Oh those Wildwood Days By Jack Coll

October 16, 2016

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Oh Those Wildwood Days

And The Grassy Sound

By Jack Coll

We all have different memories of the New Jersey shore, name a town, Sea Isle City, Ocean City, Cape May, Wildwood, you could name ’em all but chances are the town you stayed in as a kid is the town you love as an adult. If I were to take a poll I think very few people would say Atlantic City is their favorite shore spot, perhaps our parents and grandparents would name Atlantic City but for newer generations Atlantic City isn’t at the top of their list for a week’s vacation.

For me Wildwood was the happening hot-spot as a teenager in the late 1960’s and early

1970’s. I think it had more to do with the bonding that took place in a car loaded with other teenagers for the two hour long ride then it did with the actual time spent in Wildwood.

The part of the ride I always enjoyed most was Grassy Sound. I’m not sure if “Grassy Sound” was an official name for the area or neighborhood, I’m not sure if it was a borough, community or just an area named “Grassy Sound.”

Grassy Sound was located off Exit 6 off the New Jersey North-South Parkway. We would travel the Schuylkill Expressway, which seemed to take an hour to the Walt Whitman Bridge, no-one kept time because the only time that mattered was the time spent in the car with your friends. In my teenage years of running back and forth to the shore I owned three different 55 Chevy’s, a 1967 Firebird that over-heated a lot, and a 1967 GTO convertible among other star studded vehicles.

Then it was this long crazy road to get to the Atlantic City Expressway, once on the expressway you could really open it up. Even driving at high speeds the AC expressway to the Parkway seemed to take about two hours and the Parkway drive seemed even longer. The anticipation of cruising the Wildwood Boardwalk was tremendous, every time we hit the Wildwood boardwalk it was like a kid opening his gifts on Christmas morning, we could really let loose.

So when you exited the Parkway to head into Wildwood you had to travel this long two lane road that seemed like it was out in the boondocks. A lot of times we would make the trip to Wildwood in the middle of the night and that road seemed almost haunted. If you drove slow enough with your windows down, (As teenagers none of us ever owned a car with air conditioning so the windows were always down) you could hear the tall grass blowing in the breeze with the grass stems clacking off each other making an eerie sound. In between the tall grass sitting out in the swamps along route 147, what they called the causeway leading into North Wildwood was these old beat-up bungalow/huts/fishing shacks and homes. Grassy Sound was considered by many to be “a poor man’s shore resort.

Some of the run down shanties were almost ghetto-like while others appeared to be well maintained pretty cool looking summer homes. Almost all of them had these long run-down docks behind the house where apparently at one time there was a thriving waterway behind the houses and sometimes under the houses but there never seemed to be any water in the waterway in the years I traveled that road.

A little history check revealed that following the Jersey Shore’s great nor’easter of 1962, the storm of the century changed a lot of the shore’s topography, you might remember how Cape May had blocks of houses washed away that were never replaced. Cape May lost in some cases up to a half mile of beach-front property taking dozens if not hundreds of structures.

The state of New Jersey at that time decided to discourage people from living or buying a structure in Grassy Sound. The state also passed a law forbidding homeowners along the 147 causeway known as “Grassy Sound” to make even minor repairs and forbidding the residents from making any up-grades to the property or docks. (How strange was that?)

After nearly 30 years of neglect by the homeowners under state rule, the state of New Jersey in 1990 declared the area “Unfit for human habitation.” Although many of the shacks were demolished in the early 1990’s many of the homeowners vowed to stay in their homes.

A little research revealed that the main sticking point for the state was that none of the structures ever had flush toilets. Although empting the waste into the waterway, which ran beneath the floorboards of the house’s had long been banned, many of the residents used small portable toilets transporting the human waste to communal holding tanks which were then drained by the municipality.

For the homeowners that vowed to stay in their homes in the early 1990’s got a boost when the State Department of Transportation built a new bridge along the 147 causeway, the new road project helped bring attention to the sewage issue for the remaining homeowners.

The original two lane-roadway was tight with very little or no shoulder and no real land-marks telling us how close we were to Wildwood. The only real landmark on the road came at the end of the road when you crossed what most people called the “Tickle-bridge.” The tickle bridge was this bridge about one hundred yards long, it seem longer than that but was in all likely-hood shorter because you always slowed down to cross the bridge and listen to the boards as your tires rumbled a crossed them. The bridge surface was what looked like two-inch-by-eight-inch wooden boards and almost all of them were mounted very loose so they made this rumble sound when crossing.

Minutes after crossing the tickle bridge the road rolled to the right and the first brightly-lit landmark telling you that you were in North Wildwood was Zaberer’s Restaurant. Zaberer’s was always well lit and the lines to get in on most nights wrapped around the parking lot.

Eddie Zaberer opened his restaurant in 1955 and at its peak the North Wildwood Landmark seated more than 3,000 people on a good hot, summer-weekend night. Some of the star studded dinners over the years included Richard Nixon, Bo Derek, Liberace, Bobby Vinton, Muhammad Ali, Bill Bradley and John Facenda just to name a few.

Zaberer sold the restaurant in 1987 to a man from New York and just four years later the restaurant was foreclosed on. The building burned down in the early 1990’s bringing a permanent end to the Wildwood landmark.

Once the restaurant came into view you knew you were in, you made it, and you were minutes away from the best night of your life.

Looking back, the journey to Wildwood on all those summer nights, the time spent in the car with no cell phones and four or five friends beat the hell out of the actual visit to the boardwalk. Some nights we would stay overnight, not in a hotel but slept in the car, or on the beach, but in most visits we didn’t sleep at all, it was good to be young.

The most exciting part of the Wildwood experience throughout those years was the drive along Grassy Sound, there’s nothing like the anticipation of spending the night on the boardwalk when you’re a teenager.

The Grassy Sound highway has long been replaced by a modern day four-lane high-speed concrete highway, most of it is a bridge crossing over the mostly demolished houses and docks that once provided that comfort ride.

There’s was nothing like the drive along Grassy Sound.

Memories are a wonderful thing!

If you remember Grassy Sound, enjoy the photos I took in the summer of 1992,

Along with a few memories from Zaberer’s Restaurant.