Thanks finchaser and dark and all the others. This is one of the best NJ threads. This is what I found on the early history -----
Long Branch
Long Branch, located on the long branch of the Shrewsbury River in Monmouth County, north of Long Beach Island, was also one of the earliest Jersey Shore resorts. According to Gustav Kobbe, Philadelphians were frequenting a local inn as early as 1788. Before the turn of the century, a boardinghouse operated by Herbert and Chandler presented competition for the first summer rentals. [38] By 1840, New Yorkers were coming by steamers (through an inlet, now filled in) that docked along the Shrewsbury River. [39] Steamship transportation made Long Branch (Fig. 12) a competitive destination with Cape May and Saratoga, establishing the future of the quiet Quaker resort that, in 1876, Harper's Monthly Magazine would declare "the great marine suburb of the great metropolis." [40]
Figure 12. Steamboat Landing. Long Branch. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. 23 August 1879.
By 1860, Long Branch offered the social schedule and accommodations necessary to attract wealthy celebrities and politicians such as Edwin Booth, Maggie Mitchell, Gen. Winfield Scott, and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln. [41] The city's tradition as a presidential summer resort began in the late 1860s when a group of business and newspaper men bought up beachfront property. After supporting Louis P. Brown in his land-development project, which resulted in the creation of Ocean Avenue, George W. Childs invited President Ulysses S. Grant to experience a Jersey Shore summer. Childs and others pooled their resources to purchase 991 Ocean Avenue for the President and his family, beginning Long Branch's reign as the "summer capital" of the United States. [42] Other presidents followed Grant's example, and Shadow Lawn, the old Elberon Hotel, and an Episcopal church (Fig. 13) near the Takanasses Bridge became known for presidential patronage. The construction of Monmouth Park in 1870 also attracted approval from federal officials. A life-size statue of Grant in front of the track proclaims his fascination with racing.
Figure 13. Church of the Seven Presidents, Long Branch. HABS No. NJ-1083-2.
The combination of presidential prestige and the competitive spirit of Monmouth Park, which tacitly sanctioned gambling, resulted in a burst of popularity for the city during the 1870s-80s. Stimulated by gambling activity, Long Branch opened clubs such as the Pennsylvania, where the lucky could flaunt their winnings in style. A parade of larger-than-life characters flocked to "the Branch," eager to partake of the action and outdo their contemporaries in lavish display.
Here Lillie Langtry kept her private car for an entire summer on a railroad siding adjoining the home of her current protector; there Diamond Jim Brady drove Lillian Russell in an electric coupe brightly illuminated on the interior rather than with headlights, so that all might see and enjoy; and here Josie Mansfield and Ed Stokes admired Col. Jim Fisk and his regiment in their gold braid as they played at drilling on the Bluff Parade Grounds. [43]
Summer visits by subsequent Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, James Garfield (who died at his cottage in Elberon after being shot in Washington in 1881), and Chester A. Arthur contributed to Long Branch's status as the premiere American resort of its time (Fig. 14). Completion of the New York and Long Branch Railroad in 1875 brought train loads of both the urban rich and the middle class to the seashore, where they stayed in elaborate Victorian hotels and boardinghouses.
The hotels were titanic masses of wood and fancy ornamentation. . .two or three stories in height and usually a block long. Their porches were furnished with wicker rockers and chairs, shaded from the sun by huge striped awnings in bright colors. [
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Hardly a stick of wood remains from hotels such as the West End, which had a wooden footbridge across Ocean Avenue to a two-story beach pavilion.
Figure 14. Shadow Lawn. Summer Capitol, Long Branch, NJ. Postcard, Sarah Allaback, Ca. 1916.
Along with the visitors came speculators with money to invest, attracted by what was later described as "brave, expensive and perilous" advertising, sold with "elaborate pressure methods." [45] These investors have left more tangible evidence of their times. Promoter Lewis B. Brown made huge profits subdividing oceanfront plots in Elberon, a seaside neighborhood in Long Branch's south end. [46] Actor Oliver Byron built fourteen cottages at Long Branch, and financier Jay Gould built four. Elberon's streets were lined with shingled, turreted Queen Anne mansions. Old postcards show street profiles of Ocean Avenue porches, gables, towers, and awnings facing the sea. The house Solomon R. Guggenheim bought in 1899 on Ocean Avenue was "festooned with fretwork from porch steps to gable peaks." [47] Though Guggenheim's house was torn down in the 1940s, examples of cottages by Charles McKim of McKim, Mead and White, such as the Charles Taylor House, remained through the early 1980s. New York architects Peabody and Steams, designers of the now-demolished Elberon Casino, were also active in the city. Artist Winslow Homer came to Long Branch in the late 1800s, engraving beach scenes (Fig. 15) for Harpers and other popular magazines and painting his famous "Long Branch, New Jersey," depicting women with parasols peeking over the bluffs.
Figure 15. On the Bluff at Long Branch. Winslow Homer. Appleton's Journal. 21 August 1869.
Other evidence of Long Branch at its height can be found inland, mixed with the suburbs and shopping centers that have since surrounded the old business district. In 1905, Murray Guggenheim, son of mining magnate Meyer Guggenheim, hired New York architects Carrere and Hastings to design a palatial residence (Fig. 16). The partners' New York Public Library had gained them a reputation for the kind of civic monumentality Guggenheim must have desired; the Beaux Arts mansion, set amid landscaped grounds at Norwood and Cedar Avenues, resembles a pavilion from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The residential design won the architects a gold medal from the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. [48] In 1960, the Guggenheim Foundation of New York donated the house to Monmouth College, which now uses it as a library. Also part of Monmouth College is Woodrow Wilson Hall, previously the presidential mansion Shadow Lawn and the set for the movie "Annie." The mansion was built for Hubert Parson, president of Woolworth's, the five-and-dime store chain, and was later used by Woodrow Wilson as a summer residence.
Figure 16. Murray Guggenheim House, Long Branch, HABS No. NJ-1178-1.
Seabathing
Figure 17. Bathing at Long Branch—"Oh, Ain't it Cold" Every Saturday, August, 1871. Library of Congress.
Today the New Jersey coast, with its endless boardwalks fringed by shooting galleries and fortune-tellers' booths and hamburger and hot-dog stands and salt-water taffy concessions, is solidly in possession of the millions; the millionaires have been good-naturedly elbowed off the scene. Long Branch, even in its prime, was engaged in the unequal struggle of trying to hold back the masses; it was futilely defying its manifest destiny. It could not be, at one and the same time, the great marine suburb of the great metropolis and the snug harbor of the leisure class. [
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