After lurking for a while, I registered just to reinforce this sentiment!
Some of the beach towns in Monmouth County are absolute gems.
Maybe the most walkable - and the most wonderfully surreal - beach town in Monmouth County is
Ocean Grove (bird's eye view
here), a not-quite independent quasi-municipality where all the land is owned by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist organization that established Ocean Grove as a seaside retreat in the mid nineteenth century. Ocean Grove initially was an independent municipality controlled by the Camp Meeting Association, and the town's ordinances had a decidedly religious bent: it was (and is) a dry town and, until the 1980s, you could not drive a car on Sundays. Some time in the 1980s, the town's charter was yanked on the basis (I believe) that having a municipality controlled by a religious organization flew in the face of the establishment clause of the US Constitution. Now, cars can drive around on Sunday, but all the land is still owned by the Camp Meeting Association - homeowners merely rent the land on 99-year leases, which are renewable every 99 years for $1.
Anyway, the 60s and 70s were hard on Ocean Grove. Like other Jersey Shore towns, tourist traffic dropped with the onset of the jet age. Race riots roiled its neighbor to the immediate north,
Asbury Park. Coinciding with the decline in tourism was New Jersey's policy of deinstitutionalization, whereby psychiatric patients were released from state hospitals in an effort to streamline them into society. As Ocean Grove and Asbury Park had a wealth of underused hotels, boarding houses, and oversized Victorian homes, many of them went Section 8, and the State of New Jersey essentially absolved itself of responsibility for the mentally ill by warehousing them by the sea. Ocean Grove got the sobriquet "Ocean Grave", while Asbury Park, for its part, would later get the nickname "Sarajevo by the Sea".
The upside of the decades of neglect and religious control is that Ocean Grove never fell victim to short-sighted development schemes or urban renewal. It is a world-class collection of Victorian resort architecture with wonderfully intimate streets and short, condensed blocks. Now that times are better, homes, B&Bs and businesses have been beautifully restored. The religious control has loosened to some extent - There's no need to adhere to religious dogma to own (or rather, lease on a long-term basis) property in the town, and there's a substantial gay community, buttressed by the presence of Asbury Park to the north. It's still a dry town, but a two-minute walk across Wesley Lake is all that separates the
bars and restaurants of Asbury Park from the stuck-in-time charm of Ocean Grove.
One of the weirdest, greatest things about the town is its tents. There's a tent colony set up around Ocean Grove's
Great Auditorium, a vestige of its old-time religious revival days. Hundreds of semi-permanent tents set up each summer. The waiting list to get a plot is probably measured in generations.
I'll have to do a photo tour of Ocean Grove this summer, since photos that do the place justice are remarkably hard to find online.
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