ASBURY CATHEDRALS ARE DYING
Convention Hall, Grand Arcade, Paramount Theatre, Casino, Carousel House, Breezeway, and the Steam Plant. Warren and Wetmore built them.
And nobody is coming to save them the way Jackie Kennedy saved Grand Central.
Written by Adam Nelson, Co-Founder, Socko!
Photography by Adam Nelson, 2014-2026
The same hands that built Grand Central Terminal built the Asbury Park boardwalk.
Nobody says it, nobody teaches it, nobody puts it on a plaque, and it is the single most important architectural fact about the Jersey Shore that has been allowed to slip out of the public memory like a coin through a grate. Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, the architects who designed the most beautiful train station on the face of the earth, the Beaux-Arts cathedral with its celestial ceiling and its chandeliers and its marble and its light, came down to Asbury Park in the late 1920s and they built Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre and the Casino and the Carousel House and the Steam Plant. They built them with the same ambition, grandeur, and insistence on detail that they brought to Grand Central, because they believed that a boardwalk on the Jersey Shore deserved the same reverence as a train station in Manhattan.
Imagine that. Imagine standing on a beach in Monmouth County in 1928 and saying we are going to build a 3,600-seat convention hall with copper panels and carved stone and lanterns and mermaids and a ship fastened to the entry, and a Grand Arcade running along Ocean Avenue, and a 1,600-seat theater that opens with the Marx Brothers and Ginger Rogers. Saying south of that we are going to build a casino with an archway decorated with winged seahorses in honor of Poseidon, a copper-clad carousel rotunda to house a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel, and behind the casino the largest indoor skating rink in the state of New Jersey with panorama windows facing the Atlantic. Saying we will build a steam plant that looks like a temple from a country that does not exist, with two great copper urns on its roof and tunnels running under the boardwalk that warm the whole complex from below like a living organism. Imagine saying all of that and then doing it. Warren and Wetmore said it and did it, because to them Asbury Park was not a lesser commission. Asbury Park was a palace on the sand.
That palace is dying.
Nobody says it, nobody teaches it, nobody puts it on a plaque, and it is the single most important architectural fact about the Jersey Shore that has been allowed to slip out of the public memory like a coin through a grate. Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, the architects who designed the most beautiful train station on the face of the earth, the Beaux-Arts cathedral with its celestial ceiling and its chandeliers and its marble and its light, came down to Asbury Park in the late 1920s and they built Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre and the Casino and the Carousel House and the Steam Plant. They built them with the same ambition, grandeur, and insistence on detail that they brought to Grand Central, because they believed that a boardwalk on the Jersey Shore deserved the same reverence as a train station in Manhattan.
Imagine that. Imagine standing on a beach in Monmouth County in 1928 and saying we are going to build a 3,600-seat convention hall with copper panels and carved stone and lanterns and mermaids and a ship fastened to the entry, and a Grand Arcade running along Ocean Avenue, and a 1,600-seat theater that opens with the Marx Brothers and Ginger Rogers. Saying south of that we are going to build a casino with an archway decorated with winged seahorses in honor of Poseidon, a copper-clad carousel rotunda to house a Philadelphia Toboggan Company carousel, and behind the casino the largest indoor skating rink in the state of New Jersey with panorama windows facing the Atlantic. Saying we will build a steam plant that looks like a temple from a country that does not exist, with two great copper urns on its roof and tunnels running under the boardwalk that warm the whole complex from below like a living organism. Imagine saying all of that and then doing it. Warren and Wetmore said it and did it, because to them Asbury Park was not a lesser commission. Asbury Park was a palace on the sand.
That palace is dying.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE HULLABALO
The Paramount Theatre has been closed since 2021. Four years of dark. Four years of a 1,600-seat theater sitting empty on the boardwalk, its chandelier hanging unsafely over threadbare seats where nobody sits anymore. Its roof is leaking, its masonry crumbling, its steel rusting in the salt air that has been eating this building alive since the day it was built. The city ordered it shut over safety concerns. Madison Marquette, the Washington, D.C.-based developer that has owned the boardwalk since 2010, received an $11.7 million Preservation Fund grant from the state to restore it. The original contractor, March Associates Construction, quit before starting the work. Months passed. The grant has a December 2026 deadline, and if the work is not done, the money goes back to Trenton.
In May 2026, the Asbury Park City Council approved Poland SST as the new contractor for the structural repairs. Work can now get underway. The deadline did not move.
In May 2026, the Asbury Park City Council approved Poland SST as the new contractor for the structural repairs. Work can now get underway. The deadline did not move.
Convention Hall, the 3,600-seat grand dame next door, has been closed since the same year. The copper panels that once adorned its exterior, twenty-seven of them, each 5.5 by 16 feet, each weighing 450 pounds, original to 1929, were removed for a structural inspection, stored in a vacant pavilion on Sunset Avenue. And then they were stolen. Six tons of copper. Gone. The case was investigated by both the Asbury Park police and the state Division of Criminal Justice. Neither found a viable lead. The panels were never recovered, never replaced. Where they once hung, the salt air now enters the building, corroding the steel, soaking the stone, doing to Convention Hall in slow motion what a wrecking ball would do in an afternoon.
The Casino Building south of Convention Hall has its own calendar. The breezeway, the open-air walkway that connects the Asbury Park boardwalk to Ocean Grove, was closed to the public in May 2023 following an inspection that found significant corrosion of the steel trusses supporting the arcade. Madison Marquette announced that a historically significant renovation was coming and the breezeway would reopen shortly. Three years passed. In January 2026 the company applied for a demolition permit. A crimson sticker appeared on the Carousel House window: UNSAFE FOR HUMAN OCCUPANCY. The address on the sticker, 700 Ocean Avenue, covered the breezeway, the carousel, and the steam plant.
Community outrage was immediate. State Senator Vin Gopal intervened. Assemblywomen Margie Donlon and Luanne Peterpaul wrote letters. A hundred people stood on the boardwalk in subzero wind chills to demand preservation. Madison Marquette reversed course and pledged to repair the breezeway.
Community outrage was immediate. State Senator Vin Gopal intervened. Assemblywomen Margie Donlon and Luanne Peterpaul wrote letters. A hundred people stood on the boardwalk in subzero wind chills to demand preservation. Madison Marquette reversed course and pledged to repair the breezeway.
Artist: Hot Tea / Wooden Walls Project
Then, on March 13, 2026, the roof repairs on the Casino were completed. A structural engineer inspected and approved the work. The safety stickers came down. The exterior pedestrian pathway on the east side reopened for foot and bike traffic between Asbury Park and Ocean Grove. The interior breezeway, the one Warren and Wetmore actually drew, the one with the steel trusses corroding inside the walls, remains closed. A roof was patched. The building underneath it is still wounded.
The Steam Plant sits quiet at the canal. The urns have weathered to the green of old pennies. The machinery underneath is silent. The tunnels that once carried heat to the entire complex are dark, because the complex they served is not operating. A building designed to give warmth to a boardwalk in winter is sitting in the cold.
And there is a building that is not there anymore. The rear of the Casino, the part that held the Casino Ice Palace, the first indoor public ice skating rink in the state of New Jersey, twenty thousand square feet of ice with panorama windows facing the sea, opened on Thanksgiving Eve 1929 with the slogan INDOOR ICE SKATING ON THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. The rink ran intermittently from the 1940s through the 1960s. Storms came. A poorly installed roof came. The 1980s came. By 2001 the entire Casino was vacant. By 2006 the rear portion, the Ice Palace itself, was torn down. The front of the Casino survived. The back did not. The idea is gone, and almost nobody under fifty remembers it was ever there.
The Steam Plant sits quiet at the canal. The urns have weathered to the green of old pennies. The machinery underneath is silent. The tunnels that once carried heat to the entire complex are dark, because the complex they served is not operating. A building designed to give warmth to a boardwalk in winter is sitting in the cold.
And there is a building that is not there anymore. The rear of the Casino, the part that held the Casino Ice Palace, the first indoor public ice skating rink in the state of New Jersey, twenty thousand square feet of ice with panorama windows facing the sea, opened on Thanksgiving Eve 1929 with the slogan INDOOR ICE SKATING ON THE ATLANTIC OCEAN. The rink ran intermittently from the 1940s through the 1960s. Storms came. A poorly installed roof came. The 1980s came. By 2001 the entire Casino was vacant. By 2006 the rear portion, the Ice Palace itself, was torn down. The front of the Casino survived. The back did not. The idea is gone, and almost nobody under fifty remembers it was ever there.
Tillie is gone too. The great painted face that watched the corner of Lake Avenue and Kingsley for half a century, that smiled down at every kid who ever spent a quarter in this town, that watched Springsteen drive past on his way to the Stone Pony, watched the wrecking ball come for the building behind him in 2004. Palace Amusements was not even Warren and Wetmore. It was something better. It was the working-class joy of the boardwalk, the bumper cars and the funhouse mirrors and the laughing sailor in the glass booth and the smell of popcorn and motor oil. And it was left to rot until the rot became the argument for the wrecking ball, and then it came down, and then the lot sat empty, and then it sat empty some more, and then condominiums came. That’s what they call progress. Buildings die, and inevitably, they sell what comes next. Palace went in 2004. The Ice Palace went in 2006. Tillie's smile is now a mural on a wall and a tattoo on a thousand arms, and you cannot fit a building inside a tattoo.
This is what neglect looks like when it happens slowly. It looks like a sticker on a window. Like a roof torn down in 2006 and never replaced. It looks like a corner where Tillie used to be.
This is what neglect looks like when it happens slowly. It looks like a sticker on a window. Like a roof torn down in 2006 and never replaced. It looks like a corner where Tillie used to be.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE MEGILLA
In 1975, the New York State Supreme Court voided the landmark designation of Grand Central Terminal. The building was going to be demolished. A 55-story office tower was going to swallow it. The Main Concourse would be gutted. The Beaux-Arts facade would come down. The ceiling with its painted constellations would be destroyed. And it would have happened, it would have actually happened, if a woman named Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had not walked into the Oyster Bar and stood in front of a microphone and said the words that saved the building:
“If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.”
In a handwritten letter to Mayor Abraham Beame, on powder-blue stationery, she wrote: “Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?”
Jackie Kennedy formed the Committee to Save Grand Central Station. She led rallies at the terminal. She rode a train called the Landmark Express to Washington to bring attention to the Supreme Court hearing. She used everything she had, her credibility, her fame, her fury, and she saved the building. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of preservation. Two hundred million dollars and two decades of restoration later, Grand Central reopened in 1998 and most New Yorkers had never seen it looking so glorious. Jackie had died four years earlier. They named the foyer after her.
Now hold that story in one hand and hold the story of the Asbury Park boardwalk in the other, because the parallel is not a metaphor. It is a fact. The same firm built both. The same hands, the same minds, the same belief that architecture should make you feel something when you walk through it. Jackie saved one. Nobody is saving the other.
“If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.”
In a handwritten letter to Mayor Abraham Beame, on powder-blue stationery, she wrote: “Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?”
Jackie Kennedy formed the Committee to Save Grand Central Station. She led rallies at the terminal. She rode a train called the Landmark Express to Washington to bring attention to the Supreme Court hearing. She used everything she had, her credibility, her fame, her fury, and she saved the building. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of preservation. Two hundred million dollars and two decades of restoration later, Grand Central reopened in 1998 and most New Yorkers had never seen it looking so glorious. Jackie had died four years earlier. They named the foyer after her.
Now hold that story in one hand and hold the story of the Asbury Park boardwalk in the other, because the parallel is not a metaphor. It is a fact. The same firm built both. The same hands, the same minds, the same belief that architecture should make you feel something when you walk through it. Jackie saved one. Nobody is saving the other.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE RUCKUS
Stewardship is the obligation that comes with custody. A steward does not possess the thing. A steward holds the thing in trust for the people who come after. A steward maintains, repairs, defends, and preserves, not because there is profit in it but because there is duty in it. Stewardship is what a museum does for a painting. What a parent does for a child. What a nation does for its constitution. What a city is supposed to do for its architecture.
Madison Marquette entered into a redevelopment agreement with the City of Asbury Park in 2010 to rebuild the waterfront, particularly the historic structures. That was the agreement. That was the stewardship they accepted. In April 2023 they announced a $130 million plan to transform the Casino into a world-class destination for music, art, and entertainment, funded by federal, state, and local tax credits. One month later, in May 2023, the breezeway was closed indefinitely. Three years on, the Casino plan has produced no construction. The Paramount and Convention Hall venues are closed. The Grand Arcade is still open as a shopping passage, which is the strangest part of the whole thing. You can walk into a Warren and Wetmore building, you can stop at a little shop, you can buy a t-shirt and a candle, you can look up at the ceiling and watch the paint come down on you, you can walk through history while history is dying around your ankles, and the developer collects the rent on the t-shirt.
There is a word for this. The word is not neglect. Neglect implies passivity, as if the owner simply forgot. The word is abandonment.
You do not forget a hall where The Doors played in 1968. You do not forget that on the night of August 16, 1969, while half a million kids were standing in mud upstate at Woodstock, Led Zeppelin chose to play Convention Hall instead. They chose Asbury Park. They picked this room. And after them, The Rolling Stones picked it. And Pink Floyd picked it. And The Clash and Blondie and The Beach Boys and James Brown and Janis Joplin and Ray Charles and KISS and Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen all picked it, over and over and over again, because Convention Hall was the room. It was the room where rock and roll happened on the Jersey Shore. Every one of those artists stood on that stage and felt the ocean through the walls.
You do not forget any of that. You choose not to care about it. And choosing not to care about it while holding the deed is not ownership.
Madison Marquette entered into a redevelopment agreement with the City of Asbury Park in 2010 to rebuild the waterfront, particularly the historic structures. That was the agreement. That was the stewardship they accepted. In April 2023 they announced a $130 million plan to transform the Casino into a world-class destination for music, art, and entertainment, funded by federal, state, and local tax credits. One month later, in May 2023, the breezeway was closed indefinitely. Three years on, the Casino plan has produced no construction. The Paramount and Convention Hall venues are closed. The Grand Arcade is still open as a shopping passage, which is the strangest part of the whole thing. You can walk into a Warren and Wetmore building, you can stop at a little shop, you can buy a t-shirt and a candle, you can look up at the ceiling and watch the paint come down on you, you can walk through history while history is dying around your ankles, and the developer collects the rent on the t-shirt.
There is a word for this. The word is not neglect. Neglect implies passivity, as if the owner simply forgot. The word is abandonment.
You do not forget a hall where The Doors played in 1968. You do not forget that on the night of August 16, 1969, while half a million kids were standing in mud upstate at Woodstock, Led Zeppelin chose to play Convention Hall instead. They chose Asbury Park. They picked this room. And after them, The Rolling Stones picked it. And Pink Floyd picked it. And The Clash and Blondie and The Beach Boys and James Brown and Janis Joplin and Ray Charles and KISS and Elton John and Stevie Wonder and Bruce Springsteen all picked it, over and over and over again, because Convention Hall was the room. It was the room where rock and roll happened on the Jersey Shore. Every one of those artists stood on that stage and felt the ocean through the walls.
You do not forget any of that. You choose not to care about it. And choosing not to care about it while holding the deed is not ownership.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE RAZZMATAZZ
There is a parallel here to the way this country treats its elderly, and somebody has to say it.
We build our parents up. We celebrate them when they are strong. We lean on them when they are useful. And then, when they age, when their bones decay and their faces sag and their spirits soften from a lack of love, we put them in a room and we close the door and we tell ourselves we will visit on Sunday and then we do not visit on Sunday, and we do not visit the Sunday after that, and eventually the room becomes a coffin with a television set, and the person inside it stops asking when someone is coming because they have learned that nobody is coming, and we call this dignity because the alternative is calling it what it is, which is abandonment.
Convention Hall is ninety-six years old. The Paramount is ninety-six years old. The Casino is ninety-seven years old. They are our grandparents on the boardwalk, standing in the salt air with their skin peeling and their joints rusting and their insides exposed to the weather through holes where copper used to be, and they are watching the condominiums go up around them, the steel and beige boxes of gentrification rising on every block, and they are thinking, if they could think, the same thing every abandoned elder thinks: I was here first. I was beautiful once. I held thousands of people inside me and they all felt something. Does that not count? Does that not earn me a roof that does not leak?
More than grassroots, which is righteous. More than rallies, which are necessary. More than letters from state senators, which are welcome. What these buildings need is a steward. A person or an institution or a city or a state that says: these buildings are ours, they are not for sale, they are not for demolition, they are not for neglect, and we will hold them in trust for the people who come after us the way Jackie Kennedy held Grand Central in trust for the people who came after her.
We build our parents up. We celebrate them when they are strong. We lean on them when they are useful. And then, when they age, when their bones decay and their faces sag and their spirits soften from a lack of love, we put them in a room and we close the door and we tell ourselves we will visit on Sunday and then we do not visit on Sunday, and we do not visit the Sunday after that, and eventually the room becomes a coffin with a television set, and the person inside it stops asking when someone is coming because they have learned that nobody is coming, and we call this dignity because the alternative is calling it what it is, which is abandonment.
Convention Hall is ninety-six years old. The Paramount is ninety-six years old. The Casino is ninety-seven years old. They are our grandparents on the boardwalk, standing in the salt air with their skin peeling and their joints rusting and their insides exposed to the weather through holes where copper used to be, and they are watching the condominiums go up around them, the steel and beige boxes of gentrification rising on every block, and they are thinking, if they could think, the same thing every abandoned elder thinks: I was here first. I was beautiful once. I held thousands of people inside me and they all felt something. Does that not count? Does that not earn me a roof that does not leak?
More than grassroots, which is righteous. More than rallies, which are necessary. More than letters from state senators, which are welcome. What these buildings need is a steward. A person or an institution or a city or a state that says: these buildings are ours, they are not for sale, they are not for demolition, they are not for neglect, and we will hold them in trust for the people who come after us the way Jackie Kennedy held Grand Central in trust for the people who came after her.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE TAKE
Here is what is true right now, in the almost summer of 2026. The Paramount Theatre has $11.7 million in state money earmarked for its restoration. The deadline is December 31. The grant money has to be spent by then or it goes back to the state. The city wants the theater reopened. The mayor says he does not know where the rest of the money is coming from.
Convention Hall needs its copper panels replaced. It needs its roof sealed. It needs the holes plugged where the salt air is entering. The mayor has suggested, as a stopgap, that the openings where the copper was stolen could be sealed with plywood. Plywood. On a building designed by the architects of Grand Central Terminal. That is not stewardship. That is hospice.
Meanwhile, the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere came to Asbury Park and temporarily placed a working carousel inside the Casino's rotunda and replaced the lighting fixtures for the duration of the shoot. A film production did more to restore the interior of the Casino in a week than the owner has done in fifteen years. Read that sentence again. A movie set dressed the building better than the landlord.
Convention Hall needs its copper panels replaced. It needs its roof sealed. It needs the holes plugged where the salt air is entering. The mayor has suggested, as a stopgap, that the openings where the copper was stolen could be sealed with plywood. Plywood. On a building designed by the architects of Grand Central Terminal. That is not stewardship. That is hospice.
Meanwhile, the Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere came to Asbury Park and temporarily placed a working carousel inside the Casino's rotunda and replaced the lighting fixtures for the duration of the shoot. A film production did more to restore the interior of the Casino in a week than the owner has done in fifteen years. Read that sentence again. A movie set dressed the building better than the landlord.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE STATE OF THE STATE
SOCKO! is not a preservation society. SOCKO! is a magazine. But a magazine has a voice, and the voice is loud enough to say what needs to be said, which is this:
These buildings are not real estate. They are not assets on a ledger. They are not parcels to be held until the market improves. They are the architectural children of the same firm that built the most beloved building in New York City, and they are standing on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with those beatific details carved into the concrete: the lanterns, the mermaids, the winged seahorses, the ship on the entry of Convention Hall, these are not decorations. They are promises Warren and Wetmore made to this city in stone, and we have broken every one of them every year we have allowed the buildings to decay.
Stewardship is not a word. It is a verb. It is the act of showing up, every day, with a bucket and a brush and a check and a conscience, and doing the work that the building cannot do for itself because the building is old and the building is tired and the building did not ask to be born on a beach where the salt never stops.
Jackie Kennedy understood that a building is not just a building. A building is a memory made solid. A building is a promise kept in stone. Lose the building and you lose the memory, and then what are you? You are a city with a boardwalk and nothing on it worth remembering.
SOCKO! will not stop writing about these buildings until they are restored, or until those who hold the deed understand that a Warren and Wetmore building on the Jersey Shore is a sacred trust.
These buildings are not real estate. They are not assets on a ledger. They are not parcels to be held until the market improves. They are the architectural children of the same firm that built the most beloved building in New York City, and they are standing on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean with those beatific details carved into the concrete: the lanterns, the mermaids, the winged seahorses, the ship on the entry of Convention Hall, these are not decorations. They are promises Warren and Wetmore made to this city in stone, and we have broken every one of them every year we have allowed the buildings to decay.
Stewardship is not a word. It is a verb. It is the act of showing up, every day, with a bucket and a brush and a check and a conscience, and doing the work that the building cannot do for itself because the building is old and the building is tired and the building did not ask to be born on a beach where the salt never stops.
Jackie Kennedy understood that a building is not just a building. A building is a memory made solid. A building is a promise kept in stone. Lose the building and you lose the memory, and then what are you? You are a city with a boardwalk and nothing on it worth remembering.
SOCKO! will not stop writing about these buildings until they are restored, or until those who hold the deed understand that a Warren and Wetmore building on the Jersey Shore is a sacred trust.
❖ ❖ ❖
THE CALL
Asbury is an artistic beehive. It is the Wooden Walls Project painting the back of every building on the boardwalk, it is the old Asbury Lanes that ran the bowling alley and the punk shows and the burlesque and the sideshows out of the same room for half a century, it is House of Independents booking the acts the bigger rooms missed, it is the photographers and the printmakers and the muralists and the buskers and the kids with movie cameras and a project and a Saturday.
Save Our Structures Asbury Park is running the council pressure and the letter writing and the testimony at sos-ap.org. Go there. Sign. Write.
**Attend the Planning Board meeting tonight, Monday, 1 June 2026
Then come back here, because Memorial Day to Labor Day a million people walk this boardwalk, and the people who make the art in this city already know what a million eyeballs is for.
Paint portraits of what is left and photograph what is gone. The copper that is not on Convention Hall anymore. The boarded windows. The construction fencing where the Paramount used to flow. Then hang the prints on the boardwalk railing on a Saturday in June. Pop-up gallery, no permit, no announcement, just the work where the work needs to be seen, and a sandwich board that names what is happening to it.
Write songs about the calamity. Then bring them to the boardwalk in front of the Casino on a Saturday in July. One busker is only a busker. A hundred buskers playing the same song on the same boardwalk on the same day is the soundtrack of the season, and the soundtrack of the season is what the local press writes about, is what any developer hears from their perch, and news the Governor can’t avoid.
Mount massive Bread and Puppet-style traveling performances. Carry the buildings as puppets. Process from Convention Hall to the Carousel with the cathedrals on your shoulders, on a Sunday afternoon in August when the boardwalk is at its thickest, and let the tourists with their phones do the documentation for you. By Monday it is on Instagram. By Tuesday it is in the New York Times. By Wednesday it is back on the council's agenda.
Project the buildings onto themselves at night. The Ice Palace to the wall where the Ice Palace used to stand. Tillie back on the corner where Tillie was. Do it on a Friday night when the boardwalk crowds are heaviest and stay until the cops ask you to leave, and then come back the next Friday. The technology is cheap. The wall is right there. The night is free.
Digitally map every building in peril with renderings of what could be. Overlay the boardwalk that exists with the boardwalk that was promised, so a kid on a phone in Bradley Beach can scroll a hundred years of loss in two minutes. Then push it to every council member, every state senator, every reporter on the shore beat, and pin it to the top of every Asbury Park subreddit and Facebook group until clicking it is unavoidable.
Email me at [email protected] and SOCKO! will turn its amplifiers on for you.
The Paramount has $11.7 million in state money and a December 31 deadline. The summer between this issue and that deadline is the most consequential summer the boardwalk will have in a generation.
Save Our Structures Asbury Park is running the council pressure and the letter writing and the testimony at sos-ap.org. Go there. Sign. Write.
**Attend the Planning Board meeting tonight, Monday, 1 June 2026
Then come back here, because Memorial Day to Labor Day a million people walk this boardwalk, and the people who make the art in this city already know what a million eyeballs is for.
Paint portraits of what is left and photograph what is gone. The copper that is not on Convention Hall anymore. The boarded windows. The construction fencing where the Paramount used to flow. Then hang the prints on the boardwalk railing on a Saturday in June. Pop-up gallery, no permit, no announcement, just the work where the work needs to be seen, and a sandwich board that names what is happening to it.
Write songs about the calamity. Then bring them to the boardwalk in front of the Casino on a Saturday in July. One busker is only a busker. A hundred buskers playing the same song on the same boardwalk on the same day is the soundtrack of the season, and the soundtrack of the season is what the local press writes about, is what any developer hears from their perch, and news the Governor can’t avoid.
Mount massive Bread and Puppet-style traveling performances. Carry the buildings as puppets. Process from Convention Hall to the Carousel with the cathedrals on your shoulders, on a Sunday afternoon in August when the boardwalk is at its thickest, and let the tourists with their phones do the documentation for you. By Monday it is on Instagram. By Tuesday it is in the New York Times. By Wednesday it is back on the council's agenda.
Project the buildings onto themselves at night. The Ice Palace to the wall where the Ice Palace used to stand. Tillie back on the corner where Tillie was. Do it on a Friday night when the boardwalk crowds are heaviest and stay until the cops ask you to leave, and then come back the next Friday. The technology is cheap. The wall is right there. The night is free.
Digitally map every building in peril with renderings of what could be. Overlay the boardwalk that exists with the boardwalk that was promised, so a kid on a phone in Bradley Beach can scroll a hundred years of loss in two minutes. Then push it to every council member, every state senator, every reporter on the shore beat, and pin it to the top of every Asbury Park subreddit and Facebook group until clicking it is unavoidable.
Email me at [email protected] and SOCKO! will turn its amplifiers on for you.
The Paramount has $11.7 million in state money and a December 31 deadline. The summer between this issue and that deadline is the most consequential summer the boardwalk will have in a generation.
❖ ❖ ❖
The Asbury cathedrals are dying.
The buildings cannot save themselves. Hands are what's required. The kind that shore things up. The kind that pray and push. The kind that get dirty.
Empty hands have killed more beauty than anything ever built to destroy it.
A steward worth their salt must love those buildings louder.
The buildings cannot save themselves. Hands are what's required. The kind that shore things up. The kind that pray and push. The kind that get dirty.
Empty hands have killed more beauty than anything ever built to destroy it.
A steward worth their salt must love those buildings louder.
This story appeared in the inaugural issue of Socko! Magazine [May, 2026]. Click here to subscribe
Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre, designed by Warren and Wetmore, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Casino Ice Palace, also designed by Warren and Wetmore, was demolished in 2006.
Convention Hall and the Paramount Theatre, designed by Warren and Wetmore, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Casino Ice Palace, also designed by Warren and Wetmore, was demolished in 2006.
Adam Nelson has lived at the intersection of performance and American storytelling for more than three decades. As the founder of Workhouse, the New York public relations agency he has run since 1999, he has built an award-winning firm representing filmmakers, artists, festivals, and cultural institutions. A professor at the New Jersey Film Academy, he is currently training a new generation for the state's rapidly expanding production economy. His film Food for Thought, directed by Gary Hanna, was a finalist at the AP'N3 Film Challenge and went on to win Best Silent Film at the 2026 Absurd Film Festival in Milan, Italy, and the Coney Island Film Festival. Huckleberry Jim, his debut novel, arrives October, 2026. Nelson is co-founder of SOCKO! Magazine
