Publisher's Synopsis
Long before Bruce Springsteen picked up a guitar; before Danny DeVito drove a taxi; before Jack Nicholson flew over the cuckoo's nest, Asbury Park was a seashore Shangri-La filled with shimmering odes to civic greatness, world-renowned baby parades, temples of retail, and atmospheric movie palaces. It was a magnet for tourists, a summer vacation mecca - to some degree New Jersey's own Coney Island. More recent years, however, have seen this once-thriving destination give way to deserted streets and rampant political corruption. As real-estate money moved out, pan-handlers and drug dealers moved in. In the 1980s Asbury Park's mayor was desperately trying to find a buyer for its once crowded boardwalk, and the amusement circuit's two vintage carousels were sold and shipped out of the state. Years of economic strife transformed this booming seaside city into a ghost town eventually tagged "Beirut on the Jersey Shore." In Asbury Park's Glory Days award-winning author Helen-Chantal Pike chronicles the city's heyday - the ninety-year period between 1890 and 1980. Pike illuminates the historical conditions contributing to the town's cycle of booms and recessions.;She explains that the area has had four "peaks" of popularity - the 1890s, 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s - all periods during which the city thrived as a cultural center. She investigates the factors that influenced these peaks, such as location, lodging, dining, nightlife, merchandising, and immigration, and how and why millions of people spent their leisure time within that one-square mile boundary on the northern coast of the state. Pike also includes an epilogue describing recent attempts to resurrect this once-vibrant community. Accompanied by hundreds of images, dozens of interviews, and many sidebars on attractions, Asbury Park's Glory Days is much more than a history; it is a heartfelt chronicle that evokes the atmosphere of a New Jersey amusement and cultural icon that is distinctly American.
