The Beached Boat That Fed a Century

Start with the thing that is easy to miss when you are elbow-deep in a lobster and looking out at the boats: the room you are sitting in was floated here on purpose.^[1] The main dining room at Bahrs is a houseboat — a two-story one they walked ashore on the tides more than a hundred years ago and jacked up onto the land for good. They did not find a building and get lucky. They rode a barge in on the high water, set it where they wanted it, and lifted it out of the river's reach. The spot is not where the boat drifted to. It is where they decided to put it.

The people who saw the possibility in a stranded boat were not restaurateurs. John Bahrs — Jack, everyone called him — was a necktie manufacturer out of the Dutch Neck section of Newark, the grandson of a tall-ship captain, which may be the only part of this that was fated. He and his wife, Florence, born Florence Crelin, made silk ties in the city and came down to Highlands for the charm of it, the way people still do. Then their shop was robbed — the silk and the finished neckties both gone — and a robbery in Newark turned into a decision about Highlands. They took it as a sign, or at least as a shove, and they left.

Their first business here was small and seasonal: a boat rental on Cedar Street, rowboats in the summer, back to Newark in the cold months. To keep the renters happy they cooked clam chowder on the side. And that is the whole seed of the thing — the chowder was a courtesy to people renting boats, and the chowder is what stayed. In 1917 they bought the houseboat and the beach under it^[2], brought it around to this spot on the high tide, jacked it up above the waterline, and moved the rental boats over to work from the new landing. A potbelly stove, two stories, open only in season. They could sleep boarders upstairs, so they did — two dollars and fifty cents a night for room and board, for the fishing parties who came down from the city on the Friday train.

You could get here by train then, or by steamer, which is the detail that places Bahrs in the same world as everything else in this history. The Central Railroad of New Jersey ran down from Jersey City and stopped at Highland Station, just outside the front door, on its way to Long Branch. The same rail-and-steamer machine that carried twenty thousand people a day to the Sandlass resort a mile across the water carried the anglers to Bahrs' porch. When the trains and the steamers died, the Sandlass resort died with them. Bahrs did not. That is the difference between a destination and an institution: a destination depends on how people arrive; an institution becomes the reason they come.

The turn from fish camp to landmark happened in the middle of the century, under the second generation. Jack and Florence's son John — Bud — and his wife Peg ran the place from the 1940s into the 1970s and made it year-round, and somewhere in those decades Bahrs became the kind of place a name gets attached to. Sinatra ate lobster here. So did Joe DiMaggio^[2], in from the racetrack crowd at Monmouth Park and the summer concerts at the arts center down the parkway. The stars are the line everyone repeats, and they are true, but they are not really the point. The point is that the same room served the tall-ship captain's grandson's chowder to a Newark fishing party in 1917 and a lobster to Joe DiMaggio in 1957 and a basket of clams to whoever walked off the ferry this afternoon, and it did it from the hull of a boat that stopped moving a century ago.

Bud and Peg retired in 1974. The restaurant did not pass out of the family — it passed sideways within it, to Ray Cosgrove and then to his son Jay, the great-grandson of Jack and Florence, the fourth generation to run the boat that never left. They added Moby's deck and the lobster pound and kept the marina Jack started, where you can still dock behind the building and eat on your own stern if you would rather. But the houseboat is still in there. It is the interior of the main dining room, the same two-story structure with the same bones, wrapped now in a hundred years of additions the way a tree grows rings around its first season's wood.

Highlands has lost a great deal to storms and to the state and to time — the resort, the amusement pier, whole streets of what used to be. Bahrs is the oldest business still operating in the borough, and the reason is almost funny in its plainness: it is a boat somebody decided to stop, and turned into a place. Everything else on this shore was built to be somewhere. The Bahrs family took a barge that could have gone anywhere, rode it in on the tide, and jacked it down onto one spot of Highlands for good — then let the town grow up around it and started cooking. A hundred years later the chowder is still on the menu, the boats are still out back, and the room still floats — you just can't tell anymore, because the water it was set into was Highlands itself.