Harrigan’s of Sea Girt’s History
Widower, Otho (Otto) Gale Clarkson moved from Dayton, Ohio to find work in New York in 1910, after his aunt left him $1,000. His wife Lucy had passed away six years earlier and his children were grown.
He fell for a showgirl, the much younger Alice Josephine Westcott. Alice was an effervescent blonde burlesque performer. At the tender age of 23 was nearing the end of her career. Alice was responsible for her mother and grandmother who were both widowed and she was struggling to keep working. This beautiful curvy blonde no longer fit the styles of the day; skinny flapper girls with long legs and boyish shapes were coming into vogue, and the patrons through their catcalls would determine the girls who could count the highest pay.
For years Alice had worked at Minsky's Burlesque show, the most famous of New York’s risqué productions. It was an adult vaudeville where striptease mixed with suggestive comedy and musical numbers. Alice was talented enough to continue to work some musical comedy after she was no longer fit enough for the runway as a showgirl.
Otho was double her age, but many younger men went to fight World War I. The couple settled in Glenridge New Jersey after they married in 1916. He worked as a department head at Monroe Calculating Machines, feeding the demand for the financial business in New York. The push-button, desktop 50-pound machines had spinning wheels that could add subtract, multiply and divide.
Alices’ theater friends often traveled to the Jersey Coast for shows, and she followed them. She and Otho purchased a summer cottage and some land on the 4N State Highway between Manasquan and Spring Lake in Sea Girt at Baltimore Blvd, near the old Sea Girt/Spring Lake Country Club horse grounds.
Property was cheap west of the tracks and lots had lingered since the resort town was founded in 1875. By 1930 an aging Otto was laid off as the Great Depression hit. Alice was 38 pretending to be 30. She had no children and no more showbiz work. She had the idea of setting up a hot dog stand to help make ends meet. Cars were overtaking train riders and State Road 4N (the current route 71) was the primary road north from the summer White House and the Sea Girt encampment. The soldiers and visitors would be hungry as they passed by. She started with four chairs set up in the yard and soon had a line.
Her mother helped in the kitchen and her show business friends sent people to Alice Clarkson's. They encouraged her to add a full luncheon menu with home-baked pies, which is what she did in 1931 as Alex Clarkson's Grill. As the Depression deepened, Alice fed people for lunch and dinner for two bits, selling her million-dollar smile and good cheap food.
They moved to the Shore full-time to save money. They bought a house on 6th Ave in Sea Girt near the tracks. Alice added a $0.50 four-course dinner and by 1934 she was doing 3,000 tickets per night at Alice Clarkson's Tea Cottage. Still bleach blonde and looking much younger than her age, she flirted with many of the patrons giving out free lollipops to bald men, winking and suggestively wise-cracking “Hello you old devil. I haven't seen you since the Minsky days”, to great laughter and red faces.
She spent $14,000 with borrowed money to bring the cottage to its present size. Many copied the concepts but none of them had Alice's personality. Prohibition ended and she applied for and captured one of Sea Girt’s full-year liquor licenses. Alice Clarkson's Cocktail Cottage was born.
Liquor added revenue. She added music, mostly lounge and piano acts. She also attracted burglars. After closing time on Labor Day 1936, safe crackers using shellac on their fingers to hide their fingerprints took $4,000 from her safe.
A year later, Otto passed away in their 6th avenue home at age 69. Alice continued to fight along, hiring a Chinese chef named Ah Cong, baking her mother’s pies, and serving up Thanksgiving every Sunday for $0.50 with extra courses for $75. No charge for the smile or entertainers to serenade the diners.
In 1942 Alice married Jack Weber, her restaurant manager but she was not in good health. She had an operation in early 1943 and kept the cottage closed. The Catholic Church used the restaurant as a summer Sunday chapel. She sold part of her property back to the town for $400 and auctioned off most of the restaurant equipment. The writing was on the wall and she sold out after the 1945 season to P.R. Bragg who opened the “Cedar Manor”. For a short time, Alice’s husband Jack opened a Sandwich shop on Adelphia-Lakewood Road using the “Alice Clarkson” name. Alice retired to Normandy Beach in Brick where she sold antiques and children's novelty books.
In the next iteration of the property, in 1950, Lou Novello opened Lou’s Cottage Inn and offered a fancy piano lounge featuring Matt Matlin, “The Poet of the Piano” who had been playing there since Alice owned it. Lou added singers like “Peggy Ryan, the Songbird of the Shore”. There was high-level musical talent in the Spring Lake and Sea Girt hotels. Jack Sullivan, the “Host of the Coast” booked big New York names for the Shipmates Room at the Jack Sullivan’s Lodge and the big band orchestra leader Gus Steck owned the Tremont’s Surf Room on the beach in Sea Girt.
By the end of the 1950s the cottage was renamed “The Fireside”. For most of its lifetime it was owned by Ted Gaetner manager at the Wall Airport and the Collingswood Circle Shore Drive-In theater. He continued the music lounge model.
In 1964 the cottage was renamed “The Keynote” As Jimmy Byrnes’ first New Jersey club. His mom and dad were entertainers. His father’s talent on the Irish fiddle, gave him a large following in Bayonne. His brother Bobby’s expertise was show tunes. The boys and their dad played Carnegie Hall together. Jimmy largely kept the piano lounge model taking turns with Bobby belting out popular music and Irish anthems. This was two years before he bought his larger and more rowdy venue down the road, at the Sea Girt Inn.
In 1966 Jimmy bought a double Decker London bus to shuttle the patrons between the Sea Girt Inn and the Keynote. The Sea Girt Inn had 11 bars, 6 bands and was the most popular “last stop” for young people bar hopping the Shore. Everyone wanted to end their night with Jimmy and Bobby singing, “I don’t wanna go home.”
The change in the drinking age from 18-21 over 3 years starting in 1980 brought big problems to the Sea Girt Inn. Byrnes sold the Keynote in ’81 and Brian Lowe created Harrigan's Pub with the Irish theme on the site. It was a can’t miss formula in an area with the highest concentration of Irsih-Americans in the country.
Lowe created a pub menu at reasonable prices and attracted a consistent local adult and family crowd. Lowe was also noted for feeding down on their luck and lonely people with free Thanksgiving dinner from his first year in business until he sold the place in 2005 to Bill and Kasey Passaic of Baltimore Boulevard. The Alice Clarkson tradition of serving Thanksgiving dinners lives on.
The Passaic’s continued the charitable tradition, working with the Knights of Columbus to find grateful senior citizens to feed. The pandemic in 2020 suspended the tradition for the first time in
40 years.
Fortunately, local patrons kept the business afloat during the tougher parts of the COVID-19 restrictions, and Sea Girt is blessed to still have it’s roadhouse over 90 years after Alice grilled her first hot dogs.
The Irish pub theme continues to attract diners at the shore and Harrigan’s proudly stands with Rod’s, Kelly’s in Avon, St. Stephens Green Public House Spring Lake Heights, the Dublin House, Red Bank, Johnny Mac’s and The Black Swan Public House in Asbury Park, The Celtic in Long Branch, Murphy’s in Rumson and Claddagh in Highlands serving up Guinness and everything that goes with it.