Thursday, November 29, 2012
Legislators get tour of Shore destruction
Members of New Jersey's General Assembly toured Ocean County communities devastated by Superstorm Sandy Thursday. The tour, led by State Police Superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes, along with local officials, gave lawmakers and members of the press an up-close look at what Sandy left behind – including the remnants of the Seaside Heights boardwalk and the now-iconic Jet Star roller coaster, which dropped from Casino Pier to the ocean during the storm. Casino Pier will be repaired in what is estimated to be a $45 million project, Seaside Heights Police Chief Thomas Boyd said, and the roller coaster will be removed from the ocean floor. Funtown Pier in nearby Seaside Park, is in the preliminary stages of assessing the damage with its insurance …
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Is the retail encroachment into Thanksgiving day worth fighting?
I’ve been known to be a party pooper, a real Debbie downer (sorry Debbie) when it comes to certain kinds of indulgences. Keep this in mind if you keep reading. Black Friday. Fine. After a day of gastronomic excess, we launch into a season of consumer spending that many of us will regret well into 2013. But a Black Friday that begins on Thanksgiving Thursday is just too much, or is it? The argument was succinctly made by P.C. Richard & Son (on Facebook, of course) that retailers who chose to open their doors on Thanksgiving “show no respect to their employees and families, and are in total disrespect of family values in America.” I’m inclined to agree, though the invocation of “family values” is questionable now that the phrase has been …
Monday, November 5, 2012
What the first devestating week looked like from my Mantoloking Road vantage point
It’s been a week since Hurricane Sandy hit and like many others, we still have no electricity at my house off Mantoloking Road. Our neighborhood is humming with the sound of generators, but I’ve been worried about the silent households ever since the temperatures dropped. In the past week, I (like you) have seen a lot, starting with a house strewn in the middle of Gale Road. A homeowner there said it washed across the bay and through the marsh onto his low lying street—a street that still reeked of diesel fuel on Thursday. Homeowners were shoveling thick, smelly muck from their driveways like it was snow that day. They thanked me for stopping and listening, even though that’s all I did. My brother-in-law lost most of his belongings in a …
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Strap supporting concrete crab snaps; outcome uncertain
A 47-foot-long horseshoe crab replica is now sunk at an artificial reef off the coast of Mantoloking, but not as planned. After Point Borough sculptor Chris Wojcik invested more than a year of time building and readying a concrete crab replica for its place at the Axel Carlson reef, it was finally sunk today. But the sinking turned out to be far more dramatic than anyone expected or wanted. Two hours were spent methodically preparing for the sinking, with the crew of the ocean crane Columbia New York filling the twin, 50-foot barges that support the structure with water, then strapping it to a crane to ensure the crab, which is welded to the barges, remained upright when it reached the ocean floor. But just before noon, the strap …
PatrickL
2:56 pm on Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Lucie47, it is the ignorant people like you that give Seaside Heights such a "bad reputation." First off, The Borough of Seaside Park and the Borough of Seaside Heights are two separate municipalities, they are not decent and indecent "areas" of the same borough. Second, during the 60's and 70's, Seaside Heights was at the height of its GOOD reputation as the number one place for family fun along… more ›