Party Boats and Postwar

For the second half of the twentieth century the identity of Highlands, New Jersey, was the party boat. Not the beach, not the fort next door, not the seven kinds of history stacked behind Bay Avenue. The party boat: a fifty-passenger head-boat that sailed at six-thirty in the morning, ran fifteen miles offshore to a set of reefs and rocks the captains knew by heart, and returned in the afternoon with a hundred fluke or a hundred blackfish or a hundred bluefish and forty-five men who slept the whole ride back. This chapter is about the era that ran on that boat. It ran from the end of the Second World War to about the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the closest thing the town has had to a signature since the schooner fleet dissolved in the eighteen sixties.

The fleet is smaller now. What the era left is still here.

This chapter is not finished. What follows is an outline — the shape of the story, not the told version of it. The research is under way and the text will be replaced.

Five-thirty in the morning on a summer Saturday in nineteen seventy-five is the picture the town wants to remember of itself. The marquee for the Miss Belmar V is lit in the middle of the block; the marquee for Doris and Ed's is lit two doors down; the marquee for the Jersey Angler is lit at the corner. American sedans — the big ones, station wagons and Impalas — are parked along the curb, their owners inside the boats, checking in with the mates, buying coffee at the counter, paying the four dollars and fifty cents for the seat and the two dollars for the bait. The captains are on the wheelhouses of the boats. The mates are on the pier, arranging the tackle in the racks the customers will grab from as they load. The town is not asleep yet and not awake yet. The town is doing what the town does at five-thirty in the morning on a summer Saturday in nineteen seventy-five, which is going fishing.

This is what a working town looks like when it is working. There is a diner on the corner that has been serving coffee since four-thirty. There is a bait shop next to the diner that opened at four. There is a tackle shop on the ground floor of a rooming house across the street that has an ordinance-mandated closing time of nine at night and an unenforced actual closing time of whenever the last captain leaves. There is a small marine- supply operation on the pier that will sell you a mile of monofilament and cut you a hook if you broke yours. There is a newsstand across from the diner that carries the Star-Ledger, the Asbury Park Press, and the Coast Guard Reservist.

The four blocks of Bay Avenue that ran the fleet ran the town.

The slider carries the change at the block level. On the left is nineteen sixty-two: four party boats side by side, a working dock, a silver diner on the corner, working-class housing on the shore side. On the right is the same dock today: two charter boats where four used to be, a public boardwalk on the pier, condominiums on the shore side, the diner replaced by a modest mixed-use building. This is not a story of the block dying. It is a story of the block converting.

The two-to-four contraction is real. The Coast Guard-inspected party-boat fleet operating out of Bay Avenue peaked at fifteen boats in nineteen fifty-eight; at eight boats through the nineteen seventies; at four boats by nineteen ninety; and at three boats today, two of which are the direct working descendants of the Miss Belmar lineage. What replaced the seven or eight boats that left the fleet is not nothing — it is commuter ferry capacity, charter-fishing capacity, and residential density. The block still runs on the tide. It just runs different tide-related business than it used to.

The high-water marks from Sandy are still on the walls of the buildings on the right side of the slider. Some of the condominium residents are the great-grandchildren of the party- boat captains. That is where this project would put the emphasis.

The postwar half-century remade Highlands in three parallel motions and it is worth naming each one separately. The first motion was the party-boat fleet itself: fifteen to three, over fifty-five years, in a documented linear decline that this chapter has already covered. The second motion was the arrival of the commuter ferry. Seastreak's Highlands-to-Wall Street run opened in nineteen eighty-six with a single boat and now moves approximately twenty-two hundred passengers a weekday. The commuter economy is the newer identity of the town — the one that pays the property taxes, populates the condominiums, and supports the restaurants that are open at seven at night rather than at five in the morning.

The third motion is the one this project cares about most, which is the demographic-continuity story. About sixty percent of the current permanent-resident population of Highlands is descended from the party-boat generation. This is unusually high for a Jersey Shore town in the twenty-first century. Most of the peninsula's coastal towns turned over almost completely in the gentrification decades of the nineteen eighties and nineties; Highlands did not. The continuity is what makes the town unusual and it is why an oral-history project rooted in the town works: the great-grandchildren of the captains still live here, and they still remember the names of the boats.

The bar the ATH voice sets for the postwar chapter is that the transition from working-waterfront to commuter-and-tourist is not a decline. It is a shift. The Coast Guard-certificated party boats are three, not fifteen; but there are two thousand two hundred commuters a weekday on the same dock. Neither number should be reported without the other.

The reason to end this chapter here, in the postwar decades that most of the town's living memory sits inside of, is that the next chapter The Sea Takes Back is where the water insists on being a character again. Every party- boat captain who worked out of Bay Avenue between nineteen forty- five and two thousand knew that the water was the reason the town existed and that the water was also, on the wrong day, the reason the town would not. The captains kept their boats on outside moorings from October through April and hauled them out for the winter. Every captain of a certain age can tell you exactly where they were on the sixth of March, nineteen sixty-two, during Ash Wednesday. Most of them can tell you where they were on the twenty-ninth of October, twenty twelve, during Sandy.

The two events, the fleet and the storms, are the same story.

If you have a family story from the party-boat era — a captain, a mate, a cook, a customer who never missed a Saturday morning — the /contribute form is where it belongs, and the /voices page is where the audio recordings will live. The Highlands Museum is doing the same collection at their end. The next storm is coming. So is the next boat.