The Rise and Fall and Rise of Allen Road Beach

The Allen Road beach on the bay in Berkeley Shores is getting a makeover – again.

It’s a place that once looked like the meadows north and south of that bayside community. But when the growth genie jumped out of the bottle in Ocean County with the opening of the Garden State Parkway, it soon became apparent that there was not enough waterfront property to fill the needs of the masses suddenly within driving distance of paradise.

So out came the big timber mats and the clamshell dredges. The big shovels moved the mats out onto the meadows and drove up on them, operators secure that the heavy rigs would not sink into the mushy meadows. They’d scoop a chunk of lagoon out of the wetlands, pile the dredge spoil up on the banks creating new building lots, jockey another mat into position, and repeat the operation.

That’s what happened at Berkeley Shores, and lots of other places too. The lots went like hot cakes. Small one-story homes sprang up on them and sold for a few thousand dollars. They built them, and they came.

The Allen Road beach was created from some of the dredge spoil from the creation of the lagoons and lots. Like today’s retirement communities, nearly every one of those lagoon communities had a clubhouse. Lot and homebuyers were told they could use the clubhouse gratis, at least until all the lots were sold, and then they were on their own.

The clubhouse at Berkeley Shores was a showplace by comparison with those at Sunrise Beach, Forked River Beach, etc. It had a nautical design, with a concrete bow sticking out into the water. The deck offered lots of room for transplants from North Jersey to sun and relax. Or they could just dry off in the sun. After all, there were two bayfront swimming pools, in case the bay dried up.

The one-story building swept out toward the bay. Huge tinted glass windows gave protected panoramic views of the bay and the Barnegat peninsula. Social gatherings took place in the expansive building.

The beach was popular with new homeowners and others who knew about it. Economic tides changed in Berkeley Shores, with development surging, then slowing to a stop. It seems to me there were three major phases of that development. The first was of the small inexpensive homes on lagoon lots.  Then came homes a little bigger and town houses. The last involved multi-million dollar mansions on the last lagoons to be developed, on the north edge of the community.

Vandals began taking the clubhouse apart, piece by piece, between the first and second waves of development. The swimming pools were abandoned, the expensive glass windows shattered, and the bay began undermining the deck of the building. My recollection is that James E. Johnson was called in to remove what was left. Some of the concrete wound up on the point across the cove from the clubhouse, where today it is used as the foundation for a grand bayfront house.

The late Mayor Ken Leake got involved in a big flap over a mountain of dirt there too. There’s only one way in and out of the lagoons in the original part of Berkeley Shores, and the mouth of that key lagoon had shoaled nearly shut.

Leake led the charge to get the channel dredged. His political foes claimed he was in the pocket of the then-developer because the builder was to get the wonderful bay bottom dredged from the fouled lagoon. I covered lots of fights where people battled against dredge spoil dumping. This was the first time the foul-smelling bay bottom was regarded as a treasure.

Leake was no dope. The destination for the dredge spoil swiftly shifted to the Allen Road beach. Mountains of the stuff were dredged up there. Somebody built a duck blind atop what I called  Mount Leake. Gradually the mountain has been massaged, moved, and reshaped. It’s still a far cry from the way the beach was, which is a far cry from the way it was before Berkeley Shores was gouged out of the meadows.

When the beach was at its prime, it was one of the most popular crabbing spots on Barnegat Bay. Crabbers armed with 25 or 50-foot long haul seines would make a few pulls through water off the beach and harvest a bushel or two of crabs. Big ones. Others would tie fish heads or chicken parts to strings, attach them to long poles, sink the poles in the bay bottom, and wander from pole to pole, netting crabs.

Across the cove, the banks of the undeveloped lagoons were busy with people baiting, throwing, and retrieving crab traps or hand lines. The Berkeley cops would ticket those who parked along Bayview Avenue, or the road that ran parallel to it, an entertainment that last only one summer, if I recall correctly. I suspect my ticket blitz story in the Trenton Times hastened the reform.

The dirt roads in that end of the development were so heavily traveled that they were pocked with deep holes filled with water. It was difficult to drive there without squashing an endless parade of toads. By summer’s end, that area looked like a landfill, and smelled worse than one.

When the regional sewer network came to came to the county, Allen Road was picked as the route for the discharge line for the Ocean County Utilities Authority’s central plant off Hickory Lane in Bayville. The line is buried under the road, dips under the bay, crosses under the Barnegat Peninsula, and extends far out to sea off South Seaside Park, carrying the liquid end product of the OCUA’s waste treatment operation.

Things are looking up at the Allen Road beach, although I’d still like to have a conversation with those who decided a lot of rocks would do the bay bottom some good.  So much for using seines for crabs, or anything else.

Lots of work has been done to reshape Mount Leake and try to stabilize the Amherst Beach inlet. A nice boardwalk offers a chance to enjoy the views that once brought so many to the clubhouse. Beach grass has been planted. There’s more to do.

 The Berkeley Shores Homeowners Civic Association and anyone who wants to help out, will plant salt marsh seedlings and install biologs to stabilize the shoreline starting at 9 a.m. on  April 30 and May 1.  Biologs were used successfully at Long Point in Island Heights several years ago to control the erosion that claimed the bathing beach on the north shore of the Toms River. They stabilize the shoreline while natural plants grow in the area they protect. The biologs eventually biodegrade, but not before the plants are well established.

Whether they work at Allen Road or not, it’s a lovely spot again, getting more lovely. Bayview Avenue is one of the most beautiful stretches of highway anywhere in Ocean County, and will stay that way because of the purchase of vast stretches of meadows and uplands on both sides of the road by Ocean County and its the land preservation partners. The Allen Road beach is a stop worth making – again.