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Going to the Jersey Shore is a trip back in time

BY ROGER PIANTADOSI | The Washington Post

August 5, 2007

The Mainstay, a Victorian B & B in Cape May, New Jersey. (HANDOUT)

For me, OK: It is home. But for everyone who chooses to spend a bit of summertime at the Jersey Shore, I'm thinking the reasons are similar: It's like home.

As a 50-something who grew up here and returns several times a summer, in fact, I am prone to think of the Jersey Shore as one giant family room - large enough that you can see it from outer space, and loud enough that you can hear it from New York. Come in, it says. Eat something. Want to play cards? Watch the game? Take the kids up the boards? (It's important to imagine all these things being said to you at the same time, by different relatives.)

Not to say that being "down the shore" is some kind of exclusively ethnic, big-family thing. State tourism officials, in fact, like to point out that more visitors to New Jersey - visitors who spent more than $37 billion in the state in 2006, by the way - are coming from places other than the traditional New York and Philadelphia markets, including Baltimore, Washington, Boston. Canada, even.

From wherever you're coming to the Jersey Shore, however, it helps to be comfortable around large numbers of people who: a) do a lot of talking, often simultaneously; b) are demonstratively thankful that it's Friday (or Saturday, or Sunday) and c) may be wearing flip-flops.

Everybody's family is, of course, different.

"Hey." We say it simultaneously, your typical low-key, noncommittal Jersey greeting, me and the stocky guy in a baseball cap getting out of his black Lexus sport utility vehicle on a late-morning Saturday last summer, as I head back into the Green Planet coffee shop in downtown Point Pleasant Beach. I had run out quickly to buy an Asbury Park Press to go with my coffee, and I'm thinking, jeez, this guy looks so familiar - did I go to high school with him? Or did I know him from ... oh, my God. I'm back inside at the front window watching him, in flip-flops, shorts and T-shirt, straightening up stuff in the back of his car, when I realize to whom I just said, "Hey."

It's Tony freakin' Soprano.

OK, no, it's really James Gandolfini, the actor who played the world's most famous fictional mob boss on TV, but still. Tony freakin' Soprano. I try to focus on the fact that I, like Gandolfini, grew up in New Jersey, so a certain amount of watchful and respectful distance is called for. Nonchalance, many believe, was invented in New Jersey - not far from Thomas Edison's laboratory.

When he finally hurries toward the coffee-shop door, Gandolfini glances at me again and smiles affably through the glass. Inside, he heads straight for the counter, nearly unnoticed, wherein the manager, clearly expecting him, has readied at least a dozen huge coffees to go on three trays. He pays her, stacks and carries the trays out, places them carefully in the back of the car, and is pulling away from the curb in less than a couple of minutes. What have we learned from this? That's easy: At the Jersey Shore, even Tony freakin' Soprano is just a guy in flip-flops who has to go get everyone coffee. When it's his turn, I mean.

Aside from the we're-all-brothers vibe, the second aspect of the Jersey Shore I should mention is its diversity. None of the Atlantic coastline's 127 miles, from Sandy Hook in the north all the way to Cape May, is exactly like any other.

In general, the biggest difference is a north-south thing. New Yorkers and North Jerseyans head to Ocean and Monmouth counties - to the family-friendly boardwalks and laid-back beaches of Ocean Grove, Sea Girt, Manasquan, Point Pleasant Beach and the more singles-friendly streets, clubs and amusement piers of Seaside Heights.

Philadelphians head to the small-town, boardwalk-free charms of Long Beach Island and points south, including such quieter Atlantic City "suburbs" as Margate and Stone Harbor, and the extensive boardwalk-based amusements of the Wildwoods and Ocean City. The three best-known cities along the coast - Asbury Park, Atlantic City and Cape May - are less representative of the Jersey Shore and more like attractions unto themselves, each with its own specialty:

Victorian architecture, B&Bs and some of the world's widest beaches in Cape May (where someone recently proposed opening a camel concession - to get people across the vast sands to the water's edge).

Casinos, of course, and spas and shopping and most things air-conditioned, in Atlantic City.

Asbury Park's amazingly persistent live rock-'n'-roll club presence, first made famous by Bruce Springsteen in the early '70s, and its more recent rebirth and gentrification as a resort hub for gays and a year-round design and arts center.

Yes, things change. On the other hand, some things hardly change at all: Point Pleasant Beach, for instance.

Aside from a relatively healthy, picturesque and franchise-free downtown, Point Pleasant Beach's oceanfront and mile-long boardwalk seem much the same today as they were when my high-school buddies and I really got to know it the summer before senior year. After buying our El Producto cigars at Martell's (now a more built-up place whose Tiki Bar near Arnold Avenue and the boardwalk's kid-friendly amusement area offers live music almost nightly), we'd smoke them as we walked north through a mostly residential area. Up here, the sound of kids and card games and smells of cooking still waft, as they did then, from the patios and screened porches that face the boardwalk and the beach.

Eventually we'd wind up at Jenkinson's Pavilion, at the Manasquan Inlet, where there were dances every Saturday night. Today there are concerts and fireworks here on the weekends.

Today there are also markedly fewer teenagers standing around wondering, as we did, why no girls would ever come around and talk to us. And that's probably a good thing.

We now know it was not us, per se, but the cigar smoke. At least that's what we tell the kids.