Full transcript
Jay Cosgrove
This is an automatic transcript of the recording, not yet checked against the audio. Names and local words in particular may be wrong. Where it differs from the recording, the recording is the record.
- 0:00
In 1969, Frank Sinatra pulled his yacht, the Roma, into our docks at Bahrs Landing in Highlands, and he refused to get off. Frank Sinatra's yacht was 80-ft yacht. It was named the Roma at the time before he had his bigger yacht called My Way, right? His captain of his yacht, Captain Wheeler, was from Highlands. His family actually had a a pretty famous bar and seafood place down on Bay Avenue called Cap Wheeler's. So, they pulled in and uh he had a lobster dinner,
- 0:28
although we had to serve the lobster dinner on board cuz it was uh
- 0:32
a lot of commotion going on here that day. One of the reasons why he came here, he was performing at the Art Center. New Jersey State Investigation Commission wanted him for questioning for organized crime at the Jersey Shore. But, there's a old maritime law where you cannot issue a subpoena over the water, on the dock or his yacht. So, word got out. The big reporters from New York City got tipped off, so they're all waiting at the bar for the yacht to show up, and then once it did, for him to get off,
- 1:02
come in for dinner, and it was pretty raucous bar. Guys having some shots and some chowder and some
- 1:10
smoking their cigars, and it was pretty exciting. There was a whole bunch of other locals showed up, too, to check out his yacht and see if they can get a glimpse of him, which they did because they did walk up the dock and come in for cocktails for back on board for his lobster dinner, which we served on board. The waitresses just basically put it on trays and and walked out there and served them, you know, just brought it to you. Obviously, they set up on board, gave him his lobster crackers, the lobster bibs, the the wipes. Sally Carmelo, who was a long-time waitress even when I was
- 1:41
working here, Sally was one of the servers, so she would always tell the story. I would listen to her over the years before she retired. But, and my grandfather, he was he was busy all the time. I don't think he got on board. I don't think he I think he did get to shake his hand, but that was about it. The reporter was here for dinner a couple times and I got to meet her and we have the article she wrote which was in the next day in the front page of it was a Red Bank Register which is basically she was in college, I think. She was dressed up for the occasion. She found her way over
- 2:12
to some boat rentals over by the bridge and 16-year-old kid that was working there got her on board his little boat and brought her around to the other side of his yacht away from all the bouncers and security and the crowds and she climbed on board, knocked on the cabin door and who answers it was Frank. All of his bouncers were on the dock fighting off the fishermen and that was another big part of this story. Oh, there was some scuffles going on between the bouncers and our local fishermen.
- 2:42
I think a few of them went into the water. And he let her in so she got the best she scooped all the New York guys which is a big deal. So, she was here for dinner a couple times. And one of the big things for us was he said it was the best lobster dinner he ever had.
- 2:56
So, we got that going for us.
- 2:58
Well, of course.
- 3:00
You are the lobster boss.
- 3:01
Back in the day there was I remember people would say Mel Tormé was a regular. A lot of people when they would go to the Art Center once it opened
- 3:08
would come here for dinner. You know, the Bon Jovis were customers. Bruce Springsteen even lived down the street. Who else? Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto who I met here. All the cast members of The Sopranos. David Chase the creator of The Sopranos has been here recently. My favorite, Dr. Ruth. I actually got her autograph. Do you know who Dr. Ruth is?
- 3:32
No, I was thinking I was I was I was thinking Babe Ruth.
- 3:36
Babe Ruth? No, you know, I I say Babe Ruth used to come here because he would come down to play golf at Old Orchard Country Club where my grandfather's brother-in-law was a head pro, George Sullivan. So, I have a photo of Babe Ruth and I'm assuming he came here for dinner, but I don't have any proof of that.
- 3:53
Who's Dr. Ruth?
- 3:54
She's
- 3:56
She was Dr. Ruth. You'll have to ask your parents about
- 3:58
Specifically your dad.
- 4:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My name's Jay Cosgrove. I am the fourth generation owner-operator of Bahr's Landing. My mother's grandparents started the restaurant in 1917. They actually didn't start it as a restaurant. It was bait and tackle and rooms rooms for hire and like more like a bed and breakfast in the summer. But they turned it into a restaurant pretty quickly.
- 4:24
That's who I am. Fuel dock, dock and dine, just like Frank Sinatra used to come in by. We have probably the most dock and dine footage on the East Coast, one of the top anyway. We have some slips. Most of the boats inside of our marina are commercial working boats. So we have clam diggers and charter boat fishing. Sell bait and tackle and a little bit of that kind of stuff.
- 4:46
Beer.
- 4:46
Some beer.
- 4:49
89 octane.
- 4:50
I grew up working on the gas dock in the summer and washing dishes in the winter. It was a great experience. We serve, just like we do in the restaurant, we run the gamut from your high-end guys that live on the Navesink River and work on Wall Street to local yokels just out for the day fishing or wakeboarding. You get to meet all kinds of different people and as well we're a destination restaurant, so we get people coming up up from New York or if they're traveling
- 5:20
the East Coast, this will be a popular stop on their way either to Florida or back up to Maine. Family tradition for a lot of people. Every day somebody will tell me, "Oh, my grandfather took me here and we used to get this. We used to get the Shirley Temple and the and the fried clams." Literally hear that every day. Going back way back some of them. Prohibition days even is one customer. He's an old-timer now, 108 years. Not too many of us out there. There's a There's a handful. Upper East Side of
- 5:50
Manhattan Italian restaurant that was 1906. I never heard of it before. The 96-year-old woman finally passed away and then they just closed the restaurant. Nobody else wanted to run it after her, I guess, and her her family.
- 6:05
And we're currently standing in a houseboat.
- 6:10
There's long history from the 1800s. Very interesting. All major cities around United States where they had barges for canals. Same guys that owned the barge and canal business started many of them started the railroad business. So, all of the cargo they used to put on the barges now went on the railroads and they didn't need the barges anymore, but they had a lot of barges. They converted them to houseboats. Put them around different harbors around cities where that era there was not the best
- 6:40
conditions when it got hot and stinky without air conditioning and proper sanitation. Horses and animals. A lot of the factories and people with clothes and the people would find their way down here on the train or ferry and they would rent out these houseboat barges for a week or for the summer, whatever it would be. And they just anchor them out along Sandy Hook Bay. There was tons of them up the Red Bank Ocean Port. They would have two anchors, 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 so they
- 7:10
could sleep easier at night. Fish off of it. They had rowboats. And this is one that was I two-story. There were very few that were two-story buildings or barges. And I think when my grandparent my great-grandparents bought it, it had already been beached and kind of put up on some pilings.
- 7:27
How did they get it to here?
- 7:28
Uh good question. I guess they had tugboats that pushed them around.
- 7:32
So, they just pushed
- 7:33
sure about that.
- 7:34
Yeah.
- 7:34
Like a crane, I guess, or
- 7:36
Um well, no, they would just high tide and crank it up. They didn't use cranes back then for that, I don't think.
- 7:42
Wait, they had that they got it onto land?
- 7:45
no bulkhead.
- 7:46
So, it was just high tide and they just
- 7:47
High tide, high tide, they just keep pulling it back and they probably had some way, you know, rollers or cranks to get it up as high as they wanted it.
- 7:55
That's pretty amazing.
- 7:56
Right? Yeah.
- 7:57
That's kind of crazy. I think in Red Bank the Shrewsbury Sailing Club, which is on a pier, was boat house at one point and there used to be a few in Seabright. You could tell just by the looking at them they were tucked in between all the big houses. I don't know if there any left
- 8:14
anymore, but there used to be a couple of little tiny They almost look like manufacturer homes, like a trailer home. It's just distinct design. So, they had They were all designed exactly the same way with the same pitched roof, same amount of windows, the same length because they all had to be the same to get through the canals. I think they only had so much room to get through the locks in the canal. So, they're all the exact same width and length, that kind of stuff. So, you can You can recognize them
- 8:44
if you're going around old places.
- 8:47
So, pretty much when when someone's having a lobster in the dining room, they're eating in a house barge that ended up on this land because of the change in tide and some people pulling the house onto land.
- 9:02
And then And then get lifted with old-fashioned cranks or jacks, they call them. Which we Which I still have one of those jacks in the basement. We never from my grandpa.
- 9:15
have a jack from that?
- 9:16
Yeah. Yep.
- 9:18
That's crazy.
- 9:19
a little rusty, but it it We have it.
- 9:21
Yeah, yeah.
- 9:22
Just in case you ever need to move it another 10 ft back.
- 9:25
Probably still works.
- 9:27
Yeah, I feel like things like that don't stop working, you know?
- 9:30
I have a question. This year the Shrewsbury froze over considerably. Has this been one of the worst years you've seen and how has it affected your marina?
- 9:42
It was definitely one of the thickest and the the lengthiest freeze. I think 5 weeks maybe it was a little over 5 weeks. And the ice certainly got thick. Some of our pilings, even though we had bubblers and we're out there chopping away. When it gets to 5° at night at low tide, it just it'll grab the piling and and pull it up if it's uh doesn't have enough air flow or bubbles under it, which you we only had so many. Uh but we tied them down. We got them
- 10:12
all back in pretty quickly. We have I have a Luke Jenks does our dock work here and uh he was on site. Which he is uh he basically bases his operation out of here. So, we're lucky for that. The big concern was the tide goes by like 5 mph and if a big chunk, like a massive chunk and say Horseshoe Cove inside of Sandy Hook, would break loose at a high full moon high tide and north wind, they just start piling into the bridge and they don't go under the bridge, so
- 10:43
pressure builds and it moves into our gas dock and it'll just instead of pulling the pilings up, it'll just snap them. And so, that happened to us in 2018, actually. Um so, it's not necessarily in the end it was better because it was to- ice wasn't moving. It was so thick. All right. So, when we did have a high tide or the or one storm, one or two storms we had, there was no ice movement. So, we got really lucky with that. And then once it did start the thaw, it was
- 11:14
a gradual thaw, so we never had hard thick icebergs, I call them, hitting us. Um so, yeah, we got very lucky with that. But you never know. Never know with the ice like uh that was pretty much the worst I would always say the latest in the season in the winter season that we would ever have ice damage was February 17th. I think it was like 1999 or 2000.
- 11:45
And yeah, we had like an ice storm and that's exactly what happened. It came in and just
- 11:50
took down all of our fixed docks. [laughter] Back then. So this one was actually a little bit later. We still had ice into the like think 20 just a week ago, right? So like the 21st, 20th it started melting here. So it was interesting. We had it on the the live webcam. People were watching it all over the world.
- 12:15
It was quite a spectacle.
- 12:17
Yeah. Yeah, it was It's like being on the moon, I I'd say. My father, Ray Cosgrove, took over from my grandparents suddenly. He had a corporate job and he had to take a leave of absence, so he you know, I would come down when my grandparents were running it, but you know, I wasn't working. I was just kind of hanging out. Once my father took over, it was,
- 12:43
[snorts]
- 12:44
you know, 24/7 situation where we were open 7 days. Well, he he turned it on 7 days. It was always 6 days with my grandparents. And then we bought Mobies and the marina we used to lease out and the marina when I was 16 15, 16, he put
- 13:04
me and my brothers and couple Highlands guys out there. We ran the the fuel dock and bait and tackle. But yeah, I mean I was always here for I grew up here, but I was lucky enough to grow up in Rumson, too. So I had I had my Highlands is all different place back when I was in high school. It was not what it is now, so it was there was a a
- 13:25
a lot going on and it's between the the clam the
- 13:30
the clammers, the fishermen the bungalows That's a the whole another story.