Asbury Park is Back

Greetings from Asbury Park! – I have been a fan of Bruce Springsteen ever since that album came out and now apparently Asbury Park has made a comeback. I was just reading an article in the USA Today Travel section where they talked about this area and I have a bunch of the article here and you can click the link to see the rest.

If you’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, have we got a trip for you.

Even if your reaction to that famous salutation is “Hi!” “Hey!” or “Huh?” the folks in Asbury Park will be equally happy to meet you.

Where is Asbury Park anyway?

This friendly seaside community, indelibly linked to Springsteen’s 1973 debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., has plenty to offer — whether you’re among the fans making pilgrimages, or just want to have fun, relax and enjoy the beach.

Just ask Jorunn Elnes of Rjukan, Norway— or the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons.

“It’s the most beautiful beach and the most beautiful boardwalk,” Clemons said in a recent AP interview.

He has the wholehearted agreement of Elnes, who took time off from her banking job to visit Asbury Park three times in the span of a year.

Jersey Shore author-historian Stan Goldstein says the boardwalk is the “best it’s been in more than 30 years.”

Goldstein remembers the giant Exxon sign that brought this fair city light and the now-razed Flamingo motel, whose name may have inspired the fictitious Flamingo Lane of Springsteen’s song Jungleland.

Clemons fondly recalls a carousel with handcrafted horses, and driving around an informal route known as “the circuit,” referred to in Springsteen’s Night and 4th of July, Asbury Park.

That was before Asbury Park became a city of ruins.

Race riots in 1970 “sucked all the life right out of Asbury Park,” says Clemons. Its swan song “was really, really sad.”

“For at least 20 years, it was a ghost town,” says Goldstein.

The city has undergone a recent renaissance. Upscale development has snowballed. Goldstein says it’s now like a family-friendly version of Miami’s South Beach.

“It’s all coming back now; that’s exciting,” says Clemons, though he impishly denounces the city’s recent rejection of a topless beach proposal.

The pristine sand, trendy but relaxed bars and cafes, the Silverball pinball museum (1000 Ocean Ave.), and an adorable boardwalk water park for kids are hallmarks of the resurrection.

Elnes, who came to the U.S. to see parts of a Springsteen tour and the Light of Day benefit in Asbury Park, also loved the city’s “small, nice shops,” and she enjoyed “a very, very good hamburger at a restaurant near the Paramount Theatre,” one of the boardwalk’s stately anchors. (The Light of Day concerts, which Springsteen has performed in, raise money for Parkinson’s disease research.)

But the city’s role as a musical epicenter runs deeper than Bruce.

“It’s like Liverpool,” says Clemons. “Everybody went for the music. All the young musicians seemed to gravitate to Asbury Park.”