This is my favorite place in the world.
OCEAN CITY, NEW JERSEY occupies a barrier island eight miles long, and less than a mile across at its widest point. Excepting a beautiful, brambly, poison-ivy-infested protected state park at its south end, the entire island is built up with thousands of residences on regular lots in a regular grid. Even the long beach is hash-marked with rock jetties, piers and
drainage pipes, dotted with recycling and trash bins and supplemented with piped-in sand every few years to counter the erosive
work of the tides. The bayside is carved into inlets and docks. For much of the year it is an odd small town in the way of resorts, with life and commerce nestled among vacant two - and four-unit condos instead of hills or farmland. Ocean City takes in thousands and thousands of pleasure-seekers between Memorial and Labor Days, and increasingly into the "shoulder seasons" of spring and fall as well.
Ocean City proudly calls itself "America's Greatest Family Resort," backing the claim with a broad, well-kept boardwalk lined with amusements, high-calorie eateries, shops, and no bars, games of chance or brazen nightclubs. It also boasts clean beaches, a quaint downtown strip (once you get past the fast-food and gas-station cacophony on the island side of the main causeway from Somers Point), very low crime, safe passage for pedestrians and bicyclists, updated playgrounds, and frequent concerts and events at the boardwalk's stately Music Pier. If that's not enough, there are also such come-ons as Weird Contest Week, featuring a wet t-shirt throwing contest and a salt water taffy sculpting contest, a Baby Parade, First Night, hermit crab races and other G-rated frivolity.
Founded as a religious retreat by three brothers, all Methodist ministers, Ocean City today is certainly secularlized and hedonistic as the next resort (given that the next resort is Sea Isle City to the south, or Longport to the north). It retains the Lake Brothers' legacy in its busy nondenominational Tabernacle and its many churches. It's also still a dry town, so we always make a stop at Circle Liquors in Somers Point to stock up on necessities. Circle Liquors is so-named because it sits on one of New Jersey's few remaining traffic circles, an awesome death-trap with insufficient stop signs, yield signs, or other sort of sensible traffic-patterning devices. I don't know how people survive the confluence of Highway 9 and NJ 559 heading into
Ocean City on busy hot summer weekends, when everyone is in a hurry to Get There. For a state with the wisdom to incorporate
the elegant jughandle into its highway design, New Jersey really bombed with the traffic circle. A jughandle is a way to make a
left or u-turn by turning right on a sort of exit that crosses the road you've just exited, if you can visualize that. It looks exactly like a jughandle. Anyway, the Somers Point traffic circle is on its way out. The causeway over Great Egg Harbor Bay into Ocean City will soon be rebuilt, and the circle replaced by a multi-road intersection controlled by traffic lights. None too soon, but I hope Circle Liquors doesn't change its name.
On the causeway, if you're lucky, your first sight on the island will be the giant ferris wheel at Wonderland Pier at 6th and Boardwalk. A little to its right will appear the boxy white Flanders Hotel, one of the few remaining grand old hotels on the Jersey Shore, then a few more centimeters to the right, from your vantage point a couple miles away, the pink Port-O-Call Hotel -- not a grand old hotel, but ask us again in fifty years. After you've enjoyed these promises, you may be able to deal with the sight of a blanket of buildings stretching to the right and left as far as the island allows. Welcome to America's Greatest Family Resort, where development is king. For a generation at least, the single-family beach homes and modest duplexes have met the wrecking ball one by one and dozens by dozens, as old residents die or cash out and simple greed (er, investment) puts four vacationing families on the same parcel of sandy ground where one family once lived. My grandparents' last home, 2144 Central Avenue at 22nd St a block from the beach, was to me the most poignant and horrific of these losses. The lot, once occupied by a sweet little gray house with peculiar wiring and heavenly nooks and crannies, now supports what we lovingly call The Monstrosity, an ugly peach-and blue number that fits at least four families if not six. Note: no one quadrupled the amount of on-street parking while they were at it. This point is the least of my lamentations about the condofication of Ocean City.
Toward the south end of the island, boxy uncreative condos stretch in dutiful blocks for about two miles along the three north-south avenues. Here and there a cottage still stands, stubborn and probably doomed. Nearer downtown, a historic district protects several blocks of older bungalows and lovely guest houses, which demonstrate that a residence can be large without being unsightly. North of First Street (the east-west streets count from 1 to 59 southward, ten blocks to a mile), the grid of streets gives way to loops and boulevards in a fairly plushy semicircle known as The Gardens, which does feature a fair amount of greenery and trees relative to the arenaceous infertility of much of the island (it's not only square condos - it's square condos on rock gardens with here and there a scrubby hedgerow). As far as I know, every block of every street island-wide has a sidewalk, which is certainly an upside of all the paving and building-up.
While we were there this May, a bitterly fought mayoral race in town lurched to its telling conclusion. The incumbent is an old Republican businessman, formerly the proprietor of a long-operating pharmacy, who retired and closed shop before crushing three other would-bes in the Ocean City mayoral race some years ago. He's in the midst of the power network of businessmen, developers, Realtors and what-have-you here in town. The challenger is a youngish City Council member, a Democrat (incidentally, the race and office are ostensibly non-partisan), member of the preservation advocacy group, and by day an inner-city school teacher in Atlantic City. A fairly clear choice, as these things go - if you want to make a buck (or a "return on your investment") in Ocean City, vote for Bud, but if you're here for your quality of life, vote for Jody. On Election Day, about 5,500 votes were cast - this is about a 50% turnout - and the incumbent won by 77 votes. Damn shame, but it gives me hope. The entire machine was on one side, yet the race was awful close. Perhaps the simple folks like me are getting feisty. Maybe sometime down the road, the demolition companies and building companies will have to set up their Sylvester McMonkey McBean shops elsewhere.
Meanwhile, I'm on about a skinny beach island burdened with overdevelopment. What's to love?
I know. I've been coming to Ocean City since I was in utero, and I can hear the sound of waves crashing and smell the briny, salty, popcorny, planky scent of the boardwalk, if I try, while I'm sitting in traffic in central Ohio in a snowstorm. The feel of the first footfall stepping down from the wooden stairs onto the hot sand, and then the soft, giving sand, the treacherous jaggy broken-seashell sand, the smoother compact sand balmlike at the high-tide line, the spongy wet sand between the tides, and finally the icy exhilaration of the lapping water. Looking up to horizon, maybe three miles away but it seems hundreds of miles across the water. The sun rises over Atlantic City, as we are not really oriented to true east, looking out to the water, but stand on a beach that faces southeast, so that all these years when I thought I was looking at Europe I was probably looking at southern Africa. The subtly clackety sound of bicycling on the boardwalk, and the jangly shopping strip promising fun via commerce - Shriver's Salt Water Taffy, Mack & Manco Pizza, Johnson's Famous Caramel Corn, Wonderland Pier, mini-golf and t-shirts and fudge and kites and even fresh-squeezed orange juice.
The ramp to the boardwalk at 22nd Street, a block's walk from my grandparents' house, where if you turn left you can see the boardwalk stretching out before you and the stores and amusements yonder a mile (the boardwalk continues nine long blocks south of the brouhaha, and six more blocks north), or if you look straight ahead you have BEACH, and OCEAN, and sky, and seagulls and sandpipers and the lifeguard chair painted "OCBP 22", and more recently dunes to keep back the ocean, and there is nothing in the world you have to do but go walk on the sand to the water. Where to get good coffee, good butter cookies, good bread, good seafood, good candy. Bicycling the clear length of the island and back, because you can.
Clearly, it's all about nostalgia, and familiarity. It's about being able to recreate the feeling of sitting in the back seat of the gray Olds Omega while Grammy drove around doing the errands - cold cuts and torpedo rolls at Boyar's Market, transacting mysterious adult business at the drive-through window of Ocean City Home Bank - and the teller would pass through a green lollipop for me, and one for Susy, and a doggy biscuit for Demmy the Pomeranian. It's about reminiscing on a boardwalk stroll with Susy about which store used to be at this or that address, and which rides we wish were still around. Especially Bulgy the Whale, our shared tot-hood favorite. We love that kiddie ride enough that we drove to Point Pleasant Beach this time around to put Benjamin on a Bulgy we'd spotted there before (Ocean City's is long gone). Spoiled by the above-mentioned giant ferris wheel at Wonderland Pier, which he jubilantly rode with Andy and Susy while I cowered on a bench, Benjamin was thoroughly bored by Bulgy and spent the entire ride glaring at us, or at whatever was in sight as he went around and around, up and down. I was crushed, of course, but in an amused way. (The photo on this page, incidentally, was taken before the ride started!).
This carries me, and clearly I've been blowing in the ocean breeze all along, to something about this particular trip, and a sort of denouement. Each time we've traveled back to Ocean City in the past several years, the exquisite feeling of comfort, memory, and loss, and the simple joy of being on vacation at the beach, have been increasingly compromised by the ambivalence of loving such a messed-up, overdeveloped resort, and by outright anger at the dominant short-sightedness of the town's decision-makers. It's almost enough to send me scurrying to the Outer Banks, where I have no ties and have actually never set foot, just to be someplace worthy, wild, and lovable. But just as the crisis of nostalgia versus economic reality forms, another force intervenes: the power of a vacationing two-year-old.
Benjamin has spent a week or two in Ocean City each spring since he was 9 months old, and this year he really started to get it. He is now old enough to be engaged, opinionated and desirous, and desirous he was - I want to go to Fun Fair! I want to splash in ocean! Strolling on the boardwalk, he would demand the stories of the frescoes on the Wonderland walls (Hey Diddle Diddle, Jack and the Beanstalk, Humpty Dumpty, and a girl encountering giant flowers that we don't recognize as a childhood favorite in our memory), then stop at the words painted on the lanes of the boardwalk and spell them out: "PEDESTRIANS - BICYCLES - SURREYS". When asked what the letters spelled, he'd yell "bikes!" He'd jump on the yellow arrow painted on the lane and call out "click!" (I was mystified until Andy laughed and told me "click on the arrow." We're raising an exuberant little computer nerd.) Down at water's edge, on a windy afternoon with the air hovering around 60 degrees and the water temperature unfit for human interaction, Benjamin ran in and out of the lapping waves, jumped, fell on his bottom, threw handfuls of water into the air, and consistently responded negatively to my plaintive, swathed-in-towels suggestions that we might want to go back to the beach house. At the amusement piers (Benjamin uses the English term "fun fair" which he learned from the Muzzy tapes), we couldn't buy tickets fast enough. But back at the beach house, the rock garden in the courtyard provided as much fascination as $3-a-pop thrill rides that 2-year-olds have no business wanting to ride, even with Papa or Aunt Susy by their side.
This is one of those parental epiphanies I've been hearing about. Being with Benjamin as he runs, splashes, rides, drinks ocean water from his fingers after being repeatedly admonished against it, builds, begs, climbs, chases seagulls and asks for more pizza, I have restored to me a place where the brutalities of commerce and politics are thoroughly irrelevant. It really doesn't make a bit of difference that the sand we're digging was pumped in at great expense to US taxpayers. Nor does it matter that the dunes we walk over, carefully, on the boards set out for that purpose, weren't crafted by wind and sea but by engineers second-guessing the wind and sea. Or that the bigger rides cost $3 each for 60 seconds, or that we have to go back home all too soon and it's a long drive.
I don't really expect Benjamin to grow up with the same sentimental attachment to (or obsessive fixation with, whichever) Ocean City that I have. For one thing, he doesn't have grandparents here with a garage full of toys and rusty bikes, strips of tickets to Wonderland Pier and a vacation-long supply of hugs. It's likely we'll keep renting the same townhouse each year, so there will be consistency and familiarity, but no welcoming arms or prized objects except the ones we bring ourselves.
For another, there is, there always is, the matter of race. According to the 2000 census, the permanent population of Ocean City is about 95% white. There aren't any statistics to demonstrate this, but I'm sure the summer population is similarly proportioned. There is a small black neighborhood near downtown, and several black churches. We see and mix with black kids on the playground and at the public library, and always spot people of color on the boardwalk, plus, interestingly, quite a few apparent interracial families like ours. But I'm not kidding myself. It's a white town. When I was a child, my grandparents' housekeeper Janie (a larger than life, necessary figure) was the only black person I knew in the whole place. To my adult shame, I know she lives in a very modest apartment downtown still, and though a revered and beloved intimate at my grandparents' house, she was always there cleaning side-by-side with Grammy, never playing Mah Jongg or pinochle like other visiting grown-ups.
When I watch the black teens on the boardwalk, it seems this doesn't matter to them any more than it mattered to me when I was five, but maybe I still don't know any better. Perhaps most of their friends are white, but they still go home to parents and siblings who look like them and who understand things. I know I can't predict Benjamin's adult terms with race, but I'm not sure I see him bringing his family to this fairly pasty beach town, unless perhaps his aged parents have retired there, as these days we keep daydreaming out loud.
But for the moment, he's still two, and ravenous for sand and water and other things that are fun. And I'm thirty-six (if I get this written and posted before June 11), and, thanks to his jubilance, get to be rather less sour and pouty about how the paradisal beach town of my youth has hit the skids of self-respect and preservation. For two weeks this spring, I watched him own this narrow strip of sand and pavement on the boundary of land and ocean, and recalled beyond doubt that this is my favorite place on earth.
