Daniel Wolff - 4th of July, Asbury Park. A History of the Promised Land

THIS IS THE history of a place that never existed.

This is a history of the promised land.

There is a city called Asbury Park, a" place on the Jersey shore occupied by real people, where actual buildings stand in various stages of decrepitude and renewal, where the Atlantic Ocean breaks on the sand. And this book tells what happened there over the past 130 years.

But the purpose of this book is to tell the history of what Asbury Park promised.

These days, most of us know that promise through the music of Bruce Springsteen. If we've heard about the city at all, it's as the beat-up shore town where Springsteen came of age. From his first album (which he called Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ.) to his breakthrough record, Born to Run, Springsteen's jangly, almost ragtime rock & roll kept evoking the vision of a collapsing seaside amusement park. Lovers threw each other in the sand; calliopes wheezed in the background. And as his sound evolved, he also refined the way he used Asbury Park. It became a "town full of losers ' the ultimate backwater, the exhausted remains of the American dream. Against that romantic landscape, Springsteen cast himself as the young rock & roller "pulling out of here to win."

The music made Springsteen famous and Asbury Park famous, again. Soon millions of fans here and abroad could sing along with every word. When Mary's dress waved on "Thunder Road," when her front door slammed, audiences cheered the dream of breaking free. Somewhere out on the highway, Springsteen promised, there was the chance to see if love was real. And though he made it clear that chance involved leaving the dusty beach town, Asbury Park was where it all started: the beginning of the run toward freedom.

Farm kids who had never seen the ocean, kids from nice suburban homes who were born to stay put, took Asbury as their own. We recognized the fortune-teller, Madam Marie, and could find our way along the dinging boardwalk. When Springsteen sang about driving the circuit down Kingsley Avenue and back up Ocean we were with him, steering with one hand, nonchalant. We knew the backstreets, the darkness at the edge of town.

And that's because Asbury Park never existed.

At the peak of its popularity, in the early twentieth century, it wasn't really a city at all but an amusement. The economy was driven by spectacle: one hundred thousand people showing up to watch the annual Baby Parade, where hundreds of toddlers dressed up as adults and competed in a kind of miniature Miss America.

Before that, the great American writer Stephen Crane saw his hometown of Asbury Park as a symbol of the young nation's hopes and its hypocrisy, late-nineteenth-century America summed up in the smiling, sunburned tourists paying to ride wooden horses in circles.

And even before that, at its founding, Asbury Park was as much vision as reality. The contradictions were built right into its name. It was Asbury to honor Bishop Francis Asbury, the pioneer of American Methodism. The town rose on the Jersey dunes as a model religious community: a sort of mirage shimmering above earthly temptations. At the same time, the city's founder, James Bradley, saw it as a park. Not a community for its residents as much as an attraction that aimed to draw, entertain, and milk distant urban populations. For years, Asbury Park condemned "fun" as just another drug to corrupt the masses, meanwhile pushing that drug with every Ferris wheel and band concert.

So when Springsteen arrived, a hundred years after the founding, he moved into a city that was already a symbol. It had been put up not just as a place to live but to mean something. Generations of musicians had already used that symbol to make popular music. From turn-of-the-century oompah bands through the early days of jazz to the beginnings of rock & roll, Asbury Park had been part of a shore sound beach music that was all about the sometimes contradictory ideas of freedom and fun and democracy.

If anything had changed by Springsteen's time, it was the understanding of what those promises meant and how they'd been broken. Even as his E Street Band was forming, Asbury's ghetto erupted into flames. Visitors tanned on the beach while the inner city burned, and the New York Times editorialized that this racial violence had a "particular irony." But that was only true for those who had refused to see behind the grinning mask of amusement. For the people who lit the fires, Asbury's runaway American dream was as old as its history.

While this book traces that history in some detail, the narrative skips from decade to decade. That's because it's following the idea of the place: the changes in meaning. How the Methodist dream became a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan. How the principles of capitalism were rooted in the Mob. The different signals that Asbury is giving, today, when it promises a "shorefront revival."

The specifics are the story, and Asbury Park is a unique place. But this isn't just a local history. The brand of Northern racism that characterizes Asbury Park is only exceptional to the degree that it was publicly debated and held up as a national example. Other characteristics that seemed to set the nineteenth-century resort town apart became, in the twentieth century, commonplace. Asbury pursued the trickle-down theory of economics before the name had been invented. It ran a service economy while much of the United States still saw its future in manufacturing and agriculture. It helped create the model for Las Vegas, Disney World, the mall.