This is part 18 of a series. To go back to the very beginning, start with part one. To go back to the start of this section, start with part fifteen.
Geel and Ocean Grove both faced a sudden loss of income when one kind of boarders – students and tourists – vanished. One kind of boarders was replaced with a new kind – people who could not live independently due to madness and/or intellectual disability. In Geel, the new boarders were placed with individual families just as the students had been. In Ocean Grove, the new boarders were sent to fill entire rooming houses. In Geel, the Catholic church and the government worked with host families and the town to enforce behavioral norms. In Ocean Grove, the Methodist church had just been stripped of its power to enforce community norms through a series of court battles. By the time I was old enough to join the packs of children roaming town, most of the boarders had been sent away.
In 1991, Neptune Township, which now has regulatory control of Ocean Grove, limited the number of boarders, bringing it down to 435 in the town of fewer than 5,000 residents. Neptune received authority to inspect boarding houses on behalf of the State Department of Community Affairs that same year. Neptune was pushing for extensive changes to the law that would allow it to further limit boarders and would require innkeepers to cover the cost of relocating boarders.
In 1995 the Governor announced a plan to spend $4 million buying boarding homes on the Jersey Shore to convert them to single-family homes or apartments. Displaced residents, most of whom had by then spent twenty years living in the same place, were sent to other boarding homes around the state. Money was also allocated for upgrading boarding homes and increased rule enforcement. A spokesman for The Department of Community Affairs, the agency responsible for licensing boarding homes, told the New York Times:
"The Constitution says you can live wherever you want…But the bottom line is we're limiting the number of beds."
Residents of the Jersey Shore were promised that when the nearby Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital finally closed, patients would be sent to their hometowns and not dumped in boarding homes. Hospital social workers stated that most patients set to be released have no family members willing or able to provide care and nearly all of them are poor. Still, a spokesperson told reporters:
"This time we are going to do it right," Mr. Kaufman said. "Each one of the 450 patients who will be discharged by the end of 1993 will have a case manager and a built-in plan for community-based care and a residential program."
A town founded and run by the church
Today, Ocean Grove seems like it could be any other little seaside town. Plenty of people come down from New York City for the weekend and don’t notice that it’s unusual. That’s because the same tools we use to prohibit against discrimination have made it illegal for Ocean Grove to maintain its character as a religious community.
Ocean Grove was founded as a Methodist camp meeting. The towns on either side, Bradley Beach and Asbury Park, were meant to be extensions of this community. The practitioners of moral therapy and early Methodist leaders both believed a rural environment was a balm for the soul. As economic factors pushed people into the cities, people established retreats so people could be sheltered from the corrupting urban environment.
Ocean Grove was established as a Methodist camp meeting in 1869. Other camp meeting sites include Chautauqua, NY, Martha's Vineyard, MA, Shelter Island Heights, NY, and Pacific Grove, CA. In 1875 it was turned into a permanent settlement and the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association (OGCMA) sold leases for plots of land that are valid for 99 years or the lessee’s lifetime. Campers could build houses instead of assembling and disassembling tents each year, but the lease agreements stipulated that homes in Ocean Grove couldn’t be inhabited in the winter. Over time, the OGCMA stopped enforcing this regulation and a year-round community developed. The town is less than a mile square and has fewer than 5,000 full-time residents. It’s known as “God’s square mile.”
All of the land in Ocean Grove is still owned by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association.1 Until the Supreme Court put a stop to the practice, people could not get a ground lease for land in Ocean Grove without approval from the OGCMA. One family on my block received special permission to buy a home in Ocean Grove because they’re Catholic.2
The power of the OGCMA didn’t end when residents were approved. Ocean Grove had strict restrictions on activities during the Sabbath. Sunday was to be a day of rest and worship – no using tobacco, no running, no dancing, no kite flying, no playing games, no swimming, no sunbathing, no gardening, no home repairs, no laundry drying on the clothesline, and no skimpy clothes, ever. Only the pharmacy and cafes could be open on Sunday. Most famously, not only was driving prohibited but all cars needed to be removed from town streets. The same went for bicycles. When President Grant visited Ocean Grove on a Sunday he walked into town.
My father’s first ticket was for running on a Sunday.
These restrictions were enforced by a private police force until 1978. A 1973 New York Times article notes how Ocean Grove had virtually no crime. It was in 1979 that Ocean Grove’s policies were declared unconstitutional.
It goes without saying that Ocean Grove is a dry town. Originally alcohol was banned everywhere, even in homes. It’s not a coincidence that the strip of bars in Asbury Park is not on their Main Street, it’s just across the lake from Ocean Grove.
Not quite twenty years ago, I would transform into an old biddy when stepping off the New Jersey Transit train, raising my eyebrows at the newcomers who would drink glasses of wine on their front porches. I was shocked the first time we openly had glasses of wine at the annual block party. There are still no liquor licenses for the businesses in town, but several of the restaurants will uncork a bottle of wine if you bring it.
The last restriction in Ocean Grove is that the beach is closed on Sunday mornings. New Jersey is threatening to charge the town $25,000 in fines for each day the beach is kept closed. Of all the antidiscrimination battles we could fight, this is incredibly petty.
The rise and fall of the Methodist Jersey Shore
James Bradley founded Bradley Beach and Asbury Park in 1871. He was a devout Methodist who came to the area to visit Ocean Grove. Bradley was the first person to purchase a lot in Ocean Grove when they were made available for lease.
Asbury Park is named in honor of Francis Asbury, an itinerant preacher celebrated as the founder of Methodism in the United States. Asbury Park was developed first, with Bradley serving as the first mayor. In addition to banning alcohol in the deed of sale for residential properties, he required all businesses to close on Sundays.
Just like in Ocean Grove, there were strict rules of dressing and behavior. Instead of following the model of Ocean Grove, Bradley set up his towns with secular governments and they chose not to enforce the code of conduct. Residents rebelled by first refusing to respect ordinances and then suing him for control of the beach and utilities. Asbury Park became a popular resort town in the 1880s. Bradley died in 1921 and Bradley Beach became a popular resort shortly after. Many of the homes that stand today were built as vacation homes and have since been winterized.
It was in the 1950s that the Jersey Shore began to decline. The beach resort towns were connected to the cities by rail, so that’s where people went to vacation. Then people moved to the suburbs and bought cars, enabling them to vacation wherever they could drive to. The Garden State Parkway made driving farther even easier. Asbury Park had been a major commercial hub, which lost popularity with the development of malls and office parks in the 1960s. In 1974 the Great Adventure theme park and safari opened, which was a major competitor for the boardwalk attractions.
The establishment of Ocean Grove as a historic district made it more difficult and expensive to maintain and renovate existing hotels and other amenities, as well as private homes. Commercial flights becoming affordable for the middle class and the race riots were icing on the cake.
When I was in high school, most of Asbury Park’s shopping district and the entire boardwalk was boarded up. Blocks burnt down in the riot remained vacant until I had finished university. The Jersey Shore’s seedy reputation made friends reluctant to accept my invitations to come down for summer weekends while I was living in Brooklyn even ten years ago. Now New Yorkers fortunate enough to be locked into rent controlled leases are buying vacation homes in beach towns and the Hudson Valley.
The Ocean Grove Homeowners Association
Just as it was Geel’s tourism bureau that declared itself ‘the compassionate city’, Ocean Grove gave itself the moniker of ‘God’s square mile.’ The more popular nickname used to be ‘Ocean Grave.’ Even in 1977, Ocean Grove had a large percentage of elderly residents. A 1980 article described its residents as “almost exclusively elderly.” It wasn’t just that the residents were closer to the grave than to the cradle, it was that they were stodgy and set in their ways. I remember my grandmother being part of the neighborhood watch program when I was a little kid. I didn’t think about what they were keeping the town safe from, exactly.
Unlike Geel, there’s significant documentation of the residents and leaders of Ocean Grove complaining about the presence of the deinstitutionalized in town. Searching online reveals quite a collection of letters to the editor that generally express some sort of concern for the mentally ill along with the demand they be sent somewhere else.3
Residents worried about real estate prices being brought down by conspicuous boarders. Of course, no one raised the issue of how the strict enforcement of the Sabbath and the fact that the land ownership structure precluded low-cost mortgages through federal housing and VA programs might suppress home values. Anyone who wants to take a quick peek at Zillow can see that home values did not turn out to be a problem.
At the time, most residents of Ocean Grove were low to moderate income and 70% of Asbury Park residents were living under the poverty line. The fact that most of Ocean Grove’s full-time residents were people who had moved into their vacation homes when they retired certainly had something to do with that.
Quite a few wealthy people had come to Ocean Grove, attracted by the serenity and rambling Victorian buildings. They weren’t content to just grumble amongst themselves or call the Neptune Police every time a boarder did something weird. Neptune had just become responsible for policing Ocean Grove due to the court decision and there were many battles playing out between the city of Neptune and the former town of Ocean Grove.
The Ocean Grove Homeowners Association (OGHOA) was founded to fight back against how the town had become home to a wildly disproportionate number of the state’s mentally disabled residents. One of the leaders of the organization, Herb Herbst, was motivated by a specific incident:
“Herb decided to get involved after a mental patient attacked a young girl in front of Nagle’s [ice cream parlor] and knocked out her teeth.”
OGHOA members ran for local office, organized community support, and used connections in the state and federal government to bring about real change. They didn’t like the way the boarders loitered outdoors, so they removed benches from public places. They ensured all regulations of boarding homes and all nuisance laws were enforced. They used historic preservation and zoning laws to encourage boarding homes, bed and breakfasts, and apartments to be converted into single family homes. Hotels that were demolished (or burnt down) now needed to be replaced with single family homes. They discouraged renting, preferring owner-occupied vacation homes. They successfully prevented the development of low-income housing at the site of an old high school by preserving the building and creating an arts center instead.
The OGHOA could have worked to improve living conditions and community integration of boarders. Instead, their aim was to remove them from Ocean Grove and the surrounding communities. They succeeded in quickly closing four of the largest boarding houses, displacing 200 boarders. When government agencies finally worked to create a community service center for adults with intellectual disabilities and mental health issues, the OGHOA successfully quashed it.
In 1995 the Neptune Police Chief, who was in charge of policing Ocean Grove, told reporters:
“Things are not as bad as they used to be,” he said. “The everyday problems of people urinating in public and not taking their medication has quieted down.”
The OGHOA was a major force behind the 1995 Shore-Easy plan to reduce the number of boarding homes. Another 200 boarders had been displaced from Ocean Grove by 1998.
There was certainly no Methodist incarnation of Saint Dymphna inspiring the OGHOA. They were not oblivious to the perceived irony of a Christian community, working so hard to rid itself of those in need:
“In response to criticisms that driving the deinstitutionalized out of town was “un-Christian'', Herb Herbst, president of the HOA from 1990 to 1998, replied: “the people of the town…care about the mentally ill. But when the state allowed hundreds of former patients to be warehoused in substandard boarding homes, the result was disastrous''. He insisted that Ocean Grove was more than willing to take its fair share, which, based on the population of New Jersey, should be 0.5 per cent of the population, or around 25 to 30 people. He also stated that the HOA was the only organization that could bring about a reduction of deinstitutionalized people. Neptune Township would not because of a lack of time and money; the CMA could not because they cannot have a ‘noncompassionate stand’.”
True to their word, now that the number of boarders has dropped significantly, people in town talk about the experience as something in the past. People use the past tense to discuss boarding-out even when our conversation is interrupted by someone I now realize is a boarder coming to say hello.
This seems very strange to people, although it’s not terribly unusual for the land and structures to be owned separately. The most common example is a trailer park (or, as they’ve been rebranded, tiny house community). Generally this only becomes relevant when someone applies for a mortgage.
While it’s now illegal to not approve someone for their faith, anyone who has lived in a co-op, co-ownership, or HOA property knows you can still be rejected for all sorts of reasons.
Just as residents would one day object vocally to the sharing of public spaces with the mentally ill and intellectually disabled, white residents objected to sharing public spaces with Black residents. https://eu.app.com/story/news/local/communitychange/2017/09/27/asbury-park-historical-society-statue/704323001/
In 1887 “Bradley prohibited all black citizens from the beaches, bathing houses, pavilions, and promenades.” https://concept.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/concept/article/view/279/242