Greetings from Asbury Park
Asbury Park, New Jersey, has seen better days... but apparently things are looking up.

The town was once one of the shining stars of the Jersey shore, with amusement rides, a great boardwalk and a Victorian-era Casino building that extended over the beach and housed a skating rink, tunnel of love and authentic carousel, among other things. Then, for a variety of reasons (corrupt government, urban decay plus the usual yadda-yadda about people forsaking the shore for other more exotic locations (and The Mouse)), the attractions fell into disuse, the buildings were abandoned and started collapsing into themselves, becoming haunted shells of what they once were. (Weird NJ has a great, and more detailed, description of the fall of the amusement mecca)

Now, I've been going down to the Asbury Park boardwalk for several years to take photos of the ruins, or, as the graffiti says, "the debris by the sea." I, like every other New Jerseyan, have heard for years that one scheme or another was going to pull the city out of its doldrums and back to its former glory. The latest attempt is in building a series of luxury condos and renovating the boardwalk attractions. There's already a growing and enthusiastic gay community, the $500,000 condos are selling like crazy, and and many of the shuttered storefronts downtown are now the homes of cute cafes and interior design firms. In other words, this might actually work.

Still, though, I couldn't get the "eeries" out of my system. Every time I go onto that boardwalk, I get this sense of foreboding. The first time I went there to take photos, they all came out blurry. And I'd always take photos of the casino, with its windows blown out and trees growing through its roof. My mind raced with thoughts of what it must look like inside those crumbling walls.

Imagine my surprise when I went down earlier this year and found that the Casino was partially open. It has a new owner who has pledged to renovate it, and they'd opened up the walkway that goes through the building to link the Asbury Park boardwalk with the town of Ocean Grove to the south. Standing at the doorway, I saw that the floor was made of marble, and looking up, I noticed netting up above, hung to catch any falling plaster. And to either side, there were plywood construction barriers on which were hung artists' renderings of the new condos going up. This didn't feel like another attempt doomed to failure. It felt real: maybe Asbury Park is coming back.

As someone else started walking in, I decided to take the plunge. If anything went wrong -- or the building swallowed me up -- I wouldn't be alone. It was chilly inside the building, and I stopped at one of the drawings so I could gather my courage to go farther in. Turned out the other person was a tourist from Holland. He'd been in New York on business and wanted to see the Asbury Park that Bruce Springsteen sings about. I nodded, and as I looked outside and saw people on the boardwalk, enjoying hot dogs and ice cream from boardwalk stores that hadn't been open in years, I said, "It sure is something, isn't it?" Only thing was, he saw the decay where I saw the possibility.

Still, though, it will be some time before I can go into any of those buildings without getting the creeps.