Highland Beach

$10,000. That was the price of 74 ocean-front lots at the north end of the Sandy Hook spit — a mile of pale sand between the Shrewsbury and the Atlantic — that Anthony Reckless and Mary S. Reckless sold to the Highland Beach Association on the twenty-eighth of February, 1881.^[1][2] The tract had been Wardell Beach until then. The Association renamed it 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 10 of the 74 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 what was coming.^[4] The association, the notice said, would build a depot. Bathing, music and dancing pavilions. Stores, pagodas, hotels. 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.

Two names attach to the Improvement Company in this project's working notes — Ferdinand Fish and Henry Vantine — and neither of them appears in any source we have read. They are carried here as unverified, and their person pages say so.

The Highland Beach Gravity Railroad was built by 1888.^[2] One of the earliest roller coasters on the East Coast, and built on LaMarcus Adna Thompson's designs — the Switchback Railway he had opened at Coney Island four years earlier.^[5] Gravity-powered, which is to say 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. 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.^[6] 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. Its footprint is now, roughly, under the NPS employee parking lot at the north end of the Sandy Hook Unit.

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. $500 a year, from March first of ninety-three.^[7][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. 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 75 feet riverward to keep pace with the shifting channel,^[8] and put in a row of a row of bathhouses along the beach — Hank Sandlass, who grew up counting them, is "pretty sure there were 500."^[6] In September 1894 the Monmouth Press reported the management ordering 200 new bath houses and a larger gate house.^[2]

The Bamboo Room came later, and the dates do not sit flush. Hank puts William's trip to Cuba, and the shipload of bamboo he came back with, in the 1920s.^[6] But the research paper shows Building 600 already operating as the Bamboo Garden around 1915, and describes the airdrome as a form of the First World War years.^[2] The likeliest reading is a mid-1910s garden and a 1920s trip and indoor room, and this project is not going to flatten it into one date. 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. It was a popular watering hole and a loud one. Hank, sleeping upstairs, had trouble getting to sleep before it shut at one or two in the morning.^[6]

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.^[9] That is the deed.

Four times the outside world drew a line across William Sandlass's resort.

The first is the founding. The Highland Beach Association's 1881 acquisition of the whole 74-lot tract.^[1]

The second is the federal purchase of 1892, which was two transactions and not one. On 27 July the Association sold Lots 2 through 22 to the United States for $19,000. Two days later, on 29 July, Lot 1 — held by the Atlantic Highlands Association since 1882 — went to the United States for $1,500, with riparian rights. $20,500 in all.^[10][2] The transaction fixed the permanent Fort Hancock boundary approximately where today's Gateway NRA entrance toll station sits. It walled the Sandlass operation off from the northern end of the peninsula for good.

The third is not a line at all. It is a building that moved.

The Sandlass family lived above the Bamboo Bar, on a strip of land between the railroad track and the roadway, and the strip was narrow enough that the ocean reached the river across it in any serious storm. On the twenty-first of September, 1938, a hurricane came up the coast and did considerable damage. The following year the family moved the building — south, closer to the river, across the street from where it had stood.^[2][6] It stopped being a bar with an apartment over it and became a house. Gardens went in around it. A dollhouse was built to match. It sat apart from the beach club, which was itself being scaled back; the merry-go-round and the pavilion came down in the same period.^[6]

The National Park Service's research paper gives the 1938 hurricane as the cause and the following year as the date. Hank Sandlass, who grew up in the house, gives a longer cause: not one storm but every storm, on a piece of ground too thin to defend. Both are probably true. The building is the one the Park Service now numbers 600.^[2][6]

The fourth is the state's taking of the whole remaining Sandlass acreage in January of 1962.^[2] The state's own legal file records the property as ten acres and change. The family's own deeds record it as slightly less. What the sixty-two taking cost, and what the family recovered from it, is where this chapter is headed.

The bathhouses were not the whole of the resort's residential fabric. By 1889 a cluster of seasonal cottages had grown up on the northernmost lots — at the far north end of the tract, reached on footpaths, with no way to drive to them.^[2][6] They were offered for sale at first, and ended up 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 families paid for their own lights, their own well pumps, their own privies, their own lifelong upkeep. They paid a modest annual ground rent besides.

When the state condemned Highland Beach in 1962 the cottage 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.^[6] The state's condemnation valued the ground and the Sandlass business's built structures at $350,000.^[11] The cottages themselves — a hundred-odd of them, some in families for four generations — were bulldozed as unencumbered improvements.

The Register's society pages of the 1910s and 1920s carry the cottage families' surnames, and we have not read them. When we do, the names go in the family index. That part of this chapter belongs to them and it is not written yet.

William Sandlass died in 1938 — the month is not established in any source this project has read. His son Henry Sandlass — born upstairs in the Bamboo Room building in 1913, "in the middle of a hurricane," per Hank Sandlass's oral history^[6] — took over the running of the resort at twenty-five. Marguerite "Midge" Sandlass married him and joined the family business — the date is not established here — 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 itself had been pushed inland by the 1938 highway construction. What was left was a beach approachable only by private car, and a set of 500 bathhouses that could support a private membership operation but not a walk-up trade.

One thing about the ground itself, which the chapter has been quietly stepping around. Highland Beach faced Highlands and drew its members from Highlands and Atlantic Highlands, and it belonged to neither. Whether the property sat in Highlands or in Sea Bright was disputed and settled in law in Sea Bright's favor: the family paid its taxes to Sea Bright and Hank went to school in the Sea Bright parish.^[6] A resort that is the best-remembered thing about a town it was never legally part of.

Henry converted the whole property to a private members' club. Between 300 and 350 member families, by Hank's count, drawn mostly from Highlands, Atlantic Highlands, Middletown, and Rumson.^[6] 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, in Hank's recollection, never once setting foot in the water.^[6] Around 1960 Gertrude Ederle — first woman to swim the English Channel, in 1926 — handed out the medals at the club's annual swim awards. Her family summered in the Highlands area, and she had trained in the river because the currents ran like the Channel's. Hank keeps that photograph.^[6] Her homecoming is Chapter 11's neighbor in this town's memory, and Trudy Fest still runs on it.

Hank read about the club in The New Yorker himself: a piece by Edmund Wilson describing a visit, with associates of F. Scott Fitzgerald along.^[6] Nobody has since put a date or an issue to it. Until somebody does, this project reports it as what it is — a thing Hank read once, and remembers reading.

January first, 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 ocean met the river around the house. Wind and rain drove water straight through the walls and into the bookcases. The family waded out waist-deep across the club property to the cars.^[6] 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."^[6] 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. 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.^[6]

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 "totally inadequate."^[6] 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 — $350,000 for the Sandlass Beach Club property.^[11]

Against the consumer price index that is roughly $3.9 million in today's money, about eleven times over.^[12] Set it against what Henry had just done: March through June rebuilding every bathhouse, the porch, the beach and the bar, for a season he never opened.

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.

Hank does not tell it as a clean expropriation, and this chapter is not going to either. The state's first offer was inadequate, they sued, and the settlement the court produced satisfied the family. He goes further than that: because his father died six years later, when Hank was twenty-one, inheriting the small Sea Bright club rather than the whole Highland Beach operation may have been the better outcome for him.^[6]

What he is unambiguous about is the handling. The taking came days before opening, hundreds of member families were left with nowhere to go in the middle of a season, and the abandoned property sat as an unsupervised attractive nuisance with police clearing trespassers off it. And that it was very sad when it closed.^[6]

Forty-five years on Highland Beach. It ended in court. What is left on the ground is one building — the one William raised Henry in, the one Henry raised Hank in, the one that moved across the road in 1939 and has not moved since. The Park Service numbers it 600.

The Army closed Fort Hancock on the last day of 1974 and the land came to the Department of the Interior. A highway ramp went in off the bridge and took the front lawn.^[2] For most of the next four decades the house was Park Service employee housing, kept up minimally. After Sandy, in 2012, the Park Service did not reopen it, and has said since that a building on that ground is not a defensible investment against the next storm.^[13]

The Bamboo Room did not last that long. Someone set it on fire. Hank Sandlass remembers the mid-seventies; Mary Rasa, the curator who interviewed him, put it at 1984 or 1985 and tied it to the arsonist who was working through the Fort Hancock buildings in those years. Hank deferred to her. It was being used as storage at the time. Neither of them sounds certain, and this project is not going to be more certain than the two people who were closest to it.^[6]

The Bamboo Room and the house are two different buildings. The house was the Bamboo Bar before 1939; after it moved, the bamboo operation carried on and expanded on the old site as a separate room. The state took everything down except those two. The room is the one that burned. The house is the one still standing.^[6]

In 2014 the Park Service identified the house for demolition. In 2016 it offered, as the alternative, that somebody could move the building off the peninsula — which is not much of an alternative for a structure whose entire significance is where it stands. The Jersey Coast Heritage Museum at Sandlass House incorporated that November to fight it and has been fighting it since: restoration proposals, more than 3,000 petition signatures, a decade of meetings.^[13][14]

The Park Service went the other way. In 2023 and 2024 it worked with an outside contractor and found the property ineligible under National Register criteria. The New Jersey State Historic Preservation Office concurred in February 2024. In May 2024 the Keeper of the National Register agreed. That October the superintendent told the Fort Hancock 21st Century Federal Advisory Committee that demolition would proceed. The committee itself was disbanded a few months later.^[13][15]

What followed was a coalition — Governor Murphy, Representative Pallone, Senator Kim, the county commissioners, the Sandy Hook Foundation, the mayors of Sea Bright and Highlands. Murphy's letter, in May 2025, asked the Park Service to reconsider and to put the house into the Fort Hancock leasing program instead. Susan Sandlass Gardiner, William's great-granddaughter and the author of the resort's history, asked for the same thing.^[13]

As of this writing the building is standing, it is inside a demolition package, and the planning for that package is not finished.

This project's position on Building 600 is that it is reportage. We are not the advocacy organization here; the Jersey Coast Heritage Museum is, and they have been at it since 2016. What we can do is keep the record straight and keep it current, and say plainly what is and is not known. The building is standing today. That sentence has needed rechecking every year since 2014.

What we are still chasing.

The Red Bank Register ran this resort for eighty years and we have read almost none of it. Specific gaps we know about: the Improvement Company's own account of what it intended to build in 1888; the society columns of the 1910s and 1920s, which carry the cottage families' surnames; the obituaries and management notices around William Sandlass's death; and the whole of 1962 — the Ash Wednesday coverage, the condemnation, the suit, and the December award. We also want the catalog numbers matched to the Gateway NRA Museum figures, and the New Yorker's own archive checked for Edmund Wilson.

If you have any of it, contribute.

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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.