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By Eric C. Peterson Photograph Courtesy Madison Marquette
The buzz is back. And it’s about time. After numerous starts and stops, Asbury Park’s ongoing redevelopment finally appears on track, with much of the credit given to a top-flight city management team that has pulled together the varied elements of this very complicated effort. In the process, some important private sector names have been brought to the table. And people on the consumer side are starting to notice.
“Have you been in downtown Asbury Park at night recently?” asks Bill Parness, a Matawan-based marketing consultant. “It’s packed. It’s really alive. The restaurants are great, the entertainment is great. It’s amazing.”
That’s the kind of buzz this seaside community has been generating recently, and the city finally seems poised to regain its former prominence as a destination. But in order to get people back into town, you need to get private sector businesses into town, a goal that city officials have put a great deal of effort into.
But the first step was to get everyone on the same page. While Asbury Park’s oceanfront gets most of the ink, “the city’s initiative is to fix the whole city, not just the waterfront,” explains Tom Gilmour, Asbury’s director of commerce, who notes that Asbury Park is also an urban enterprise zone, “which has been very beneficial in many ways. The waterfront is very prominent, very ‘sexy,’ but it’s only one piece of what we’re doing.”
“The criticism has been that there is a focus on the waterfront and the remainder of the city is left by the wayside,” says Donald Sammet, director of planning and redevelopment. “What I’ve seen in the past five years is a much broader focus. There’s an effort and dedication to include all parts of the city in the redevelopment activity.
“In general, planners tend to have a broader scope to their thought process, so I started to think about how the city can get the message out that Asbury Park is not just about the waterfront,” Sammet continues. “The current governing body has really done that.”
That overall effort, however, has been made more complicated by the fact that Asbury Park is more than just a small city of about 20,000 people. For much of the year, the population swells to several times that number, and the city has a size, scope, and infrastructure that speaks to a larger population. And within that context, the overall initiative boils down to four redevelopment areas, with a fifth on the way.
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