

by Patricia A. Miller



The wooden poles that stud the tidal marshlands near Good Luck Point off Bayview Avenue and the old AT&T building would be good fodder for the television show "Life After People."



Some of the poles have toppled over, others slant at angles in the water. The towers and wires of the huge, rhombic attennas lie rusting in the marsh grass. Most of the windows in the building were shattered by vandals long ago. The rest are boarded up. The brick walls are festooned with graffiti.



Berkeley Township bought the building for a dollar years ago, during another administration, Mayor Carmen F. Amato Jr. has said. The acres of marshlands are now part of the Edwin F. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge, home to egrets, ospreys herons and even bald eagles.



But decades ago, the poles, lofty metal antennas and wires and the brick transmitter building were a major, state-of-the-art communications center on the Jersey Shore. The facilities were a high-frequency, shortwave radio transmitting station providing telephone high-seas service to ships at seas and to overseas locations under the callsign WOO, according to www.long-lines.net.



The American Telephone and Telegraph Company liked what it saw at the Berkeley site - often referred to as the Ocean Gate or Good Luck Point site - back in the 1920s.



The company was looking for locations at various points near New York for transmitting and receiving stations. AT&T bought 175 acres of the "Good Luck Tract" back in 1929. The Good Luck Point site was selected as a transmitting station and a site in Forked River as the receiving station.



"This location of the stations almost literally at high water mark was due to the fact that these experiments had demonstrated in a striking way the attenuation of signals travelling over an intervening trip of land between the station and the ocean," according to an article written by Fred Bunnell in 1940, now on www.mysite.verizon.net.



"The original electronic facilities installed at Ocean Gate included a 15 kW shortwave transmitter... together with two curtain antennas seventy feet high," according to an article in www.ontheshortwaves.com. "In the mid 1950s, the large array of curtain antennas was removed and replaced with a series of twenty-nine rhombic antennas."



The death knell for the Good Luck Point station was a result of additional undersea cables laid between Europe and North America and satellite communications, the article states.

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The state of the building has deteriorated since it was first closed, even before Superstorm Sandy roared in on Oct. 29, 2012, Amato has said.



Now conditions inside are probably even worse, since the building stands only 18 inches above sea level. The small Good Luck Point community around the bend was devastated by Sandy.



So for now, remnants of the communications system will remain in nature's hands, subject to wind and water and home to peregrine falcons, American bitterns and other waterfowl.





