For young residents of Hudson County, a trip down the shore is no day at the beach. It’s much more than that. For some it’s a rite of passage, for others, a time-honored tradition, and for all, a truly New Jersey experience. A couple of years ago, The New Yorker recognized this in a cartoon by Christopher Weyant. In the illustration a father and his daughter walk along water’s edge, the father says, “No, sweetie, we don’t go to the beach. We’re from New Jersey – we go to the shore.”
As the city heats up, young residents hastily put together plans for their tans.
Beach girls
Hoboken resident Kelly Zimmerman is a self-described “beach girl.” Her love is so strong that she and her friends were recently featured in the Lifetime Television reality series “Beach Girls,” which follows young women around the beach scene.
Zimmerman has spent every weekend of every summer at Belmar for the past seven years.
“I live for the Jersey Shore,” the Hoboken resident who grew up in Tom’s River said. “It’s only an hour ride to get away. It’s like a mini-vacation every weekend.”
Born in Jersey City, Zimmerman lived in Tom’s River for 13 years, where she became a sun and shore worshipper. She loves lying out and getting a tan, and said she practically lived on the beach while attending Tom’s River High School South.
She also enjoys the club scene in Belmar, and has danced on stage at the Surf Club every Sunday since 1982, when her mother first held her on stage as a baby.
But now, at the ripe old age of 25, the eternal beach girl was afraid that she was almost too old to spend her summer down the shore, where she estimates the average age of people who share houses to be about 23.
She quickly changed her mind after realizing that it just wouldn’t be summer without it.
“I think my friends and I will get a house in July because we feel lost without one,” she confessed.
Shore bet
In Hudson County, it seems that everyone’s got a plan to escape the city. After all, nobody wants to be the kid with the least exciting “how I spent my summer vacation” story.
Come fall, Joe Chesseri’s story should be a good one. This is his first summer sharing a beach house in Manasquan. And he seems to have gotten off to a good start. On his first day down three weeks ago, the partying started at 7 a.m.
Chesseri, 24, lives in Belleville and works in Jersey City. He is sharing a house with nine other people from Hoboken, New York, and Summit. They are each paying around $1,100 for the summer. That’s not a bad deal, as Chesseri describes it.
“Basically, for the money you spend on one vacation, you get to go on little mini-vacations all summer,” he said.
One of the things that Chesseri and Zimmerman both enjoy about being at the beach is the social aspect of it. “We’re fortunate to have a beach that’s so close,” Zimmerman said.
According to Zimmerman, that proximity leads to an overlap in summertime social scenes between Hoboken and some shore towns.
“I feel like every person I see here during the week I see there during the weekends,” Zimmerman said. “And these people are just acquaintances, people that I don’t plan on running into.”
Had his share
One fellow Hobokenite Zimmerman won’t have to worry about running into is Kris Soffel. Soffel has spent the past couple of summers far away from Belmar.
“I go to places like Aruba instead, for a week,” said Soffel, who is originally from Oradell. “It costs more than a summer down the shore, but it’s 100 percent worth it.”
At 30, he says he has had his share of New Jersey beach shares. When he was 24 and 25, Soffel shared beach houses in Manasquan with friends from home. Although there were officially 7 people on the lease, the number of people sleeping in the house was a different story.
“On any given weekend I would say there were 20 people in the house,” Soffel said. “People slept anywhere there was space -on the floor, on a couch, on a bed. If a room had two twin beds, there would be people sleeping in between the beds. It was mayhem,” he recalled.
Soffel said the main problem was all the guests who’d crash every weekend at the house.
“They would bring a thirty-pack and they thought they were good for the weekend,” he complained. And he said that though they didn’t contribute to the rent, the guests definitely contributed to the house’s messy condition. “By the end of the weekend there were literally hundreds of empty beer cans and cartons of cigarette butts all over the house. Sometimes there would be left-over barbeque lying around – if we actually decided to cook something one day.”
But there were good times along with the bad.
“It was definitely fun,” he said. “Obviously, I like hanging out at the beach with my friends and going out to the bars, getting drunk and meeting people, but because of the crowd and the constant mess it got old real fast.” Soffel said that he and his friends now rent a nice house in Long Beach Island one week out of the year.
At-home escape
With so many Hudson County residents escaping the city, those left spending their summers on the tar beach here at home can’t really complain.
Overcrowded bars become more bearable, tables open up at constantly booked-up restaurants, and a walk down Washington Street requires a lot less zig-zagging.
Hoboken resident Robert Darrish is one person who does not mind being stuck in the city during the summer. “Summer in Hoboken is one of my favorite times,” said Darrish. “Because no one’s here.”
Comments on this piece can be sent to mfriedman@hudsonreporter.com