The yacht at the dock
In 1969, Frank Sinatra brought his yacht into the docks at Bahrs Landing and would not get off.
She was the Roma, about eighty feet long, years before the bigger boat he named My Way. Her captain was a Highlands man named Wheeler, whose family ran Cap Wheeler's, a bar and seafood place down on Bay Avenue. That may be how a yacht from Sinatra's world found its way to a dock under the Highlands bridge. Sinatra was singing at the new Garden State Arts Center, and he wanted a lobster dinner.
He got it, but on board. "There was a lot of commotion going on here that day," Jay Cosgrove told us. Jay is the fourth generation of his family to run Bahrs. The waitresses loaded trays in the kitchen and carried dinner down the dock, then set the table on the yacht with lobster crackers, bibs, and wipes. One of them was Sally Carmelo, who was still waiting tables when Jay was a kid and told the story for years until she retired.
The bar inside was full. Word had gotten out, and the big reporters from New York were drinking and waiting for him to walk up the dock. Local fishermen were having shots and chowder and smoking cigars. Half the town came down to look at the boat. Out on the dock, Sinatra's bouncers were holding back the crowd, and from the sound of it the crowd included some fishermen who did not take kindly to being held back. "There was some scuffles going on between the bouncers and our local fishermen," Jay said. "I think a few of them went into the water."
The locals got their glimpse when his party walked up the dock for cocktails before going back aboard for dinner. He told them it was the best lobster dinner he ever had.
"So," Jay said, "we got that going for us."
Why he stayed on the boat
The reason he wouldn't come ashore is the best part of the story, and most of it is true.
That year, New Jersey's brand-new State Commission of Investigation wanted Sinatra to testify about organized crime. The legislature had created the commission in 1968 to look into corruption and the mob. He fought the subpoena for months and faced contempt charges. He called the commission a three-ring circus before he finally flew into Trenton and testified in February 1970.
At the bar in Highlands, everyone knew why he was staying aboard: "There's an old maritime law where you cannot issue a subpoena over the water," Jay said. That isn't quite how the law works. But it's what the dock believed in 1969, and it made a good enough reason for one of the most famous men in the world to eat lobster with a bib on his own boat while New York's reporters drank in the bar.
The kid with the little boat
In the end, none of those reporters got the story. A young woman did. Jay thinks she was still in college. She dressed up for the occasion, then walked over to the boat rentals by the bridge, where a sixteen-year-old kid took her out in his small boat. He brought her around to the far side of the yacht, away from the bouncers and the crowd and the fight on the dock. She climbed aboard and knocked on the cabin door.
Frank Sinatra answered. He let her in.
Her story ran on the front page of the Red Bank Register the next day, under the headline "Sinatra Cruises into Port at Shore for Day Visit". She scooped all of New York from a rental boat. Years later she came back to Bahrs for dinner a few times, and Jay got to meet her.
A house that floated in
When you eat a lobster in the main dining room at Bahrs, you are sitting inside a boat.
Jay explained it while we stood in it. In the 1800s, the families who ran the canal barges in America's big cities went into railroads, and the cargo moved off the water and onto the tracks. That left them with a great many barges and no work for them. So they built houses on top.
City summers then were brutal: no air conditioning, poor sanitation, horses in the streets, factories everywhere. People with the means took the train or the ferry down to the shore and rented these houseboats for a week or a season. The boats sat at anchor along Sandy Hook Bay and up the rivers toward Red Bank, each on two anchors and a big pole. "Depending on which way the wind was blowing, they positioned the boat so they got the best breeze inside for the bedroom," Jay said, "so they could sleep easier at night." They fished off the deck and rowed ashore.
The houseboats were all built to the same pattern, with the same width, the same length, the same pitched roof, and the same count of windows, because every one had to fit through the same canal locks. Once you know the shape, Jay says, you can still pick out a few along the old waterfronts.
This one was rare because it had two stories. By the time Jay's great-grandparents found it, it had already been beached and set up on pilings. No one alive knows exactly how it got there. Jay's best guess is the tide. "High tide, high tide, they just keep pulling it back," he said, with rollers and hand cranks each time the water lifted it, until it sat where they wanted it.
One of those jacks is still in the basement. "A little rusty," Jay said, "but we have it."
Neckties, chowder, and a storm
The family that bought it came from Newark. John "Jack" Bahrs, the grandson of a tall-ship captain, and his wife Florence made neckties in the Dutch Neck section of the city. After a robbery took their silk and their finished ties, they decided on Highlands. They rented rowboats from Cedar Street in the summers, and in 1917 they bought the beached houseboat and started making chowder. Fishing parties came down on the Friday night train, and $2.50 got them a room and board. The train tracks ran about thirty feet from the front door.
It was a nor'easter that made Bahrs a restaurant. A storm wrecked many of the family's rental boats, and to raise the money to rebuild them they started selling breakfast, lunch and dinner. They never stopped.
Everyone came
Sinatra was not the only famous name to find the place. Once the Arts Center opened, Jay said, its performers came over for dinner, and Mel Tormé was a regular. The Bon Jovis ate there, and Bruce Springsteen lived down the street. Joe DiMaggio came, and so did Phil Rizzuto, whom Jay met himself. So did the cast of The Sopranos, and more recently its creator, David Chase. In August 1967, MGM brought 127 guests from the New York premiere of The Dirty Dozen down on a Circle Line boat for a day at Monmouth Park and dinner at Bahrs. Ernest Borgnine told a reporter he liked it because it was close to the water.
In 1956 Bahrs held a party for Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Trudy had spent her summers in Highlands and trained in the hard currents under the bridge, a few hundred feet from where the party was held.
Jay's own favorite is Dr. Ruth. He has her autograph. Our interviewer had never heard of her. "You'll have to ask your parents," Jay said.
He is also careful about what he can't prove. Babe Ruth came down to play golf at Old Orchard Country Club, where Jay's grandfather's brother-in-law, George Sullivan, was the head pro. Jay has a photograph of Babe Ruth. "I'm assuming he came here for dinner," he said, "but I don't have any proof of that." That kind of honesty is rare in a restaurant that could easily claim him.
Shirley Temples and fried clams
The famous names are not what keeps Bahrs going. What Jay hears every day, he says, is some version of this: "My grandfather took me here and we used to get the Shirley Temple and the fried clams." One customer's memories go back to Prohibition. The guests on the dock run from Wall Street people with houses on the Navesink to locals out for the day fishing or wakeboarding, plus travelers stopping on the way to Florida or Maine. Bahrs has some of the most dock-and-dine space on the East Coast, and the boats in its marina are mostly working boats: clammers and charter fishing.
Bahrs was 108 years old when we sat down with Jay. "Not too many of us out there," he said. "There's a handful." He told us about an Italian place on Manhattan's Upper East Side that opened in 1906 and closed when the 96-year-old woman who ran it died. Nobody in her family wanted to keep it going.
The winter the river froze
We sat down with Jay in March, just after the ice let go. The Shrewsbury had frozen hard that winter, for a little over five weeks by his count, and it was the thickest and longest freeze he could remember.
Ice on a working marina isn't a postcard. On a five-degree night at low tide, the ice grabs a piling, and when the tide comes back it pulls the piling straight up out of the mud. Bahrs ran bubblers and sent people out to chop, but the bubblers only covered so much. Luke Jenks, who runs his dock-building operation from Bahrs, was on site and got the pulled pilings back in quickly.
The bigger fear is moving ice. The tide runs past the dock at about five miles an hour. If a huge sheet breaks loose somewhere like Horseshoe Cove on Sandy Hook during a full-moon high tide with a north wind, it rides the current into the bridge, jams there, and builds pressure until it shoves into the gas dock. "Instead of pulling the pilings up, it'll just snap them," Jay said. That happened in 2018. Around 1999 or 2000, an ice storm in mid-February took down every fixed dock they had.
This winter the ice was so thick it didn't move, and when the thaw came it came slowly. "We got very lucky," Jay said. The live camera on the dock caught all of it, and people watched from around the world. "It's like being on the moon," Jay said.
The first winter, in 1917, brought the same worry, when ice sheets moving with the tide threatened the marina's pilings. The family has been fighting the same river for 109 winters.
Four generations
Jay grew up on the gas dock in the summers and in the dish room in the winters. His father, Ray Cosgrove, took a sudden leave from a corporate job to take over from Jay's grandparents, Bud and Peg Bahrs, after they retired in 1974. Ray opened seven days a week instead of six. The family bought what is now Moby's and took back the marina they had been leasing out. When Jay was fifteen or sixteen, Ray put him, his brothers, and a couple of Highlands guys in charge of the fuel dock and the bait shop.
Jay grew up in Rumson, but he grew up at Bahrs too, and the Highlands of his high school years was a different town: the clammers, the fishermen, the bungalows. "That's a whole other story," he said, and laughed.
We intend to come back for it.
On a summer night now you can sit on the deck at Moby's beside the bridge, with the tide running hard toward the bay, and eat a lobster a few feet from where Sinatra ate his. Inside, the old houseboat still holds up the dining room, as it has since the tide brought it in.
Watch and read
The film is on this entry: Frank Sinatra Ordered Lobster on His Yacht to Dodge a Subpoena, along with the full transcript of the conversation.
The family's own account is worth your time: Bahrs Landing on its history, on the 1960s, and on the first winter.
Note on this page
Recorded at Bahrs Landing, Highlands, New Jersey, in March 2026, just after the ice let go. Above the Hook, with Jay Cosgrove.
Also on this entry: the film · the full transcript.
Sources. The family history, the Sinatra visit and the first winter from Bahrs Landing's own pages, including the 1960s and the first winter; the nor'easter that turned a boat-rental business into a restaurant from Monmouth Community. On the subpoena: the Washington Post on Sinatra and the FBI files, the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation on its own founding in 1968, and mafianj.com on the February 1970 testimony in Trenton.
Related: A Town of Its Own, Chapter 10, and the article on Bahrs Landing.