men in that room – except for the staff – were white, but that’s where the similarities stopped, old and young chanting the same religious theme of their own lives as the musicians landed on touch stones of songs they knew would evoke the most reaction.

This was the 25th anniversary of the band, and some of the older members got up to play a few songs, too. And since this year was also our 25th anniversary – recalling a wedding filled with white men and women, and a rock band filled with friends who had accompanied me through this long perilous journey of being white, working class and from New Jersey – I felt the pang of this performance, too.

Plenty of women accompanied the men in his room, but they seemed just a little baffled by the mood, as these men gathered in this primitive ritual, thrusting fists, fingers even beer bottles in the air in their defiance of the hard life they have lived – especially during songs like “Bad Lands,” while the women seemed equally confused as men rocked them during the ballads, men singing to their women words that were not their own, but seemed to sum up their lives better than words they could come up with on their own,. And few moments in my life made me understand what the attraction was, how Springsteen had captured more than just a moment in time, or a place, or even a feeling, he had captured a way of life that was rapidly evaporating. New Jersey would never be the same. These working class men were of an era that was vanishing before our eyes, and the men in that room, old or young, fat or muscular, rich or poor, all connected to that last string of words that kept the memory of theirs lives alive, giving them immortality that they knew they could not achieve for themselves.