A Brief History of the Ocean Grove Homeowners Association

The Ocean Grove Home Owners Association was first organized in 1953, and was incorporated in 1987.

 

Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, Ocean Grove experienced dramatic and wrenching change brought on by a combination of external and structural factors. American society became increasingly secularized after World War I, reducing the appeal of a religious resort like Ocean Grove. The completion of the Garden State Parkway, in 1957, made New Jersey's seaside resorts more widely accessible to greater numbers of the population of the New York metropolitan area. Although Ocean Grove and Asbury Park lobbied for the completion of the Parkway, they neglected to secure a local route that would provide a direct connection to the Parkway. As a result, many vacationers bypassed the area for more accessible communities to the south. Finally, and ironically, the addition of Ocean Grove to the National Register of Historic Places, in 1976, and the first attempts at renovation guidelines, made it more difficult and expensive to repair and renovate the town's Victorian structures. By the late 1970s, Ocean Grove was a collection of decaying houses and hotels. The challenges to its continued viability were multiplied by the accelerating de-institutionalization of mental patients who had formerly been housed in state institutions. Ocean Grove's large stock of nearly empty hotels and boarding houses made it a favored destination of state agencies charged with finding housing for the newly discharged residents of state homes and hospitals. Because landlords were paid on a per capita basis to house the deinstitutionalized, many landlords strove to house as many persons as possible, leading to dangerous and unhygienic conditions at many former hotels and boarding houses in Ocean Grove.

 

By the early 1980s, Ocean Grove faced what could be fairly described as an existential challenge to its continuing viability and quality of life. In response to the challenge, the Ocean Grove Home Owners Association organized an aggressive, disciplined and well-planned attack on the issues facing Ocean Grove.

 

The OGHOA began by gaining access to local government by securing the appointment of several of its members to major township committees, and supporting other members to successfully run for elected office. By 1985, the mayor, the chief of police and more than half of the members of the Township Committee were residents of Ocean Grove and members of the OGHOA. The OGHOA capitalized on its roots as a social organization to generate goodwill by organizing monthly town meetings, community breakfasts and holiday celebrations. Key to its impact was the development of strong working relationships with local and state government officials through regular meetings, support of candidates and persistent lobbying. The OGHOA made visible its growing influence in Neptune Township by orchestrating rapid and highly visible physical improvements to the Ocean Grove landscape, including street repairs, additional street lighting and decorative plantings in prominent locations. In addition, the OGHOA secured the removal of benches from Main Avenue in order to discourage vagrants and the deinstitutionalized from sleeping in public.

 

OGHOA was the driving force in addressing the issues created by the large number of deinstitutionalized. OGHOA took the position that clustering large numbers of former mental patients within a small geographic area that lacked the infrastructure and social services needed to serve such a population was in fact a disservice to the deinstitutionalized and an unfair burden on Ocean Grove. The Association argued that warehousing former mental patients in substandard and overcrowded boarding houses was shortsighted and cruel.

 

By focusing public attention on the housing conditions in which the deinstitutionalized lived, the OGHOA forced the closure of the four largest and most unsafe rooming houses. The OGHOA followed up by lobbying for passage of a bill that transferred licensing and regulation of boarding and rooming houses to local governments. The bill was passed in 1993, and Herb Herbst, then president of the OGHOA, became the first chairman of the Neptune Township Rooming and Boarding House Commission.

 

Throughout its existence, the OGHOA has focused on improving and maintaining property values in Ocean Grove. To that end, the OGHOA leveraged the designation of Ocean Grove as a historic site to encourage Neptune Township to create an Architectural Review Board to monitor all restoration and new construction within Ocean Grove. The board, which was created in 1984, is now known as the Historic Preservation Commission, and it is a key factor in maintaining the architectural integrity of Ocean Grove. In addition, the OGHOA formulated a detailed proposal for a new master plan for Ocean Grove designed to protect the historic character of the town by maintaining lot sizes, limiting the height of structures and rezoning the entire town, except for Main Avenue, for single family homes. The plan formulated by the OGHOA was adopted as part of the Neptune Township Master Plan in 1990.

 

Today, the OGHOA continues to focus on what matters most to the residents of Ocean Grove: Maintaining property values; improving the quality of life and protecting the historic architectural legacy of Ocean Grove.

 

 

The unique seashore community of Ocean Grove was founded in 1869 by members of the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness. "Camp meeting" was a religious and social gathering originating on the American frontier at the turn of the eighteenth century. The great camp meeting in 1801, at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, sparked a religious revival along the western frontier. Cane Ridge was an outgrowth of the Second Great Revival, and a manifestation of the doctrine of "perfection" or "entire sanctification" advanced by John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism. Wesley's idea of sanctification or perfection was that an individual could live in an unbroken and conscious dependence upon God, and thereby live in a state in which his soul was fully prepared for eternal existence.

 

The early Methodists, including Wesley and George Whitefield, used outdoor venues for preaching and sacramental services. The founders of Ocean Grove wished to recreate the conditions and benefits of the secluded and largely outdoor camp meetings of the western frontier on the more densely populated East Coast. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, dozens of camp meetings were formed in the United States. Ocean Grove is one of the oldest holiness camp meetings in the United States.

 

The site of what became Ocean Grove was identified by the Rev. William B. Osborn, a Methodist pastor from nearby Farmingdale. In July 1869, Rev. Osborn, together with Rev. Elwood H. Stokes, Rev. J.H. Stockton, Rev. George Hughes, Orville Howland, Rev. J.R. Andrews, Gardiner Howland, Joseph Hillman, Rev. J.H. Thornley, Rev. B.M. Adams and John Martin, together with their families, pitched tents in a clearing near what is now Wesley Lake. On the evening of July 31, 19 persons attended a prayer meeting organized by the wife of Rev. Thornley. To this day, July 31 is commemorated in Ocean Grove as Founders' Day, and the names of many of the founders of Ocean Grove, and of Methodism, are commemorated in the names of streets and buildings in Ocean Grove.

 

Ocean Grove grew rapidly from an assemblage of simple tents at its founding to a seaside resort where all Christians were welcome to come and seek, in the words of the mission statement of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, "opportunities for spiritual birth, growth and renewal through worship, education, cultural and recreational activities in a Christian seaside setting". The first of 1,900 lots, each measuring 30' by 60', were laid out and leased for 99 years, and the first permanent homes were built by 1870. By 1872, there were 300 permanent cottages. Growth accelerated after the New Jersey Southern Railroad extended its track from Long Branch to Ocean Grove in 1875. By 1877, an estimated 300,000 people annually visited Ocean Grove. The period of Ocean Grove's most intense growth coincided with the late Victorian era, and saw the construction of many homes in a wide range of Victorian styles. Most of those homes remain today, and are the foundation of Ocean Grove's unique position in the history of American architecture and design. In 1975, Ocean Grove was placed on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places; and in 1976, Ocean Grove was placed on the National Register of Historic Places as an exemplar of a Victorian planned community.

 

On March 3, 1870, the State of New Jersey granted a charter to the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Although the Camp Meeting Association had no official ties with the Methodist Church, the Methodist Church did encourage the Camp Meeting Association as a means to encourage the spread of Methodism. The charter gave the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association the authority to construct and operate utilities, and to appoint "peace officers" to enforce any rule or regulation enacted by the trustees of the Association "for the preservation of peace and good order". Among the rules enacted by the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association were ordinances prohibiting the sale of alcohol and tobacco.

 

Ocean Grove grew and thrived through the remainder of the nineteenth, and the first six decades of the twentieth century, as a Christian and family-oriented counterpart to Asbury Park and Long Branch to the north and Atlantic City to the south. Thousands came each summer to the places of worship and to the beaches, tents, cottages, hotels and boarding houses to seek respite from the increasingly frenetic pace of everyday life, and to strive toward Wesley's model of holiness and perfection. In 1894, the Great Auditorium was constructed at the western terminus of Ocean Pathway. The Great Auditorium seats nearly 7,000 people, and is the site of worship services, as well as musical programs. Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan and Billy Sunday all spoke at the Great Auditorium. Ocean Grove was distinguished for its strict adherence to the ideal of Sunday as a day of rest. From sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, carriages, and later, automobiles, were banished from Ocean Grove; the beach was closed on Sunday, as were all stores, except for the pharmacy.

 

The completion of the Garden State Parkway in 1957 accelerated the transition from travel by rail to travel by private automobile, and enabled many vacationers to bypass older, more congested resorts for the less crowded beaches and less expensive accommodations of southern Monmouth County and Ocean County. The transition from travel by train to travel by car expanded vacation options for many Americans. They could venture farther afield in search of new diversions. The quiet and seclusion and religious orientation of Ocean Grove lost its appeal for younger generations of East Coast vacationers.

 

Changing tastes, and the resistance of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association to any liberalization of its customs and ordinances, made Ocean Grove less attractive to ever-larger numbers of vacationers; and, beginning in the late 1960s, Ocean Grove declined as a vacation destination. The business of hotels and boarding houses dwindled, and many came to be occupied by transients. This trend intensified as the state closed homes and hospitals for the mentally ill, and many former in-patients came to Ocean Grove, with its large stock of single-occupancy rooms. By the mid-1980s, Ocean Grove appeared to be in a near-terminal decline.

 

Decline, however, was not to be the fate of Ocean Grove. Beginning in the late 1980s, Ocean Grove was rediscovered as a desirable place for a vacation home. The beach remained a singular attraction; housing was affordable, and the relative nearness of Ocean Grove to major population centers was again an attraction.

 

A court decision in 1979 had stripped the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association of its police powers, and this led to a less restrictive atmosphere overall. New residents purchased and meticulously restored the old homes; many hotels and boarding houses were converted to condominiums; and new businesses were opened. A disciplined effort by a group of creative and determined homeowners succeeded in closing dilapidated and unsafe boarding houses and apartments, greatly improving the quality of life in Ocean Grove. A major renovation of the Main Avenue streetscape added new lighting and widened the sidewalks in the Main Avenue shopping area. By 2009, the estimated median value of a home in Ocean Grove was $304,672.00.

 

Today, Ocean Grove is again a thriving seaside community, with a diverse population of seasonal and year-round residents. The beach remains a major attraction, but residents and visitors can also enjoy the musical programming and worship services at the Great Auditorium and the boardwalk pavilion. The Fourth of July parade and the Founders' Day celebration are highlights of the summer season. A children's playground; shuffleboard and bocce courts, as well as a hard surface tennis court are located adjacent to Fletcher Lake at the south end of Ocean Grove. Three Har-Tru tennis courts are located at the Ocean Grove Tennis Center on Inskip Avenue. The oceanfront boardwalk is busy with walkers and joggers all year long.

 

 

 

TITLE    NAME    TERM ENDS

President   Denis McCarthy July 2012

Vice President   Eileen Kean July 2012

Secretary   Gale Wyzykowski July 2012

Treasurer   Ann Horan July 2012

Trustee   Kennedy Buckley July 2014

Trustee   Barbara Burns July 2013

Trustee   Joan Caputo July 2015

Trustee   Leonard Pugliese July 2012

Trustee   Joan Venezia July 2015

President   Emeritus Francis Paladino

 

 

Dear Members, Neighbors and Friends:

Welcome to OGHOA.org, the website of the Ocean Grove Home Owners Association. Careful thought and a lot of hard work went into the creation and implementation of this tool by our Website Committee.

 

With OGHOA.org, you will be able to access the by-laws of the Association; an archive of minutes of membership meetings; a list of the current officers and trustees; and information about the history of Ocean Grove and the Association.

 

The site incorporates a search function that enables members to check the status of their membership, as well as a sign up form where members can sign up to receive news and information by e-mail. A “Contact” button makes it possible for the Association to gather your ideas, concerns and questions in a central location and to respond directly to you.

OGHOA.org will also have a page dedicated to current news affecting Ocean Grove and Neptune Township, and the work of the Association and its various committees.

 

We hope you will find OGHOA.org informative and user friendly, and we welcome your comments and suggestions.

 

Denis McCarthy, President

Ocean Grove Home Owners Association