$1 billion rebirth: Changing face of Asbury Park As the city blossoms and the cost of living rises, can Asbury Park ensure all of its residents have a future in the city?





In 1968, the Asbury Park boardwalk was for children. That's at least the way Art Taylor saw it as a 5-year-old back then. He could run across the chevron patterned planks that pointed the way to fun on a hot summer day, hop on a shiny white enameled carousel horse and ride until his mother called him home.

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The salt-filled ocean air filled his lungs, and the sound of the roiling waves pounded in his ears. Shore days were topped off with a hot dog on bun, drizzled with mustard the way he liked it.

Two years later, the race riots took hold of the city, and its future slid away like water on the sand.

Twenty-six years later, on a gray winter day in 1996, a 33-year-old Taylor visited his childhood resort one more time.

Planks in the boardwalk were rotted, missing or curling, as you can see in the video posted above this story. Landmarks like the Empress Hotel stood boarded up. And the once-proud Asbury Park Convention Hall that echoed with sounds ranging from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd was now a mausoleum to more prosperous times.

"I just decided to go down on a bleak winter day," he said. "It was very haunting, that’s the best word I could use."

Taylor snapped photos of the eerie place that had enchanted him as a child. His images, featured in the extensive photo gallery with this story, captured what remained of a city left in ruins from a disastrous brew of economic turmoil, racial tension and corruption.

Today, 20 years from that bleak day in 1996, Asbury Park is living through its renaissance.

Nowadays, you'd be hard pressed to find a quiet spot on the boardwalk. The blare of local bands from the Stone Pony has re-emerged. The streets are congested, and the parking lots are packed. The once-stagnant pool at the Empress Hotel is filled with crystal blue water. The city was recently named the coolest small town in America by Budget Travel magazine.

Even in winter, crowds flock to the boardwalk for the Christmas tree lighting or pay $200 to ring in the New Year at a black-tie bash in Convention Hall.

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The 1.4 square mile city with a population of 15,800 played host to more than a million visitors in 2016, plus it has been the center of film and music festivals over the years.

Parking revenue, a tourism indicator, has skyrocketed, with the city collecting nearly $4.5 million in parking fees this past year, up from $1.9 million in 2013, according to city records.

"Our scope of people visiting Asbury Park seems to be growing each year as our reputation improves. We now have typical visitors who are coming as far away as 100 miles," said Sylvia Sylvia-Cioffi, executive director of the Asbury Park Chamber of Commerce.

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"Ten years ago the city was a vast wasteland, you would go on the boardwalk and there were planks missing, no one was on the beach. Cookman Avenue was silent," said City Councilwoman Yvonne Clayton, who grew up in Asbury Park. "The people who lived here and stayed here were true warriors."

No longer the pariah of the Shore, the sought-after destination faces an array of opportunities and challenges: Its west side has not rebounded like the thriving redeveloped east side. Some longtime residents struggle to keep up with the increased cost of living in their small town.

"I lived not more than three blocks away from the beach most of my life," said Jennifer Lewinski. "I can't afford to live there now. I live on the west side. It's just not what I'm used to," she said.

Changing Face of Asbury Park Asbury Park has made great strides in rebuilding itself in the last decade. Now the effort is underway to replicate the effort in the predominantly African American west side.

Trending higher

Since the fits and starts of the beachfront redevelopment began in earnest after 2006, Asbury Park has become two towns. The east side bubbles with upscale housing, restaurants, shops, nightlife, a refurbished boardwalk — even a pinball museum where $10 gets you an hour on any classic machine of your choice. Millionaires buy summer condos that overlook the wide, pristine sands and ocean.

To reach the beach, though, visitors usually have to cross the west side of the city, where pockets of poverty and crime persist, and the median household income is at $32,000, less than half the Monmouth County average.

Yet the city is the place to be. The demand for housing from millennials has pushed median rental prices 17 percent from 2010 to 2015, the latest year available from the U.S. Census Bureau, to $1,063.

The average home value rose from $74,000 in 2000 to near $260,000 in 2015, according to state tax records.

Driving up the prices: wealthy Manhattanites looking to scoop up waterfront condos at places like the Monroe. The 34-unit project along Heck Avenue offers units ranging from $400,000 to $1.2 million.

Sixty percent of the units have already sold out ahead of the building's opening later this year.

Brian Cheripka, senior vice president of land for iStar, the company that is building the Monroe, said iStar invested more than $150 million in Asbury Park during the last decade.

"I look at The Asbury Hotel as the perfect example," Cheripka said. "You took a building that was vacant and boarded up since 2004, many developers had talked about bringing it back, but no one ever did. That new hotel that has helped revitalize the area and helped expose new people to the community."

This month the iStar hotel was voted the best new hotel in America by USA TODAY, which is owned by the parent company of the Asbury Park Press.

In 2008, developer Madison Marquette began a $70 million investment to restore Convention Hall and the boardwalk pavilions.

Cheripka said iStar and their partner would invest more than $1 billion over the next decade in Asbury, including 20 new residential and commercial developments.

(Story continues below the gallery. Be sure the watch the 1938 Asbury Park tourism film at the bottom of the story.)

New neighbors

Street by street, Asbury Park inched back over the last fifteen years as members of the LGBTQ community purchased and renovated homes on the east side.

The racial demographics of the city have changed. The percentage of black residents in the city fell from 62 percent in 2000 to 48.3 percent according to a 2015 Census survey. The Hispanic population increased from 15 percent to 32 percent.

John Loffredo, who sat on the Asbury Park City Council from 2001 to 2015, said much of the influx came in 2006 and 2007 as the city emerged from a decades-long bad deal to rebuild its waterfront with developer Joseph Carabetta.

"We were able to get some development going," Loffredo said. He said young people and many members of the LGBTQ community saw opportunity. "They saw value in the homes. I think you could get them at a good price if you’re not afraid to put in the work." Loffredo, who is a licensed real estate agent, said he also helped pitch Asbury Park to young New York City residents during the mid-2000s as a hip, new destination to buy homes.

Today, PRIDE flags are peppered throughout the neighborhood.

"We as LGBTQ people, we give to our community, we are disproportionately teachers and caregivers, we move into distressed communities, and we bring them back to vibrant commercial life, this is what we do," said Sue Fulton, while speaking to a crowd at QSpot LGBT Community Center in nearby Ocean Grove.

Fulton, who lives in Asbury Park, said along with the rehabilitation the LGBTQ community has done for Asbury, some negative perceptions persist and some tensions have flared.

"There is conventional wisdom that white gays come into an urban area, and gentrify it, drive property values up, and price it out and they end up pushing other communities the people who’ve lived there for decades out of that space," Fulton said. "The communities of color have been in Asbury Park for a long time. I would hope that the LGBT community, in particular, would be respectful of that."

The pricey cost of homes on the east side forced many long-term residents, like Jennifer Lewinski, 40, to look elsewhere. In 1992, she lived in a building called the Miramar, with many young black single mothers like herself. She paid $500 a month in rent.

The Miramar at 1700 Webb Street, was renovated by the John C. Conover Agency, in the mid-2000s and today has units that sell as high as $300,000.

"It was one big playground for us," she said. "At that point, I guess you would say I was a part of the more criminal element of Asbury," she said.

Crime and corruption

Asbury Park got the reputation as a hotbed of crime and corruption after the riots of 1970.

The city has seen a decrease in crime. There were 1,216 reported major crimes in the city in 2016, down from 1,491 in 2010. A drop of about 18 percent.

Among those who remember the troubled time is George Corbin, 61, who was 14 during the riots. He lived with his family in Lincoln Village, a housing project on Memorial Drive.

"Proverbial white flight caused a lot of people to move out. They sold their homes for pennies on the dollar,” he said. “Slumlords came in and they rented out to a lot of the citizens at that time."

"People were afraid to come into Asbury Park," Corbin, who now lives in Neptune, said. "When the economy shrunk based on the stores that were closing, Springwood Avenue was devastated."

The problem was compounded by corruption in city hall with a slew of elected officials indicted over a two-decade stretch. Among them was former Mayor Kenneth E. Saunders, who was convicted of conspiracy to bribe and tax fraud charges in 2003.

The city was also hampered by a waterfront development deal it was mired in for years with developer Joseph Carabetta, who filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

It was a far cry from the days when Springsteen crooned about summers on the boardwalk on songs like "Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)."

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The city finally emerged from the Carabetta deal in 2002 and approved a new waterfront development plan.

It signed a deal with a firm, Asbury Partners, which was later acquired by iStar Financial in 2009 after failing to repay a $70 million loan.

Years later, after "cleaning up her act" as she described it, Lewinski became more politically aware of some of the issues in Asbury Park.

Lewinski is a coordinator for Black Lives Matter and lives on the west side.

She said gentrification has become a part of the city.

"It happens in dozens of different ways right under your nose when you’re not paying attention to the details," she said.

The city is still looking for more affordable housing.

City Councilwoman Yvonne Clayton was excited when the city received $7.8 million in federal housing grants to build affordable housing off Springwood Avenue, the most economically distressed part of town.

"This (housing) is going to be a game-changer, now once these buildings are built, along with the new Springwood Avenue Park, it will attract investors," she said.

During the 50s and 60s, Springwood Avenue was the business district for Asbury.

As a child, U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-New Jersey, remembered shopping in stores like Fisch's Department Store with his parents. "It was also a cultural center; there were a lot of nightclubs and restaurants. It was the heart of the African-American community," he said.

"It was a source of pride," Corbin said. "People of all races lived on the west side. Italians, the blacks who migrated north, Greek families settled into Asbury Park."

But, some of the economic challenges facing the area of environmental.

Pallone has pushed to get funds to remove so-called "brownfields," including one on Springwood Avenue where no development is permitted. The site is still polluted, likely from old fuel oil tanks stored underground by businesses, city officials said.

The comeback

"We've come a long way," said Asbury Park Mayor John Moor, 65, who has lived in the city since 1977. Moor credited the 2002 waterfront plan with providing the blueprint for the city's revival, but said, "Nobody's completely happy with it." He said he would have liked to see the plan provide more specific timetables for development, citing that Asbury Park Convention Hall has seen minimal refurbishing.

Cheripka said developers like iStar have to be careful as development takes place, to ensure the "eclectic nature" of the city remains. "If you’re going to do it, do it right. Our entire approach is let’s be more thoughtful; it may take more time," he said.

Moor also said the city needed to continue to reinvest in "all quadrants" of Asbury Park.

"Now it appears the west side is benefiting from those brave souls that said let me come into Asbury Park and let me be a part of the renaissance," George Corbin said.

"A lot of the people are benefitting from that because now the jobs are coming back, but the drugs, the violence and things of that nature which are dwindling are still prevalent."

Those hopes are shared by people like Art Taylor. These days, he holds on to his photos of the troubled 90s in Asbury Park.

"It's a completely different town, now it's vibrant and alive and filled with music," he said. "It's good to look back sometimes and see how good you've got it now."

"I always figured (Asbury Park) would come back one day," Taylor said.

Asbury Park Tourism Film 1938 This film was originally produced by the City of Asbury Park Tourism Office. It was reproduced by the Asbury Park Garden Club and provided to the Press by the Township of Ocean Historical Museum. CREDIT: City of Asbury Park Tourism office

Staff writers Payton Guion and Chris Jordan contributed to this report. Asbury Park Press archives were also used.