Remembering “The Branch,” New Jersey, Former Jewel of the Sea
05.27.22
“Large, rambling frame houses with sweeping driveways and broad lawns recall at a glance the period when a house, like a fashionable woman, simply could not be overdecorated.”
New Jersey Writers’ Project, Entertaining a Nation; The Career of Long Branch
The Church of the Presidents — a former Episcopal chapel named for the seven presidents who once worshipped in its pews — is one of the last remaining visual clues pointing to Long Branch, New Jersey’s magnificent past. Once known for its ancestral houses and thirty-room cottages, “The Branch,” as it was called, served as the nation’s premier resort town for nearly fifty years.
Go further west, crossing the boundaries of Monmouth University, and pedestrians are greeted by the monstrous façade of Shadow Lawn, an Italian marble palace constructed in 1929 at a cost of $10.5 million. Designed by John McCall, president of the New York Life Insurance Company, the original build (consumed by a spectacular fire in 1927) boasted fifty-two rooms and gold-plated plumbing throughout.
“It took two years to build the house,” writes one historic society. “This was entirely understandable to anyone who heard McCall’s increasingly lavish plans. He altered the design almost daily and had a penchant for adding bathrooms. When the house was finally completed, there were more bathtubs leftover on the lawn than there were in the house.”
Today, much of the architectural glitz has disappeared. According to the Monmouth County Historical Association, development and suburban sprawl took a heavy toll on the Victorian excess of yesteryear. Since 1984, two hundred and fifty buildings, or 15% of all recorded historic properties in the county, were demolished or destroyed. In much of its place, according to one disgruntled viewer, are “drab monoliths that look uncomfortably like Yuppie versions of Soviet-era housing projects.”
This weekend, as New Yorkers make their way to Hudson Valley, the Hamptons, and Montauk, we look back at America’s original watering place on a small bluff by the sea.
Rise to Prominence
The Lenape and Iroquois tribes were the first to recognize Long Branch’s unusual natural assets, taking advantage of its “saline breezes,” robust fishing waters, and fertile black sands each summer. Early settlers purchased the land from the Lenape tribe after John Slocum defeated Vow-a-Vapon, the Lenape tribe’s reigning champion (who, according to legend, wore “nothing but his unbridled confidence and a thick coat of goose grease”), in a nail-biter wrestling match.
Early settlers saw little utility in the shoreline, preferring to settle further inland. Until the 1830s, Long Branch functioned chiefly as a small fishing hamlet and a health retreat for staid Philadelphians. One 1820s visitor described the resort as a “sedate watering place with grace at each meal, hymn singing in the evening and regular prayer meetings… Philadelphians were the sole clients, and it was a saintly place with strict blue laws.”
Its identity as a getaway for tight-lipped vacationers was short-lived. By the 1830s, it assumed a sprightlier air when, as one visitor recorded, “card playing, billiards, bowling, dancing, and fast driving on the beach were introduced. One suspects that it was the passion for fast driving that made Long Branch the mecca of the worldly crowd.”
But it wasn’t until seven years later, when Ulysses S. Grant first graced its promenade, that Long Branch truly came into its glory. Once Grant became president, a group of influential Long Branch homeowners — George Childs, wealthy publisher of the Philadelphia Public Ledger; George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Palace Car Co.; and New York financiers Anthony Drexel and Moses Taylor — induced Grant to visit every summer by gifting him a 30-room cottage in the exclusive neighborhood of Elberon. “They were trying to buy political influence,” says Beth Wooley, a local historian and trustee of the Long Branch Historical Association. “Nowadays, a president would be impeached for something like that.”
Their scheme worked. Sycophants and wealth gathered at every corner, leading to an explosion in horse racing, hotels, gambling houses, and gossip magazines. Despite Grant’s distaste for high society, the mere possibility of encountering him in his linen duster, lighting up a cigar, was enough to cement Long Branch as the nation’s premier resort town. Famously private, Grant despised the dozens of gala balls inevitably thrown in his honor. At the end of one obligatory waltz, he turned to his partner and said, “Madam, I had rather storm a fort than attempt another dance.”
Still, he eventually found his crowd, choosing to spend “hours swapping yarns” with the town policeman and bathing master. Another “crony,” the one-legged tollkeeper at Morris Avenue and Main Street, first encountered Grant trying to evade the toll. Incensed, he hobbled out and demanded the fee. Grant objected, “Maybe you don’t know who I am? I’m the President of the United States!”
Unimpressed, the old man responded, “I don’t care who you are. If you’re President of Hell, it’s your business to pay two cents toll and my business to collect it.” The toll was paid, and the two became lasting friends for the next fifteen years.
Symptoms of Decline
Grant’s vacationing choice was mirrored by six more presidents until 1916, when Woodrow Wilson accepted his Democratic nomination from Shadow Lawn. For a few brief decades, Elberon was adopted by wealthy Jewish families — the Seligmans, Loebs, Bloomingdales, and Guggenheims — who established the area as a “parallel high society” to Newport, which still closed its doors to them. However, the seaside sanctuary was upended in 1924, when 15,000 Klansman performed a 4-hour march down Broadway on the 4th of July, causing a mass exodus of prominent Jews and Catholics from the area.
“It was the biggest Ku Klux Klan march in the country,” says Wooley. “Right after that, a lot of those wealthy Jewish people closed up shop and didn’t come back.”
Already suffering from the illegalization of gambling in 1893, Long Branch struggled to find a new attraction for summer crowds. It began its transition away from a resort identity and towards a year-round city with significant industry, particularly clothing manufacturing. By the 1950s, the Garden State Parkway carried beachgoers further south, and the Monmouth Mall crushed the downtown shopping center.
The city reached an all-time low in 1987, when an uncontrollable fire swept through the 175-yard Fisherman’s Pier and the commercial center of the boardwalk, razing the city’s last tourist attraction and causing $8 million worth of damage. “Between this and the waste and everything in the water, there is nothing to come here for,” said one clerk at the boardwalk. “It’s dead.” The New York Times agreed, famously describing Long Branch’s oceanfront as “a battered array of go-go joints, vacant storefronts, weedy lots, drug dealers, decrepit housing and a defunct water slide.”
Despite public declarations that the pier would restored, it sat untouched for nearly seventeen years, stymied by funding gaps, political battles, and lack of a clear plan. “I ran by here all the time, watching it literally fall into the ocean,” said long-time resident Tim McLoone. “It used to break everyone’s heart just to see it crumbling into the ocean.”
New Life at Long Branch
Today, McLoone is the proud business owner of McLoone’s Pier House, one of the earliest businesses to reopen at the Pier in 2005. Following an infusion of nearly $20 million in public grants and low-interest loans, the local government restored public access to the beach, rebuilt a portion of Ocean Boulevard, and subsidized market-rate housing. This progress inspired a group of local businessmen to pool resources and hire an elite design firm, Thompson and Wood, to discuss redevelopment of the town’s coastline.
In July 1995, they unleashed a master plan that called for $1 billion in private investments to create an “urban renewal utopia, complete with bikeways and walkways and condominiums and high-value commercial zones.” Long Branch quickly adopted the plan and, incredibly, convinced the state to wave the Coastal Area Facilities Review Act, a clearance process so onerous that five developers immediately jumped at the opportunity to avoid it.
Ultimately, Applied Development won the bid and completed the first two phases of redevelopment before selling Pier Village — which includes nearly 500 rental units and 90,000 square feet of retail shops — to Jared Kushner’s company for $200 million. Part of the project’s continued appeal rests in its recent designation as a coveted Opportunity Zone, which some question given its proximity to “a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant and a Lululemon yoga shop.”
Still, many believe the city’s extensive use of eminent domain and tax incentives were a necessary cost for rebirth. “Certainly, I was a beneficiary [of eminent domain],” admits McLoone. “But I’m a runner, and I ran by those buildings for years, and they were rat infested, they were drug infested, there was violence. They were falling into the ocean. Literally. And now that area is a jewel.”
If not a Victorian jewel, so to speak, Pier Village is certainly popular enough that it has been overwhelmed by TikTok parties twice in the past two years. And while watchdog residents will no doubt closely monitor future phases of redevelopment, many are thankful to call Long Branch a destination once more.
“We had one of the largest redevelopment projects in the history of the state,” says former Mayor Adam Schneider. “We had one of the most controversial as well. But we rebuilt our waterfront.”
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