When the ocean came ashore: Allenhurst and the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944
An unnamed September storm redrew the Jersey Shore — and changed how Allenhurst built
Spier Avenue, general view of the block looking northwest. Documented for the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS NJ-1005) — the same residential blocks that bore the brunt of the 1944 hurricane. — David L. Ames, photographer / Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress (public domain)
On the night of September 14, 1944, a Category 3 hurricane — unnamed, because the practice of naming Atlantic storms wouldn't begin for another nine years — made its closest approach to the New Jersey coast. Though the eye remained offshore, Allenhurst saw sustained winds over 75 mph and a storm tide estimated at more than eight feet above mean sea level.
What Allenhurst lost
The Borough's beachfront was unrecognizable by dawn. The 1906 boardwalk — a half-mile of oak planking rebuilt after the 1904 fire — was reduced to pilings and splinters scattered as far inland as Ocean Avenue. Seventeen homes along Norwood and Ocean Avenues suffered structural damage; four were condemned. The rebuilt Beach Club clubhouse held, but its bathhouses and pier did not. Miraculously, no Allenhurst resident was killed.
The ordinance that followed
By spring of 1945, the Borough Council had enacted one of the strictest coastal building ordinances in New Jersey. New oceanfront construction was required to sit on reinforced-concrete piers a minimum of two feet above projected flood elevation. Wooden decks had to be designed to break away under surge loads. The boardwalk itself was rebuilt narrower, closer to the dune, and engineered to be sacrificed without taking the dune with it.
Those 1945 rules, amended but never substantially weakened, are the direct ancestors of the construction standards that helped Allenhurst come through Hurricane Sandy in 2012 with less structural damage than any comparable borough on the North Jersey coast.
The memorial
A small bronze plaque at the entrance to the Beach Club, installed in 1994 on the storm's 50th anniversary, reads: "The sea took what was built; we rebuilt what it took. September 14, 1944."
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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