Ask anyone in Britain what New Jersey looks like and you’ll get the same answer: refineries, eight lanes of traffic, cloverleaf junctions and a reality TV show nobody admits to watching. That picture comes from about 15 miles of road between Newark airport and the Holland Tunnel. People have taken those fifteen miles and applied them to a state the size of Wales.
Some visitors go to Spring Lake instead, which is a small town on the Monmouth County coast, 90 minutes out of Manhattan, and it’s the exact opposite of the postcard. It’s also expensive, and getting more so. This stretch of the Jersey Shore turns up regularly on lists of the state’s wealthy enclaves, and the population swells every summer with families who have been coming for four generations.
More people are staying on year-round now, working remotely from houses that used to be shut from October. Around three thousand people live here permanently and in August it feels like considerably more.
Here’s the thing that makes Spring Lake worth writing about. It is defined almost entirely by what it has refused to have.
Two miles of boardwalk and nothing on it
One of the appeals of the shoreline here is that there aren’t any arcades, shops, funnel cake stands, or rides. You also won’t find those cheesy claw machines or vendors flogging knock-off t-shirts. It’s one of New Jersey’s longest boardwalks, spanning the whole town. It’s just planks and railings with the Atlantic on one side and enormous Victorian houses on the other.
For a British reader the comparison writes itself. Imagine Blackpool with the pleasure beach removed and the guesthouses replaced by something out of a period drama. Dull is the obvious objection, but then you walk it early and there’s nothing between you and the Atlantic but a railing. This wasn’t an accident or a decline. The town decided in the 1870s that it wasn’t going to do fairground attractions, and it has simply never changed its mind.
No traffic lights
There isn’t a single set of traffic lights in the whole town, and wonderfully, there are no parking meters either. Overseas visitors can spend an embarrassing amount of time checking whether this could possibly be true. It is.
You can’t eat on the beach, and getting on it costs money
Some people will hate this bit, so here it is straight. Spring Lake beach runs a badge system that’s around $12 for a day or a $110 for the season, with under twelves free, and that makes it about the priciest sand at the shore. Food and drink are banned on the beach itself, and dogs are banned from the boardwalk permanently and from the sand for most of the year.
The upside is a beach that is genuinely immaculate and never crowded. The downside is that you’ll be walking back into town for lunch so decide for yourself whether that’s a good thing or not.
There is a lake, hence the name
Sixteen acres of spring-fed water sits in the middle of the town, surrounded by Divine Park, with wooden footbridges crossing it. There are holly trees on the banks, swans swimming in the water, and enormous houses looking down on it. It takes about twenty minutes to walk the whole way round the lake, and it’s the best thing in the town after the boardwalk.
Third Avenue runs off the with sixty-odd shops and restaurants. Most of the restaurants are bring your own, so buy the wine before you sit down.
The Irish thing is not a marketing invention
Spring Lake has a lot of Irish ancestry with just under 40% of permanent residents, and over half once the summer people arrive. That’s why it’s called the Irish Riviera. The nickname is old and its origin is argued about locally, with some crediting the hotels of the 1920s touting for wealthy Irish-American custom and others crediting Martin Maloney, a man born in Ballingarry, County Limerick, who made a fortune in electricity and built St Catharine’s church here. The church is still the most striking building in town and you can walk into it.
If you want the town at full volume, go for St Patrick’s Day rather than in August.
One dark thing, since we’re being thorough
In the summer of 1916 a series of shark attacks along this coast killed four people, and one of them died at Spring Lake. Those attacks are the ones that fed into the Jaws movies, so it’s an odd thing to stand on a boardwalk this serene and think about.
When to go, and how
The train is the best way to arrive at Spring Lake. NJ Transit runs the North Jersey Coast Line out of Penn Station and Spring Lake has its own stop, which is walking distance from everything. So, you don’t need a car, which isn’t something you can say about much of this state.
Go in September when the water is still warm, the summer crowds have gone back to work or flocked to New York instead, and the rates drop. It’s also a great time for photography when the light on those Victorian porches is glorious. May and early June do a similar job at the other end of the summer period.
Then walk the two miles of boardwalk on a weekday morning and count how many engines you hear. That number is the whole argument about New Jersey, and everyone gets it wrong.
