Home On “The Res”

It wasn’t a long trip—around two hours—but the starting point and the destination were worlds apart. The journey began at our brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where my father, a doctor, had his office. It would end at a rambling house in the Reservation, a beachfront development in Long Branch, in what is now Seven Presidents Oceanfront Park.

In Brooklyn, we lived in a world of school uniforms and brown oxford shoes. Evenings were spent at home because my mother worried about us walking in the city after dark.

In Long Branch, we enjoyed a barefoot summer riding waves and chasing fireflies. At night, there were bonfires on the beach we shared with the other houses that made up the Reservation.

The homes at the Res, as we called it, were built by Nate Salsbury, best remembered as the principal owner of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. A native of Illinois, Salsbury enlisted as a Union soldier at 16 and left the army with $20,000 he had won at cards. That gave him his start. The show he eventually created, starring Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull, toured the United States, England, and other European countries.

According to his 1902 obituary in the New York Times, Salsbury spent $200,000 in 1900 to build the nine Reservation houses on the “sandy waste near North Long Branch.”

Salsbury named each house for a Native American person or tribe. Our house was Okaliska. My uncle, a surgeon with a home around the corner from us in Brooklyn, spent summers with his wife and seven children in the Res house named Uncapapa.

The houses—referred to as cottages—were arrayed in two rows, separated by a gravel path. Our home and four others faced Ocean Avenue, bordered by privet hedges on the street; three houses were on a bluff covered by dune grass that sloped down to the 1,000-foot-long beach where we spent our days. (The ninth house burned down in the 1930s.)

Each of the wood-shingled houses had three stories, a wide porch, and a porte-cochere. There were ten bedrooms and a kitchen on the basement level.

Among our neighbors was Colonel Arthur Foran, a New Jersey politician whose son Dick became a famous singing cowboy in Hollywood movies. Another son, Walter, became a state senator, like his dad.

My father bought our house in the 1920s for an amount unknown to us. There were then six children in the family, which must have shocked our next-door neighbor, an officer of the New York Cotton Exchange, whose only child went to summer camp.

While we lived there, the number of children in my family grew to fourteen. After my father died in 1953, my mother sold the house for about $10,000. The buyer rented it out for summers, as did other new owners when the long-time owners moved out. The town bought the homes in the 1970s and demolished all but one to make way for the present-day park, which was completed by Monmouth County.

In 1984, as a reporter for the Daily Register of Shrewsbury, I wrote the story of the dedication of the Res as a county park named to honor the presidents who had summered nearby. The only remaining home, the Navajo, was moved from its beachfront site to serve as headquarters for the park.

Sometimes I go to the Seven Presidents Beach for a swim—it’s just a mile from my current home. I like seeing that the place I remember as the Res is still giving so many people the happiness that it gave me as a child.

Liz Sheehan is a freelance writer. She lives in Monmouth Beach.

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