Shore Musings is Collin Hall’s column about life on the shore, the good and the bad. Collin is the editor of Do the Shore.
Spend five seconds on the Ocean City or Wildwoods boardwalk with an open heart and its many joys are obvious. But there’s a rumbling, maybe louder than ever, that the boardwalk is maybe a dangerous place, not a place for kids, or something to be feared.
Of course, accusations of trashiness or kid unfriendliness are old as the boards themselves. Lewd boardwalk apparel has been a staple my entire life, and it isn’t a trip to Wildwood without dangling cheeks and “I’m not gay, but $20 is $20” t-shirts. Somebody needs to update that one for inflation.
But a more potent panic began during COVID, when teens without much else to do began gathering in huge crowds in public places like the boardwalk. This made sense to me in the sense that: boardwalks are outside and free. The world was shut down, kids can meet easily through social media, and what else was there to do during that time?
The biggest kiddie crowd incident I can recall was last year in Ocean City when one 15-year-old was stabbed. He survived, and the city seems to have learned from the incident to better control rowdy that lead to incidents like this.
But reminder: this is not going to happen to you! These are isolated cases. Outside of a few freak incidents, the millions of people that visit Cape May County are safe and sound.
I think the narrative is getting a bit ahead of reality. Local law enforcement is getting better at responding to crowd incidents like this because they can brace for them. This summer has been largely incident free, wahoo!
An anecdote: a Herald reporter here at the office called city officials, starting in Cape May, to ask how things went over Memorial Day weekend. That’s the first busy weekend of the tourist season and when things got crazy in years past. The reporter was told, and I’m paraphrasing a conversation I didn’t hear myself: “things were great here, no real problems! Nothing like the chaos in Wildwood.” So the reporter picked up the phone, called Wildwood, to ask about the chaos. He was told, and remember I’m paraphrasing: “Things went smooth here! We didn’t have any of the problems they had up in Sea Isle City.”
So Chris picked up the phone, called Sea Isle City… And the goose chase continued. There was no chaos.
Just the idea that something could happen, that chaos has occurred in the past, is making folks nervous. But it remains true that you’re more at risk driving to work in your 3000-pound automobile than in any boardwalk scenario.
Herald reporting found, after parsing police logs from local shore municipalities, that Memorial Day weekend was safe and swell. Some rowdiness here and there. In Wildwood, police responded to an altercation that began with a thrown banana peel. Business as usual.
The Wildwoods boardwalk was one of the first places that, as a kid, I felt free. I would walk the entire boardwalk at midnight during the height of my teenage depression, and for a few hours, my problems would melt away. I hate that kids can’t have that experience because of new curfews and restrictions.
I meet the moment by reminding myself that this isn’t our first moment of Jersey Shore moral panic. An especially silly act of virtue signaling came in 2013, when the Wildwood City Council passed an ordinance to ban sagging pants that exposed the wearer’s underwear. To a concerned public, it seemed like the latest sign of moral slippage.
Yeah, you’re picturing the right thing, that 90s hip-hop style which Wikipedia attributes to American prisons, where men are often deprived the dignity of a belt, forced to sag.
The Wildwood ordinance states: pants can’t show more than 3 inches of underwear, and police were given free reign to enforce it. Imagine it: cops measuring tourist’s trousers with a ruler.
We’ve banned a lot of things in the name of public safety: sagging trousers, smoking, recreational drones, and lately, kids after 10 p.m., backpacks, and skateboards. Maybe banana peels will be next.
I think some folks get nervous around big crowds because people can be scary! And during COVID, fear of crowds was even more dramatic. Maybe some of that fear has lingered. But most of the people on the boardwalk are here for the same reason: to enjoy a nice night with an ocean breeze. Don’t fear your fellow man. Go to the boardwalk!
(and un-ban skateboards on the bike path, please.)
Contact the author, Collin Hall, at 609-886-8600 or by email at chall@cmcherald.com
