Flickr Favourites #2

originally uploaded by Sister72.

It's not quite up there with Christmas, but still, I love Easter, and apparently they love Easter in Asbury Park, NJ as well.

Asbury Park is one of my favourite places on earth. A couple years ago, my parents and I decided to drop off there on our way from Washington D.C. to Philadelphia as a kind of a joke: my Bruce Springsteen-fixation was only starting up then and so as a joke (because he named an album after the place) I said, "why don't we go to Asbury?". When we got there, we were in for a surprise - since the early 2000s, they've started up this whole regeneration-project around that area, but when we got to Asbury Park in May 2006, it was still all urban decay, demolished buildings and faded seaside glamour. When we returned in July 2006, they'd done some painting, cleared up the scrap metal from the Building C-8 demolishment and there was a new mini-golfcourse on the Boardwalk, but still. In the 1920s, it was one of the most popular seaside resorts, but after the Great Depression and World War II, it never quite recovered.

Sister72 is one of my other Flickr-favourites, she lives around the Asbury Park-area, and frequently posts photos of life around Monmouth County, NJ. It's great to see little snippets of every-day life of such a special place. There's a lot of history to Asbury Park (this is one of my favourite sites about the town), and it's great to read people's own histories of the place in the comments to Sister72's photos.

To end this post (I could go on and on), a video by EarlyFilms: