By Tom Lavecchia | For more than a century, Long Branch has been chasing a version of itself it lost. The Elbie, breaking ground now on Broadway, is the latest—and perhaps most deliberate—attempt to finish that comeback.
There is a version of Long Branch that most New Jerseyans have never seen. Not the Long Branch of beach tags and boardwalk fries, but the Long Branch that once drew presidents. Ulysses Grant summered here. So did James Garfield, Chester Arthur, and seven other commanders-in-chief. At its peak in the late 1800s, Long Branch was the most glamorous resort destination on the entire East Coast—a place where the Gilded Age came to exhale.
Then came the casinos, the decline, the fires, the slow unraveling of a city that couldn’t quite figure out what it wanted to be next. Asbury Park—Long Branch’s scrappier neighbor to the south—eventually got the revival story, the record stores, the national press coverage. Long Branch kept rebuilding, block by block, without ever getting full credit for it.
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