Explosives!

Fireworks display from July 5th. Bradley Beach and Asbury Park ended up doing their fireworks on the same night! My mother and I headed down to the Ocean Grove fishing pier (what’s left of it) to watch the Bradley fireworks at 9:00, and then turned around to watch the Asbury fireworks at 9:30. I never get tired of photographing explosives!

I don’t feel like/ have time to do a lot of editing, so I’m just gonna crop and resize and post a whole bunch of my favorites. (I won’t even STRAIGHTEN them. Yeah I KNOW. The AUDACITY, the ARROGANCE.)

Oh hey, P.S., I have an Instagram account, which is where I’m uploading casual snapshots these days. Follow me there for updates more often than once a year! (Side note: I have wayyyy too much fun with filters.)

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Pinkies

Do you recognize these?

Paint the town pink

If you happened to drive through shore towns during May, you might’ve noticed crazy pink lines down the middle of the road.

“Paint the town Pink” is “an annual community-wide effort to raise awareness of the importance of annual mammography.”

(Breast cancer awareness in May, basically.)

It is pretty attention-grabbing!

North End

Depending on your source, the North End Pavilion may or may not be a remnant of Ocean Grove’s 1911 North End Hotel complex.

North End Hotel. Image from the Ocean Grove Historical Society.

In 1938, the hotel suffered a brutal fire, and its pier was swept away by a winter storm, but the overall structure kept standing… until it was demolished in 1978.

I don’t know whether the remaining North End Pavilion structure (such as it is, after Sandy; until now, it’s always held a variety of quaint beach shops) is a recreation of the original North End Hotel, or a façade of the original. Any shore residents want to weigh in on this?

 

EDIT: My dad posited that this is definitely the original structure because it looks like the original. But I’ve seen cases where replicas and homages of historic buildings are erected after the original is no longer there, and I was skeptical. I did a little extra digging, though; turns out he’s right. There are some photos of the 1978 demolition on Blogfinger that show how they carefully preserved this one little section of the complex.

According to that same link (Blogfinger is a great resource for all things Ocean Grove; it’s like NPDP but way better), after the North End Hotel was torn down, the site was slated to be turned into a retirement community. Never happened, though.

 

P.S. The top photo also shows off Ocean Grove’s brand-new asphalt walkway. Ooh la la.

These boards were made for walkin’

Despite Ocean Grove being denied FEMA funding for rebuilding its boardwalk, the construction continues anyway. The Ocean Grove beach offices/ restrooms/ base of the fishing pier is one of the lucky sections to get a revamped boardwalk out of the deal.

Apparently this new boardwalk is a composite material. (Whether to use wood or composite for the new boardwalks has been the source of controversy in other shore towns [most notably Belmar].)

 

They’ve done a lot of construction since January:

January 2013: Ocean Grove boardwalk, rebuilding near the beach offices

 

Which is all great progress from what Sandy wrought:

October 31, 2012: Near the Ocean Grove beach offices immediately after Sandy

October 31, 2012: Base of the OG fishing pier immediately after Sandy

Beached

For Mother’s Day, we took my mother for a walk in Ocean Grove (with a quick jaunt into Asbury Park). I hadn’t been this close to the Casino since before Sandy.

They’ve cleaned up the rest of the area pretty well, so the lifesaving boat was likely dragged and intentionally placed here recently. I guess it’s one of those icons of Sandy, a reminder, a curiosity we can show the kids.

Playing in the trashed Asbury Park lifesaving boat.

Just this past week, a brand new 8-foot wide asphalt path was laid between the end of the Ocean Grove boardwalk and the Asbury Park Casino, making that area accessible again.

January 2013— After the boardwalk was destroyed by Sandy, the only access to the Casino from Ocean Grove was by walking across dunes.

The Casino serves as the bridge across Deal Lake between Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, linking the two boardwalks. The structure itself is still fenced off, but sources say that it’ll be open for Memorial Day.

Peeking over the fence into the Asbury Park Casino, May 2013; this will all be cleaned up in two weeks

Currently, people can get from Asbury Park into Ocean Grove by detouring around the Casino onto the beach (which probably won’t work after Memorial Day, when you have to start paying for beach access).

Side of Asbury Park Casino, 2011

The sand drops off into the ocean right about where the old demolished Casino foundations end, so circumnavigating this area isn’t entirely safe anyway, but it’s our only option at the moment. Here’s hoping for better access in two weeks!

Sand

Eh. Just a beach.

Beach closed

Still buried in sand, months after Sandy.

I dunno, it’s just these little things that get to me.

Splinters

This is the north end of the Ocean Grove boardwalk, which hasn’t seen much of any reconstruction. Maybe they’re planning on patching the rough areas and otherwise keeping it as is. I hear that the dunes protected the boards from a lot of harm!

Fisherman

 

For as long as I can remember, the Ocean Grove fishing pier has featured a cute little fisherman dummy, who just sits there, fishing.

Ocean Grove fisherman, captured on film in August 2007

 

Of course, the Ocean Grove fishing pier no longer exists, courtesy of Sandy.

Ocean Grove fishing pier, during Sandy

 

But there’s still a little fisherman dummy there.

“Wow,” said my dad, “someone went to a lot of work to strap that guy up there.”

“Nah,” I said, “they could’ve just walked down what’s left of the pier. Piece of cake.”

“No, look at it,” my dad replied, “this remnant of the pier isn’t connected to the rest of pier at all. They’d need 20-foot-long arms.”

He’s right. Hot damn.

YOU CAN CRUSH OUR PIER, SANDY, BUT YOU WILL NEVER CRUSH OUR LITTLE STUFFED FISHING DUMMIES. Ha!

(I wish I could read those signs posted next to him. The lower sign starts with “Every,” but I can’t read the rest.)

 

EDIT, MAY 2013: The fisherman dummy has a name: Ralph.

He was first put on the pier in 1992, by Bob Borders and Carol Boniello, when it was rebuilt after the Halloween nor’easter. Sandy took him out, somewhere to sea. So Borders and Boniello put a spare little Ralph as a symbol of good will.

Tracey James, who photographed the installation, explained why.

“Ralph is an acronym for ‘Rising Above the Long Pier of Hope,’” she said.
—Mark Di Ionno, April 2012, “Despite FEMA denial, Ocean Grove bands together for Sandy rebuilding,” NJ.com

And the sign apparently reads “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right.”