Asbury Park On The Record: The Basics.

Asbury Park was laid out in 1871 by its founder, James Bradley. He organized the town around four bodies of water: the ocean, Wesley Lake, Sunset Lake, and Deal Lake. The streets were drawn to run straight toward the ocean and to widen as they neared the beach, which opened up ocean views and let sea breezes move through the town. That street plan, and the boardwalk running along the beach lined with pavilions and large public buildings, is still the physical shape of the waterfront today.

For much of the twentieth century, Asbury Park was a thriving seaside resort, and the boardwalk had an anchor at each end. Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre drew concerts, conventions, and touring performers to the north. The Casino complex anchored the south end as the city's entertainment and amusement hub, alive with rides, games, and a boardwalk arcade. Roughly a thousand feet inland, where Kingsley Street met Cookman and Lake Avenues, stood Palace Amusements, an indoor amusement park that opened in 1888 and became known for the grinning “Tillie” mural painted on its exterior wall. Smaller pavilions filled in the rest of the boardwalk with their own shops, games, and rides.

Over the following decades, the resort declined, and by the 1980s much of the waterfront sat empty. Palace Amusements closed in 1988 and was torn down in 2004, though the Tillie mural was saved before demolition. The large buildings anchoring the two ends of the boardwalk survived, but many of them went dark.

The city's first modern attempt to rebuild the waterfront came in 1986, when it hired a private development company to construct new housing there. That company built a single condominium tower, then went bankrupt before finishing it. Waterfront development stalled for roughly the next decade.

In 2002, the city took a fresh approach. It adopted an updated master plan for the waterfront and entered into an agreement with a new development company, Asbury Partners, to carry that plan out. That plan and the agreements built around it are where the modern story of the waterfront begins, and they are what the rest of these sections explain.