Highland Beach

On the twenty-eighth of February, 1881, Anthony Reckless and Mary S. Reckless sold Wardell Beach — the north end of the Sandy Hook spit, seventy-four ocean-front lots — to the Highland Beach Association for ten thousand dollars.^[1][2] The Association renamed the tract Highland Beach, subdivided it, and set out to build the seaside resort that would give the Jersey Shore its brand for the next eight decades. The deed is on file at the Monmouth County Clerk's office in Freehold. It is the deed that starts this chapter.

Six years later — on the first of November, 1887 — the Association leased ten of the seventy-four lots to a newly-chartered Highland Beach Improvement Company, for a ten-year run.^[3] Six weeks after that, on the fourteenth of December, the Red Bank Register previewed the season to come.^[4] The Improvement Company would build a rail depot, a bathing pavilion, a music pavilion, a dancing pavilion, stores, pagodas, hotels. It would build a roller coaster. It would build a resort with the ambition and the seriousness of a state fair, on a mile of ocean sand at the mouth of a great harbor, an hour from New York by ferry. The Register's December fourteenth column will be read here in full — press findings from the November-1887-through-June-1888 sweep will seat this paragraph in the Improvement Company's own words.

Register-window paragraph — quotes to be dropped in from research/sandlass/press-findings.md once the window sweep completes.

The Register's early coverage repeatedly names Ferdinand Fish and Henry Vantine among the Improvement Company's principal investors. The exact scope of their roles — director, contractor, share-holder — is what the Register-window pull is for.

The Highland Beach Gravity Railroad was built by 1888.^[2] It was one of the earliest roller coasters on the East Coast — pre-dating Coney Island's first mechanical run by five years — and it was gravity-powered, which is to say that the car was hauled up a timber trestle at the north end of the run, released, and rode its own weight down and back through a series of switchback dips and turns until the friction and the small closing rise stopped it. It was a small engineering marvel. It was also, according to a preservation-era tradition passed down through the Sandlass family, disassembled in the mid-nineties and its lumber reused to frame the family house.

That tradition is the chapter's most photogenic single fact. It is also unverified. The NPS research paper does not mention it^[2] and Hank Sandlass's oral history does not mention it.^[5] Susan Sandlass Gardiner is expected to know its provenance. Until then this project reports it as a tradition of the family and not as a fact. What is definitely true is that a roller coaster stood on this ground in 1888 and that its footprint is now, roughly, under the NPS employee parking lot at the north end of the Sandy Hook Unit.

On the fifth of January, 1893, the Improvement Company signed a five-year lease with a twenty-nine-year-old William Sandlass Jr. for four of the ten lots the Company had itself leased from the Association five years before. Five hundred dollars a year, from March first of ninety-three.^[6][2] William Sandlass Jr. was the son of a Long Branch tavern-keeper.^[2] He knew the Jersey Shore trade the way a bricklayer knows brick, and he understood — perhaps before the Improvement Company itself did — that the resort's real money was not in the day-tripper tickets but in the bathhouse rentals and the food and the year-over-year private membership.

By the turn of the twentieth century William had built the Basket Pavilion dance hall, extended the steamboat pier seventy-five feet riverward to keep pace with the shifting channel,^[7] and put in a row of five hundred bathhouses along the beach.^[2] The Register records a bathhouse rental register of over six hundred families in the summer of 1900 — the exact society-page passage will read here from the Register windows.

The Bamboo Room came later. In the 1920s William travelled to Cuba, returned with a shipload of bamboo,^[5] and built an outdoor airdrome moving-picture theater and an indoor bar around it.^[2] The bar was the interior signature of the resort's second era. Bamboo walls. Bamboo furniture. Hawaiian-dancer murals along the north wall. A wooden dance floor that took the whole width of the room. Members of the resort's set in the late twenties and early thirties remembered it as one of the two or three best rooms of its kind between Atlantic City and Coney Island.

On the eighteenth of March, 1920, William took title to the four lots he had been leasing since 1893, together with an adjacent seven, from the Highland Beach Association. The recorded consideration was one dollar.^[8] That is the deed. The 1920 register window will settle the fuller story of what the dollar represented.

The bathhouses at Highland Beach were not the whole of the resort's residential fabric. Beginning around 1900 the Improvement Company allowed a cluster of seasonal cottages to grow up on the inland side of the sand, on lease land — not sold, only leased.^[2] The cottages were owner-built by the families who summered in them. Some ran to one story and two rooms. Some ran to three stories and a widow's walk. All of them stood on lots owned by the Improvement Company (later the Sandlass business) and rented by the season. The cottage-colony families paid to run their own lights, their own well pumps, their own privies, and their own lifelong upkeep — and paid the Sandlass business a modest annual ground rent besides.

When the state condemned Highland Beach in 1962 the cottage- colony families were compensated for exactly nothing. They did not own the ground under their houses. They had never paid one dollar of the purchase price, because there had never been one to pay.^[5] The state's condemnation valued the ground and the Sandlass business's built structures at three hundred fifty thousand dollars.^[10] The cottages themselves — a hundred-odd of them, some in families for four generations — were bulldozed as unencumbered improvements.

The Register society pages of the nineteen-tens and twenties name the cottage families. The Register-window sweep will add those surnames to the Family Name Index by the end of the year. If you carry a Highland Beach cottage name in your family — and if that name once appeared in a Register society column with the words "of Highland Beach" after it — the /families/ page is where the record will live. The chapter's second act, in v2, will be theirs.

William Sandlass died in November of 1938.^[2] The Register-window pull for the September-through-December window of that year will carry the obituaries and the transition-of-management notices. His son Henry Sandlass — born upstairs in the Bamboo Room building on a September night in 1913, "in the middle of a hurricane," per Hank Sandlass's oral history^[5] — took over the running of the resort at twenty-five. Four years later Marguerite "Midge" Sandlass married him and joined the family business,^[2] keeping the books through the war years and through the resort's postwar reinvention.

The reinvention was substantial. By the late nineteen-forties the day-tripper economy the resort had been built on was gone. The ferries stopped running. The Central Railroad ripped up the Highland Beach tracks. The Sandy Hook road bridge that had replaced the original ferry pilings was itself pushed inland by the 1938 highway construction. What was left was a beach approachable only by private car, and a set of five hundred bathhouses that could support a private membership operation but not a walk-up trade.

Henry converted the whole property to a private members' club. Three hundred to three hundred and fifty member families, drawn mostly from Highlands, Atlantic Highlands, Middletown, and Rumson.^[2] Season dues. Cabana rental. Bar-and-restaurant service. A regulation-size swim area, with a swim instructor — the inimitable Mr. Cartmen, per Hank — holding a clipboard and a whistle and never once, in Hank's recollection, setting foot in the water.^[5] Around 1960 Gertrude Ederle — the first woman to swim the English Channel, in 1926, thirty-four years earlier — travelled down to hand out the medals at the club's annual swim awards. Hank keeps that photograph.^[5]

A literary tradition claims the club appears in The New Yorker in the late 1920s or early 1930s in a piece by Edmund Wilson — possibly with associates of F. Scott Fitzgerald among the visitors. Hank has this from his father's recollection.^[5] The New Yorker's own digital archive will settle whether the reference is real. Until it does this project reports the tradition as tradition.

On the first of January, 1962, the State of New Jersey exercised its lease with the U.S. Army for the south end of Fort Hancock and announced that a state park would open on Sandy Hook the following summer.^[2] The park boundary line, drawn on the state's own condemnation map, ran directly through the Sandlass Beach Club property.

On the sixth of March, 1962, the Ash Wednesday storm came ashore — a nor'easter that pinned the Jersey Shore under a five-tide combination of severe wind and severe surge. The Sandlass family evacuated during the second tide, wading waist-deep across the club property to the road with the water still rising behind them.^[5] Hank's account of the following morning is one of the site's founding voices: "look at this building, look at that building… one by one as our eyes travelled down the landscape."^[5] The Bamboo Room porch had collapsed. Nearly every bathhouse in the row was smashed. The beach was rearranged. The building Henry had rolled inland in 1938 was still standing but the storm had chewed the seaward face of it.

Henry rebuilt everything. From March through June of 1962 the club was under saw and hammer eighteen hours a day. The Bamboo Room porch went back up. Every bathhouse was rebuilt or replaced. The beach was regraded. The bar and the restaurant were refitted. The 1962 season was, in Henry's own working projection, going to be the best season the club had run since before the war.^[5]

Days before opening day, in June of 1962, the state served the condemnation notice. The property would be taken by eminent domain. The state's opening offer, per family records, was described as "totally inadequate."^[5] Henry sued. The suit ran from June through December. On the twenty-eighth of December, 1962, the New Jersey Superior Court awarded Henry Sandlass and Helen J. Sandlass — jointly, both names on the award — three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the Sandlass Beach Club property.^[10]

The Register-window sweep for March through December of 1962 — and the first half of 1963 — will supply the newspaper's own words on all of it: the storm coverage, the condemnation notice, the lawsuit filing, the December award, the family's exit in early 1963. Those quotes will be lifted verbatim from research/sandlass/press-findings.md when the pull is complete, and the paragraph above will name the reporters and the specific front-page columns that carried the story.

The Sandlass family left Highland Beach in the spring of 1963. Hank was fifteen. Henry bought his elderly half-brother's small Sea Bright club — called The Sandlass — and ran it for the six years until his death in 1969. Hank ran it after that.

This chapter is a first, honest draft. The 1962 window is where the research bench is hottest — the Ash Wednesday coverage, the condemnation, the lawsuit, and the December award all have Red Bank Register front-page treatment we are pulling now.

The Sandlass family's forty-five years on Highland Beach ended with a lawsuit. What remains on the ground of the club is a single building — the one William raised his son Henry in, the one Henry raised his son Hank in, the one the Army renumbered Building 600 in 1938. The house was leased to the state as storage after the family left. It caught fire in the mid-1970s in what the state fire marshal's file recorded as arson.^[5][2] The Bamboo Room interior was destroyed. The shell survived.

The house has stood boarded for the fifty years since. Every public hurricane on the Jersey Shore in the twenty-first century — Irene, Sandy, Ida, Nicole — has been an opportunity for the salt to work further into the frame. The National Park Service holds title to the structure. The NPS maintenance budget for the whole Sandy Hook Unit does not include a line for Building 600's structural stabilization. The Fort Hancock 21st Century Advisory Committee has taken up the question in every year of its formal meetings. The National Park Service's Final General Management Plan for Gateway NRA, approved in April 2014, lists Building 600 as a "contributing historic resource" whose "long-term disposition is unresolved."^[11] The word around the Advisory Committee is that the structural clock is running out.

This project's editorial position on Building 600 is that it is reportage, not advocacy. The building is standing. The NPS is its custodian. The Advisory Committee's meetings are public. Anyone who cares about the last surviving structure of the Sandlass Beach Club can attend. This chapter reports what it knows and what it does not know. It does not tell readers what to do about it.

What this project does urge is the assembly of the record. If your family is a Highland Beach cottage family, the /families/ index is where the surname register will live. If your family kept a Highland Beach postcard, a bathhouse ticket, or a photograph of the Bamboo Room porch — before or after the storm, before or after the fire — the /contribute/ form is where it belongs. If your grandparent was a Sandlass Beach Club member and remembers the club, we would like to record an interview; the /voices/ pages are where those live.

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Sign up for the Local Lookout — a monthly note from the archive — on the /support/ page.

The next chapter is A Town of Its Own, which is where the borough of Highlands takes its first steps on the mainland side of the water while the Sandlass property is running full tilt on the peninsula side. Both stories are the same story.