The Party Crashes

The stock market crashed and the Roaring 20s came to an end in 1929. Sea Girt and the rest of the shore suffered. Now show me your badge.

In Sea Girt, a fire damaged the Tremont, recently purchased from the Sisters of Charity, and renovated by Henry Shier who ran the Brielle Inn and the Squan Hotel. The Sea Girt Fire Company took an hour to contain the blaze. A new electric dishwasher had caught fire, and the flames quickly spread to the roof of the hotel. 100 of the guests were out on the street as thick smoke hung over the building. The damage was $10,000 in water and smoke damage plus the rest of the season’s receipts.

Another fire at the old Stockton Cottage on Washington Ave tested the fire department. George E. Butler was burning soft coal in an old fireplace in his bedroom when the coal caught the third floor. Heating with soft coal was a dangerous holdover from the 1800s. Stockton’s cottage was built on the Sea Girt Farm in 1854.

They saved the historic building where Maria Stockton lived when her husband, “The Commodore”, Robert Field Stockton was at the Beach House. Maria was afraid to sleep by the spray of the ocean. The partially ruined building was then sold to Edgar CV Bedell of Newark who intended to fix it for a restaurant. The house was reoriented to front Washington Blvd. After many iterations, it is still there as Rod’s Tavern.

New Jersey sued New York for the cost of garbage collection from their dumping scows. Bradley Beach complained they had collected five truckloads of trash from a recent storm, much of it with identifying information. Superintendent Charles Roberts testified and entered into evidence letters from a Manhattan office. They had washed up on the Sea Girt beach. The Hotel owners and residents insisted on clean beaches, and the towns did not have significant resources to clean them.

In addition to dirty beaches, the shore had another problem made worse by the car. The drippers. In the past, the long journey to the Jersey Shore from the cities required a hotel stay. The larger automobiles of the late 1920s and silk ‘beach pajamas’ made it easy to bring the family to the Shore, get changed in the car, and spend the day for free.

Bradley Beach Historical Society has this first badge and many other items on display

Closing beaches to the dripper was not uniquely a New Jersey idea. General public restrictions accelerated in 1928 at Glouster Mass, Islip and Hewlitt Cove Long Island, Decatur Ill, and Santa Monica California. For years public decency laws prevented bathing costumes in public, forcing people into bathhouses.

Beach Pajamas were the fashion, and they allowed both men an women a ‘decent’ walk to and from the beach.

Asbury Park long had a closed beach. The only way on the sand was to pay to use a bathhouse. You could not walk from your hotel or home with a bathing suit on without risking a summons.

Bradley Beach Mayor Frank Borden decided to restrict access to renters and residents by setting up a brass badge system. It went into effect in July 1929. They set up fences around the guarded beaches and checked for permitted access. The drippers just moved south. By August, subsequent towns restricted beach access. Belmar was an exception, but they immediately had a parking problem.

Sea Girt fenced off the municipal beach between Chicago Blvd and the Inlet. Free beach access was over. People were chased from the unguarded beach between the Stockton and the Tremont. Sea Girt would initially use its judgment to determine who belonged and who didn’t. In 1927 at Spring Lake, Clarence McGill roped off the area around the South End Pavilion he leased to prevent interlopers from coming near the lifeguards and paying patrons. Officers in Spring Lake were noted for giving $5 tickets to girls walking home in their bathing suits.

Many New Jersey beaches including Sea Girt implemented town badge systems for the following season. Real estate agents and hotel managers would hand out cards or badges to renters and registered guests. Residents would have to purchase enough for the guests in their homes. The general public was discouraged by higher fees. For example, in 1930, a season badge was 50 cents for a resident of Bradley Beach, and $5.00 for a non-resident. For a family who might venture to the shore once or twice per year, the cost was prohibitive. The shore resorts argued that other states’ beaches charged high parking and locker fees. They all were operating at a loss.

In addition to keeping unwanted humans off the beach, Sea Girt also wanted to control unleashed dogs. The council passed an ordinance requiring dog licenses and started ticketing owners who had dogs off a leash.

EC Stokes was ticketed and then brought a group of dog owners to protest at the next Council meeting. Their primary point was that ownerless strays were causing most of the problems.

He wanted the ordinance enforced only in an emergency, when a dog became vicious and not whenever one appeared on the sidewalk in front of its home or rambled to an adjacent property. Stokes said, "I came to Sea Girt to enjoy the advantages of living in the country and cultivating my dogs. I sought to allow my dogs liberty and now I find myself face to face with a situation that make it a physical impossibility to break the law.”

“Dogs are not canaries; they cannot be kept in cages. They are not tortoises; they run very fast. And Sea Girt is not New York. It has been sald that it is cruel to keep a dog in a New York apartment. But it is no less cruel than keeping a dog in Sea Girt under such arduous restrictions."

The meeting ended with Mayor Durand putting forth a vote to hire a dog catcher to round up strays. But first the dog owners would have to get licenses.