front cover of Asbury Park's Glory Days
Asbury Park's Glory Days
The Story of an American Resort
Pike, Helen-Chantal
Rutgers University Press, 2007
Winner of the 2005 New Jersey Author Award for Scholarly Non-Fiction from the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance

Long before Bruce Springsteen picked up a guitar; before Danny DeVito drove a taxi; before Jack Nicholson flew over the cuckoo's nest, Asbury Park was a seashore Shangri-La filled with shimmering odes to civic greatness, world-renowned baby parades, temples of retail, and atmospheric movie palaces. It was a magnet for tourists, a summer vacation mecca-to some degree New Jersey's own Coney Island.

In Asbury Park's Glory Days, award-winning author Helen-Chantal Pike chronicles the city's heyday-the ninety-year period between 1890 and 1980. Pike illuminates the historical conditions contributing to the town's cycle of booms and recessions. She investigates the factors that influenced these peaks, such as location, lodging, dining, nightlife, merchandising, and immigration, and how and why millions of people spent their leisure time within this one-square-mile boundary on the northern coast of the state. Pike also includes an epilogue describing recent attempts to resurrect this once-vibrant city.
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By the Beautiful Sea
The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City
Funnell, Charles
Rutgers University Press, 1983
The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City
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The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories
Sarah Orne Jewett
University of New Hampshire Press, 1997
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is Sarah Orne Jewett's most popular book. In its elegantly constructed sketches, a worldly, anonymous writer spends the summer in a tiny Maine fishing village where she hopes to find peace and solitude. As she gains the acceptance and trust of her hosts, the community's power and complexity are slowly revealed. While its episodes portray the difficulty and loneliness of rural life, they also display its dignity and strength, particularly as expressed in the bonds between women: mothers, daughters, and friends.

This centennial edition contains a facsimile of the original text, thereby restoring the novel to Jewett's own version, which had been considerably altered in other published versions, plus four related stories. Further enhancing the importance of this volume is editor Sarah Way Sherman's introduction, which includes a sketch of Jewett's life and professional development, a commentary on textual accuracy, and a discussion of the book's themes and techiques as well as its historical context.
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Designing the Seaside
Architecture, Society and Nature
Fred Gray
Reaktion Books, 2009

Surprisingly, the common notion of taking a seaside vacation has only existed since the eighteenth century, with a growing acceptance of the idea that fresh air and sea water are good for one’s health. Since then, seaside resorts for all budgets have sprung up around the world. In Designing the Seaside, Fred Gray offers a richly illustrated history of seaside architecture and culture, from the smallest beach hut to the grandest hotels. Through over 400 illustrations that include historic photographs, pamphlets, guidebooks, postcards, and posters, Gray explores the changing attitudes toward shoreline vacations.

Designing the Seaside manages to be both scholarly and colorful and offers a timely history of seaside art and architecture, from Brighton Pier and beach huts in Nice to a derelict resort complex in the Baltic, to the bizarre Palm islands of Dubai.”—London Evening Standard

“Filled with photographs, architectural drawings, guidebooks, postcards and posters, this book explores changing attitudes to holidays and their settings. . . . There is an exploration of how the seaside became a hotbed for issues of morality, where people took their sauce on a postcard as often as with their fish and chips.”—Daily Telegraph

“Gray’s illuminating study of the history of seaside architecture shows what a profound influence many of the innovations born on British coasts have had on Western holiday ideals.”—Metro London

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