The Bluffs
Bay Head, New Jersey

~ The Story Of A Hotel At The Jersey Shore ~

by Francine LaVance Robertshaw

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Foreword
by Missy Iams Kittredge

A few years ago, just after Christmas, I was flying from Boston to Philadelphia. It was a cloudy day and threatening snow; the flight, having followed the coastline south, turned in low over the coast of New Jersey on its final leg. Glued to my small windowpane, I could see Bay Head in all its winter grays and browns, the slender beach stretching away in both directions. There was 16 Mount Street (home) and a block away, The Bluffs. I noticed the empty streets, the water tower, Twilight Lake, Barnegat Bay, and the Yacht Club. What a nostalgic trip—all from the view of a high-flying seagull.

Growing up in Bay Head in the late 1940s and ’50s was pretty boring at the time, summers excepted. Summers were glorious for kids since we lived on the beach, swimming like fish as often as we liked, tromping sand into the house at lunchtime for something to eat, and going to sleep at night to the unceasing music of the ocean. Our parents knew we swam at the guarded beaches and never worried about us (I think). I remember hot streets, quiet in the sun, cool porches, and so little traffic (except on Sundays when the "furriners" headed back to wherever they came from). The Lorraine Theater was open, where ten cents got you a seat for what we now call "the golden oldies." In the really good old days, I was told, the town folk used to put on shows, sort of vaudeville-style (The Bay Head Follies?), and I think I remember the hard wooden seats used for the servants. I’m sure I sat in them many a time.

Winters were different. It almost never snowed, the beach was cold and blustery, the shingled houses empty and unfriendly, and the streets deserted. Closed for the winter, the old Bluffs was huge and hulking, but just about the only place for kids to play. Kathy Johnson (the daughter of the owner of The Bluffs) was my closest friend in those years. Playing endless games as children do, we often ran around the elegant porte-cochere, adjacent to East Avenue across from the Bachelors’ Quarters, and around the beachside porches and the North and South "Hole" Cottages. (I know the name is "Hall," but a lifetime of saying "Hole" is not easily effaced.) We got inside the main building (have no idea how) and explored the dining room and reception area. I remember the majestic, dark wooden staircase with hand-polished banisters on sturdy balusters and grand, square newel-posts at each landing. I believe there was a big stained glass window behind the first landing.

Where the parking lot of modern times was located, there was a grassy enclosure formed by a semicircular driveway surrounded by a fine privet hedge. I imagine one would take a left at the Bachelors’ Quarters, turning into the roofed front stairs on the left, unload your passengers, and then go around the grassy enclosure to exit back onto East Avenue, almost in front of the old barber shop on the corner of East and Chadwick. For some reason, this grassy enclosure was the site of many of our games, maybe because it was fairly hidden from the street. Or maybe children just like enclosures.

The bathhouses—behind which Mr. Johnson had his dog kennels—had a nice grassy enclosure too, and we spent endless hours playing in and around them. I even remember a game of spin-the-bottle! (I think this last memory must be somewhat later.) There was a little path between the Johnsons’ house and the bathhouse building going back to the kennels. This was my shortcut home after spending as much time at Kathy’s house as possible. She had her supper at six, and at my house, supper wasn’t served until seven—the worst hour of the day. I always tried to hide upstairs at the Johnsons’, reading comic books from their immense pile, and Mr. Johnson would demand that Mrs. Johnson send me home. By that time, it was dark and cold. And spooky. But home I went. (Mrs. Johnson was my godmother, and I adored her.)

With summer, the hotel came to life, looking just like one of Dick LaBonte’s paintings. The visitors with children could unload them at mealtimes, with their nannies, in the Children’s Dining Room overlooking East Avenue. (No beach views wasted on the kiddies.) In fact, Mrs. Johnson often did the same with her own. (No nannies needed since everybody in the hotel knew the Johnson children.) One of my greatest treats was to have dinner in the Children’s Dining Room with Kathy. I really had to cadge sometimes to get invited, but I just loved it. The late sunlight coming through the tall open windows would brighten the room up to its high ceilings as we sat at one of the big, round wooden tables being waited on by the white-jacketed Negro waiter.

Late in the summer, a magician would come to give a magic show for the children in the ballroom. Folding chairs were lined up on the dance floor, and the magician would amaze us with his legerdemain from the stage. A simple trick was to make a knot in a short piece of rope, pull both ends, and the knot would magically disappear. He did this a couple of times and then asked one of the children to come up and imitate him with another piece of rope. Of course, when the child pulled the ends of his knotted rope, the knot simply tightened into a ball, while the magician’s rope dangled knotless from his hand. I observed this with squinted eyes, thinking that the kid was pretty gullible, and lo, I was the next one to try my hand at the disappearing knot trick. I knew perfectly well that it was a matter of following his hand movements exactly and my knot, too, would melt away. No mirror-image wrong directions were going to entrap me! I eyeballed his every movement and got a tight knot three times in a row. Smart-ass kids, he chewed them up and spat them out for breakfast!

During all of that time, of course, the bar was as far from me as a distant planet. And about as interesting. Sometimes, when walking up the narrow cement walk to The Bluffs beach, through the breezeless summer heat trapped by the Stockton house’s old green picket fence and the gray shingled wall of The Bluffs Annex, I would get a whiff of that inimitable bar smell of recycled boozy breath and cigarettes from the open windows. Even when I was interested in getting into bars (well before my twenty-first birthday but well into a social whirl which included fooling bartenders anywhere possible that I was twenty-one and entitled to buy a drink), there wasn’t a prayer of fooling any bartenders at The Bluffs.

On June 2, 1962, ten days before my twenty-first birthday (if you’re arithmetically inclined, you can deduce my age) I was married to Tylor Kittredge at 16 Mount Street. A ceremonial departure, as these things are done, was carried out, and we ran down the steps to the (rented) Rolls Royce before our assembled guests on the front porch. (One of the drunken ushers tried to give the groom a ceremonial kick in the pants but missed and fell down the steps as we pulled away in our Rolls. Non-plussed, he found that a good moment to relieve himself in the gutter.) And where did we go in our beautiful Rolls Royce? Not to The Bluffs. Wouldn’t let us in. Mr. Johnson was not about to lose his liquor license, not even for Missy Iams Kittredge on her wedding day, ten days before turning twenty-one. So we went, as usual, to The Beacon.

Other than brief stays in town after that, with living in New York and Colorado, and finishing college and having babies, and getting Tylor off to Vietnam (and back again in one piece), and moving to Panama, there never seemed time to enjoy the good life as seen from the friendly comfort of The Bluffs Bar. But I certainly lived with enough people who did and share their nostalgia. I join them all in lamenting the loss of our loved Bay Head landmark, as intrinsic a part of our memories as the sea.

Does anyone remember this little ditty? Somehow I suspect it was not sung at the Lorraine Theater in those aforementioned good old days. But it lends itself to being sung while hoofing a lively buck and wing, straw boater and walking stick recommended:

Take… Your… Hats off to Bay Head and fill up your glass,
For old Bay Head has something that none can surpass.
The girls are better.
The parties are wetter.
The songs are louder,
It is said.
We buy our beer by the keg,
We buy our gin by the case,
Next to heaven I’d rather be no other place.
From the Yacht Club star to the Bea… con… Bar,
Take your hats off to Old Bay Head!

(Sweeping bows with boater in hand to wild applause.)
(See Appendix P for sheet music.)

With grand affection for Francine for doing the noble work of committing many of our memories to paper and bringing them to a world ignorant of a small piece of heaven on the Jersey Shore, I entrust the Reader to a happy couple of hours returning to or just getting to know The Bluffs in our Old Bay Head.

—Missy Iams Kittredge
Las Cumbres, Panama
Spring, 2006