Oral history

Voices of the coast

Stories and conversations from Highlands, Sandy Hook, and the people who know them.

Title card for the filmed conversation — "Coastal Resilience · A Conversation with Caleb" over a sunset bayshore, surf running in and the Manhattan skyline low on the horizon. Caleb Stratton

Preparing for the next coastal storm

How a shore town prepares for the next storm. A conversation with Caleb Stratton on coastal resilience, recorded before a nor'easter met a king tide.Watch the conversation

29 min Transcript

Anthony Setaro mid-sentence at a microphone on a porch, one hand raised, green trees and a strip of bay behind him. Anthony Setaro

The bootlegging history beneath Highlands

Anthony Setaro is a Highlands researcher of the shore's Prohibition years and the author of the still-unfinished Rum on the 'Sink. He works from newspapers, deeds, maps, and family memory, then goes and finds what is still in the ground — a rum-runner's garage under the grass, a signal tower aimed at the water, bottles behind the houses where they were pitched a century ago. His subject is history hiding in plain sight, and the clock on the people who can still confirm it.Watch the conversation

1 hr 18 min Transcript

Title card for the filmed conversation — "Sinatra ate at Bahrs?" over a colour photograph of Bahrs Landing in the 1960s, the lobster sign above the roof, the lot full of cars, Sandy Hook across the water. Jay Cosgrove

A century of stories at Bahrs

Fourth-generation owner of Bahrs Landing, the restaurant his family has run on Bay Avenue in Highlands since 1917 — a building that began as a beached house barge and never left. He tells the story the family still tells: Frank Sinatra's yacht at their dock in 1969, under subpoena, refusing to come ashore and having his lobster sent out to him. Also the winter the bay froze solid, and what it is to carry a century of this coast on one corner.Watch the conversation

13 min Transcript