The Allenhurst Beach Club at 100: a century on the sand
The Georgian-revival clubhouse, rebuilt in 1925 after the original burned, turns a hundred this year
The Allenhurst Club, photographed by the Detroit Publishing Co. between 1900 and 1910 — one of the earliest social institutions built in the borough after its 1897 incorporation. — Detroit Publishing Co. / Library of Congress (public domain)
When the Allenhurst Beach Club opens for the 2026 season next month, it will do so on the hundredth anniversary of the current clubhouse — a low-slung Georgian-revival building of whitewashed stucco and green shutters that has become as much a symbol of Allenhurst as the borough seal itself.
The first clubhouse, 1898–1904
The original Beach Club opened in the summer of 1898, just months after the borough's incorporation. Contemporary accounts describe a wooden Queen Anne-style pavilion with a 300-foot boardwalk and separate bathing pavilions for men and women — the fashion of the era. That first building was destroyed in the boardwalk fire of August 1904, which ignited in a nearby bathhouse and consumed a half-mile of oceanfront in less than two hours.
Rebuilding, twice
The club rebuilt in 1906 in a simpler Shingle style, but that structure too was damaged — this time by the 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane. The present clubhouse, designed by the Asbury Park architectural firm of Fogarty & Hutton and completed in 1925, replaced an aging interim building. It survived Hurricane Sandy in 2012 with only minor damage, largely thanks to a dune-restoration project completed two years earlier.
Continuity in a changing shore
Unlike many Jersey Shore beach clubs that have been subdivided, rebuilt, or absorbed into municipal operations, the Allenhurst Beach Club has operated continuously as a members-and-guests club for 128 seasons. The clubhouse is listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.
"A hundred years is a long time for a wooden-framed building 200 feet from the ocean," said Borough Historian Daniel Mermelstein. "That it's still standing — and still in daily use — tells you something about how Allenhurst has taken care of what it has."
Eleanor Brinton covers Allenhurst history, borough government, and life along Corlies Avenue. A longtime Jersey Shore resident, she writes a weekly column for The Allenhurst Press.
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