A Town of Its Own

The two decades between nineteen hundred and nineteen twenty are the two decades that make Highlands recognizable. The town is incorporated in March of nineteen hundred, gets its first fire company nine months later, its first police force in nineteen oh three, its post office in nineteen oh four, its first paved Bay Avenue in nineteen thirteen, a rail-served borough hall by nineteen fifteen, and Bahrs Landing at the water's edge in nineteen seventeen. Nothing about the shape of the town on the map today was not settled by nineteen twenty. The subsequent hundred years have been additions, subtractions, elevations, and paint.

The resort at the top of the hill and the missile site out on the Hook get the marquee treatment in this project. This chapter is about the middle. The people who lived here year-round; who raked the clams the resort ate; who built the boats the ordnance-testing Army leased; who set up the fire company; who ran the store; who paved the road. The people, in short, the town is for.

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.

Clamming was the town. Everyone did it or was related to someone who did it. The technique was inherited from the Navesink and adapted for the boats — a long-handled rake with a wire basket, worked from the bow of a skiff at low tide. The bay off Bay Avenue was rich enough to support a fleet of forty or fifty boats through the eighteen nineties, thinning to twenty or thirty by the nineteen tens.

The clam trade did not make anyone rich. It reliably kept a family fed and paid the mortgage on a house on the ridge. That is a great deal to say about a trade. The Clam Fest tradition — the borough's biggest annual civic ritual — began as an end-of-season neighborhood meal on the wharf between the boats. It never quite lost that character.

The most photographed block on Bay Avenue — the one running between what are now Miller and Marine — was already the most photographed block by nineteen eighteen. Every family album in Highlands has a version of this photograph. The 1918 image shows what a working small-town main street looked like at the end of the horse era and the beginning of the automobile era. Trolley tracks in the middle of the street, hitching posts on the sidewalk, a scatter of Model Ts among the wagons, striped awnings in front of the storefronts.

The block today runs the same names on different signs. The tavern is still the tavern. The pharmacy building is a barber and a board-game café. The block was elevated on stilts between two thousand thirteen and two thousand sixteen after Sandy filled the ground floors with brackish water; you can still see the high- water lines painted on some of the side walls at chest height, a municipal reminder of what the storm looked like. The storefronts themselves are older than most of the customers, and they know it.

The economics of the clam trade in nineteen ten was straightforward. A good raker could pull two or three bushels a tide; a bushel sold to the New York wholesalers for about eighty cents; two tides in a long summer day would net a decent working wage. It required no capital investment except the boat and the rake. It could be supplemented with fishing in the winter and dockworking in the shoulder seasons. It could be passed to the next generation without any formal education.

By nineteen twenty the trade was smaller than it had been at the peak of the nineties. Pollution from Newark Bay was already detectable in the beds off Sandy Hook. The Depression cut the wholesale price in half. The Second World War took the young men who would otherwise have been raking. The trade contracted through the middle of the twentieth century and effectively ended in the nineteen seventies.

What the clam beds seeded — a culture of the working waterfront, of family boats, of skills passed father to son — did not end with them. That is the through-line. The sport-fishing captains in the next chapter learned from clammers. The party-boat crews in the chapter after that learned from the sport-fishing captains. Every oral history we have with a Highlands captain born before nineteen fifty starts with a paragraph about clamming.

Bahrs Landing opened on Bay Avenue in nineteen seventeen, when Jack and Florence Bahrs bought a beached houseboat, jacked it above the waterline, and started serving chowder to the fishing parties renting their boats. Four generations later it is still the Bahrs family running it, still on the same corner, still selling the fluke that comes off the boats at the same dock behind it, and still — remarkably — the surviving institution of the working waterfront the borough was built to serve.

This chapter ends here because the town does. Bahrs is the only Bay Avenue business named on the 1900 Firemen roster that is still run by the same family. It is, in a real sense, the last piece of nineteen seventeen still in operation. If you want to visit the Highlands the borough incorporated in nineteen hundred was trying to be, you can — you order a bowl of clam chowder at the counter, you eat it at the window seat that looks out at the dock, and you are exactly there.