4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land [Hardcover]

Daniel Wolff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 16, 2005

The story of the boardwalk town Bruce Springsteen made famous-and a quintessential portrait of small-town American democracy.

When Bruce Springsteen called his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, he introduced a generation of fans to a fallen seaside resort town that came to represent working-class American life. But behind this archetypal small-town landscape lies a complicated past.

Starting with the town's founding as a religious promised land, music journalist and poet Daniel Wolff plots a course through 130 years of entwined social and musical history, touching on John Philip Sousa, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, and Frankie Lymon on the way to the town Bruce was born to run from. Out of the details of local history-the boardwalk in the Gilded Age; the celebrities who passed through, from Stephen Crane to Martin Luther King; sensational murder trials; the birth of Mob control; and a devastating mid-century "race riot"-emerges a universal story of one small town's fortunes. Told with grace and full of fascinating detail, Daniel Wolff's tour across thirteen decades of the Fourth of July in Asbury Park captures all the allure and heartbreak of the American dream reduced to blight and decay, with gentrification as the one hope for a return to its glory days.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In attempting to blend the social and musical history of New Jersey's faded seaside resort Asbury Park—where Bruce Springsteen first made his name in the 1970s—Wolff has an overabundance of engrossing material that never quite coheres to animate his thesis that the history of Asbury Park is the history of America. Founded in 1871 by James A. Bradley as a Methodist retreat, Asbury Park was designed to attract religious, moneyed vacationers who wanted a resort uncorrupted by alcohol and gambling. But the history of the resort is not so pretty, according to Wolff. The many African-Americans who served the rich there were restricted to the dingiest part of the beach. The Ku Klux Klan moved in, as well as organized crime. Continuing racism led to rioting in the 1970s, when the ghetto erupted in looting and the destruction of local businesses. Wolff (You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke) weaves into his narrative the musical heritage of Sousa, Sinatra and Bill Haley to underscore the social changes affecting the town over time. Asbury Park's current renewal efforts are mired in troubles—but the song Wolff hears there is still one of hope.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Anyone familiar with Bruce Springsteen's music knows about the role place plays in his work, and no place more than Asbury Park, New Jersey, a seaside resort town that has seen many ups and downs and for Springsteen exists in imagination as well as reality. In this luminous history of Springsteen's Asbury Park, journalist, biographer, and poet Wolff tells the story of a promised land. This Asbury Park somehow inspired hope in people like Springsteen, who were able to see beyond its often shabby exterior to what once was and could be again. Asbury Park was also the hometown of Springsteen's fellow outsider, author Stephen Crane (1871-1900), who saw it as symbolic of both a still-young nation's ideals and the hypocrisy of late-nineteenth-century America. Contradictions are a part of Asbury Park's history. Established to honor Francis Asbury, the pioneer of American Methodism, the city was envisioned by founder James Bradley as a resort town. Despite its small size, it has embraced many paradoxical visions--model religious community, beach town, haven for music from ragtime to rock--and represented freedom, fun, and democracy, though also Northern racism, violence, and corruption. Writing about the idea of a place, Wolff creates popular history at its best. Springsteen fans will love it, and so will anyone interested in American social history. June Sawyers
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (June 16, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582345090
• ISBN-13: 978-1582345093
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #889,593 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author most recently of "How Lincoln Learned to Read" (Bloomsbury USA) as well as "4th of July/Asbury Park" (also Bloomsbury), "You Send Me: the Life and Times of Sam Cooke," books in collaboration with photographers Ernest Withers, Danny Lyon, and Eric Meola, as well as two volumes of poetry. Currently producing, with director Jonathan Demme, a documentary called "Right to Return" about New Orleans.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A revelation on every page, October 15, 2005

By 

A Fan (Two Steps From The Blues, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (Hardcover)

I am a Jersey kid by birth. I graduated high school the same year as Bruce Springsteen, but about 50 miles away. It might as well have been 5 million miles.

As a kid, there were family trips to the boardwalk at Asbury Park. When I was in high school, there were concerts at Convention Hall. I even dated a girl who's family spent part of the summer in Ocean Grove, but that's a story for another time. To me, Asbury Park was the length and breadth of the beach and boardwalk.

It was obvious, even to an infrequent visitor like me, that the city was in terrible decline, but it took this book to explain how and why that happened, and, at the same time, place that experience within a much larger context.

The stresses caused by the fundamental dichotomies that Asbury Park was built on are the same ones that challenge much of the U.S. Religion and commerce, racial conflict, the strengths and weaknesses of machine politics, even the tug-of-war of fantasy and reality, they are all in Asbury Park's history, and they are all around us, wherever we are. Those conflicts all took a terrible toll on Asbury Park, just as they all take a toll everywhere.

In this book, Daniel Wolff tells us the history of a small place, and in the telling, illuminates larger truths. It is no coincidence that Springsteen's fame grew as he found ways to express his universal themes without tying them to a specific place and time. In his own way, Daniel Wolfe lets us see how and why that happened.

As serious as the subject matter is, the book is written in a deftly lighthanded style that makes reading it a completely enjoyable event. Don't miss it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Down the Shore, October 26, 2005

By 

Richard G. Weissman - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (Hardcover)

This book is a great resource. As a person who grew up "down the shore" adjacent to Asbury Park, I've learned a tremendous amount about the area's history. Interesting read with a great level of detail and chapter notes. I had borrowed it from the library but wanted my own copy to add to my shore book collection.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who knew?, October 22, 2005

By 

Nathaniel Whalen "baseball fan" (Chicago) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land (Hardcover)

Who knew that the history of a town that I had never heard of in New Jersey would yield such an interesting read? The town is set up in such a way that it resembles some of the seedy racist behaviors that all of us would like to believe don't exist anymore but need to come to terms with.
There is plenty of talk about Springsteen, but there is also plenty of well-researched information on the rest of the love-to-hate-'em characters in the town.