It felt like you were inside a Bruce Springsteen song
July 18, 2013 9:55 AM   Subscribe

 
Well, you've got your amusement park rising bold and stark, and your kids huddled on the beach in the mist. But in different pictures.
posted by chavenet at 9:58 AM on July 18, 2013 [9 favorites]


I have a theory that everyone's legs were sixteen inches longer in the seventies.
posted by phunniemee at 9:59 AM on July 18, 2013 [8 favorites]


I'm really not happy about the fact that 1979 looks like so long ago in those picture. It doesn't seem that long.
posted by octothorpe at 10:11 AM on July 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


Man this takes me back. I hung out at Seaside Heights and Pooint Pleasant back then.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:11 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


I had one of those mustaches, too. It looked just as silly.
posted by Curious Artificer at 10:15 AM on July 18, 2013


I have a theory that everyone's legs were sixteen inches longer in the seventies.

And every girl's hair sixteen inches higher in the 1980s....

I spent my summers on the Jersey shore in the 70s and 80s and these photos could have been taken anywhere from Wildwood in the South to Asbury Park in the North - "slightly run down and working class" is an apt description. Atlantic City was OTOH an utter shithole until the casinos arrived.

BTW I always preferred Springsteen's original of Blinded by the Light on Greetings from Asbury Park (remember the vinyl LP with the post card cover?) rather than the cover by Manfred Mann who made the song famous.
posted by three blind mice at 10:20 AM on July 18, 2013


I was born in 1969, and grew up on Rockaway Beach, NY, and I remember thinking The Jersey Shore was some far off, exotic place where rock and roll happened.

I mean, we had an amusement park, we had a boardwalk. But it was just somehow... there.

And I was metal, so punk wasn't something I was exposed to until college.

Seeing those photos is kind of... yeah, the 70s at the beach on the Mid-Atlantic coast looked pretty much the same all around, guess.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 10:36 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


His gallery has more of the images up on their website.

They're digital prints, apparently. I don't see a mention of what the film was.
posted by yoink at 10:36 AM on July 18, 2013


I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed to not be in the background of any of these...
posted by JoanArkham at 10:40 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Seaside. Same era. Childhood. Wake up. Beach in the Park. Lunch at the Sawmill. More beach until it got too hot. Home. Shower. Dinner. Video arcade games at the Carousel in the Heights until bedtime. Wake up. Do it again.

Gone forever now, not because of the storm, but because the world grew up. As did I.
posted by ob1quixote at 11:26 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yes! My grandmother was friends with the family that ran the Royal Arcade, and they would just give us rolls of dimes and quarters and we would play all day.

Just played Skee Ball for the first time since those days at a bar here in DC. 50 cents for 9 balls! Not 10, 50!
posted by JoanArkham at 11:54 AM on July 18, 2013


Huh, is this the same Joe Maloney who taped a lot of rock shows in the 70s? I think that Joe was based on Boston but I think he was a Bruce guy, so maybe he was hanging around NJ...
posted by anazgnos at 12:02 PM on July 18, 2013


Years later when I got google maps and the ability to zoom anywhere I wanted one of the first things that struck me was how close Asbury Park was to New York City. Let me check. OK it looks like ~25 miles from Central Park in Manhattan to Asbury Park in New Jersey. Asbury Park is suburban New York City. Disneyland in Anaheim is around the same distance from the Santa Monica Pier. I had no appreciation of this back in 1979 when I was blasting Darkness on the End of Town on my record player. I wonder if it would have made any difference if I had known.
posted by bukvich at 1:29 PM on July 18, 2013 [1 favorite]


OK it looks like ~25 miles from Central Park in Manhattan to Asbury Park in New Jersey. Asbury Park is suburban New York City.

Only just barely. It's a two-hour train ride.

My aunt and uncle lived in East Brunswick and that was a pretty brutal commute. She trained it to Lower Manhattan; he had to drive (to Queens! no less), and when I stayed with them in between apartments once, I had to take the bus through the Lincoln Tunnel -- which was quite often 40% of the commute time (waiting on line for the tunnel, that is). NYC is accessible, but "suburban NYC" is a bit of a stretch here. It's definitely deepest Jersey culturally and psychologically -- when my aunt and uncle splurged to go out to eat, they'd go towards Trenton.
posted by dhartung at 4:42 PM on July 18, 2013


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