‘You lose the history’

The wrecking ball is likely coming for 2529 Asbury Ave. in Ocean City, a 957-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bathroom postwar Cape Cod that’s been in the Smith family for 69 years. The Smiths know demolition is nearly inevitable, but they aren’t happy about it.

“I’m hopeful somebody would keep it as is, but I think it will probably be torn down,” said David S. Smith, of Summit, N.J., a retired investment banker whose parents bought the house in the 1950s.

There are currently 1,400 homes over 100 years old in Ocean City, and in 2024, 137 homes were demolished. Though specific details aren’t available about the age or condition of those razed houses, it is fair to say many were older and capable of being restored, said Bill Merritt, president and cofounder of Friends of OCNJ History & Culture, a group dedicated to embracing the rich, historic culture of Ocean City.

“It’s economic driven, but also regulation driven,” he said. “Ocean City has long been a real estate developer driven place.”

Over the years, R-2 zoning, which permits a mix of single-family and two-family dwellings, has driven up the number of duplexes.

“The economics of that are that a single homebuyer wanting to buy an older home and fix it up, absolutely cannot compete against a developer who is going to knock it down and build a duplex,” said Merritt.

The Smiths’ home went on the market in late October for $1.4 million. They instantly received many offers, mostly from developers.

Purchased in 1956 by Norman Sr. and Elizabeth Smith — affectionately known as Bole and Lib — for $13,500, the cottage was the summer gathering spot for the whole clan. That included their sons, Norman Jr., John, and David, and eventually four grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

After Bole and Lib died in 1994 and 1998 respectively, their son John moved into the home. When John died this past September, the family put the house on the market.

The house was typical for its time — it had a washing machine but no dryer, an outdoor shower in continuous use because there was only one shower inside the house, a grassy backyard, and an attic crammed with a tangle of sleeping children.

The cottage was small but the memories loom large.

“The attic had pull-down steps and a window where the breeze came in off the ocean,” recalled David, Bole and Lib’s son. “The oldest would get closest to the window, then the next oldest, and so on, because that’s where you got the most air. There were about four beds lined up and then you had mattresses on the floor.”

With the whole family together it was not uncommon to have up to 10 people sleeping up there, he said.

“My parents used to send me down when I was about 8 or 9 on the NJ Transit bus,” said the younger David Smith, one of Lib and Bole’s grandchildren, and nephew of David S. Smith. He’s a Realtor with Coldwell Banker who lives in Wallingford. “I thought riding the bus by myself was the coolest thing!”

Ocean City is where members of the Smith family formed lifelong friendships and forged their work ethic at their summer jobs. Lib and Boles’ oldest son, Norman Jr., met his wife of 61 years in Ocean City. The younger David Smith is their son.

All of the family members had typical summer jobs at the Shore, including beach chair rentals, waitressing at the College Grill, manning the ice cream truck, and lifeguarding.

David S. Smith won the 1968 South Jersey Lifeguard Championships in the doubles rowing event, an annual tradition that continues to this day. He was inducted into the Ocean City Beach Patrol Hall of Fame in 2004.

He recalls hanging out on the beach with Grace Kelly’s family, who lived nearby. “That whole area was really driven by the connection to the Kelly family and their connection to Ocean City,” he said.

But David S. Smith himself had connections to Shore royalty of sorts. His wife, Lynn, was elected Miss Ocean City Beach Patrol in 1967 and was on the cover of the book Images of America-Ocean City: 1950-1980 by Fred Miller.

Over the decades, the home’s backyard was always in use, as the site for cookouts and quoits, a game similar to horseshoes. Family members of every generation competed while dinner was cooking on the charcoal grill.

“The backyard of 2529 Asbury is still grass,” David S. Smith said. But at most of the nearby houses “the backyards are all stones.”

The smell of frying scrapple was the morning alarm clock — a scent that still brings back a flood of memories for the younger David, Bole and Lib’s grandson.

The Smiths witnessed the block transform dramatically over the years. Small cottages were razed and replaced with duplexes.

“The Jersey Shore has changed so much,” said grandson David. “Now you see all these giant houses.”

To help protect some of the town’s older homes, the city created a historic district in 1992, primarily between Third and Eighth Streets and Central and Ocean Avenues. That includes many homes with Victorian-era architecture, many built in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

To maintain the area’s historical integrity, the district is protected by local ordinances that require approval for demolition, new construction, or rehabilitation projects. Merritt’s group hopes to raise awareness of these and other older homes.

“When you knock down a house, you don’t just lose the house, but you lose the history,” he said.

Merritt’s house, for example, has been rumored to have been owned by the family of Grace Kelly’s boyfriend when they were teens. Merritt was recently greeted at his home by the man’s sister.

“We had this whole conversation of how her brother took Grace Kelly to the Lifeguard’s Ball, and she showed me the pictures she had,” he recalled. “When you knock these houses down, that connection to the past is severed.”

Merritt argues that the town loses its identity when these houses disappear.

While the Smiths have little say in who buys their home, they hope a single-family house will replace it, rather than a duplex, which brings more cars, people, and traffic.

“It hurts,” David S. Smith said. “We’ve had it for 69 years and there’s a lot of history.”