Lucky Town

Bruce Springsteen plays Santa to his much-loved, if dumpy, adopted hometown: Asbury Park, N.J.

ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Sandy, the aurora is rising behind us

This pier lights our carnival life forever

Oh, love me tonight and I promise

I'll love you forever.- From "4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)," by Bruce Springsteen

ASBURY PARK, N.J. - This is the story of a love affair of sorts between a rock legend and this gritty beach town of 17,000, some 40 miles south of New York.

Yet sometimes, as on this overcast morning just before Christmas, you wonder what the rocker, Bruce Springsteen, sees in the old girl.

Oh, the main drag of Cookman Avenue breathes new life after a decades-long decline, with its eclectic restaurants and shops, including Wish You Were Here, an "espresso bar, gelateria and resort boutique." But walk a few blocks up to Ocean Avenue and it might as well be Dresden-by-the-Sea.

Urban blight scars the landscape as far as the eye can see. Boarded-up buildings and empty, graffiti-covered pizza joints line a desolate, wind-swept boardwalk, where not even the faintest echoes of the old carnival life can be heard. All the way down to Convention Hall, the once-stately venue where Janis Joplin, the Stones, the Doors and the Who played, trash litters the sidewalks and the only people you pass are wild-eyed drifters.

Over the years, after the race riots of 1970 precipitated its steady decline, lots of people wrote off Asbury Park. But not Bruce Springsteen.

By all accounts, Springsteen remained fiercely loyal to the town that helped forge so much of his identity, and his music. He grew up in nearby Freehold and lives in Rumson, a 15-minute drive away. But he's always called Asbury Park his adopted hometown.

It's where he lived for years, where he met most of his E Street Band members, where he jammed in clubs like the Upstage and the legendary Stone Pony and first tasted fame. It's memorialized on his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, and it's the place that moved him to pen a plaintive song about the Fourth of July to "Sandy."

Bruce loved the town from the very beginning, even when he was broke and living in a dingy apartment above a beauty salon in the 1970s. And the town loved him right back, even as he soared to the big-time as one of rock 'n' roll's supernovas.

"We treat him like he's another guy," says Lynda Young, events manager for a local restaurant and nightclub, Harry's Roadhouse, where Springsteen frequently stops for a burger and beer. "He loves Asbury Park. When he walks in the door, he just gleams."