Harlan’s History Picture of the Day: STONE HARBOR, N. J.: TWO AERIAL VIEWS OF THE TOWN AND BEACH 1920 & 1922

STONE HARBOR, N. J.: TWO AERIAL VIEWS OF THE TOWN AND BEACH 1920 & 1922

Straight-down, black-and-white aerial mosaic of Stone Harbor, N.J., circa 1920—Atlantic surf lines the bottom edge, a sparse grid of sandy streets runs the length of the barrier island, and three curved man-made boat basins carve into the marshy bay at top left, with open dunes and wetlands framing both ends.

Sometimes it is not easy to determine a date for certain photos, especially considering aerial views taken from an airplane for example of an entire community covering over several miles like the one just illustrated here. In order to accomplish this task of dating a photo, the challenge often becomes needing to zero in on very specific places like landforms or landmarks for comparison with other possibly dated photographs. The Stone Harbor Museum archives indicates that the first photo shown above was actually taken in 1920. An enhanced or a magnified examination of this photo along with my background seems to confirm that particular date with relative accuracy.

For example, we can identify some features that were built or erected before 1920. Such features include the establishment of the mile and a half boardwalk which we know was built in 1917. In addition, the bungalow colony associated with Bower, Weber, and Stone Courts at the lower end of the town are also visible and they were constructed in 1915-16 and sold to the Stonemen’s Bungalow Colony in 1917. There is very little housing development on the waterfront areas overlooking the bay on the Pleasure, Carnival, and Stone Harbor Basins. Furthermore we know the replacement fire station built in 1924 does not appear in this photo at the corner of Second Avenue and 96th Street. All these factors and other landmarks too numerous to mention at this time do support our agreement that this first photo is accurately dated and having been taken in 1920.

Grainy oblique aerial of Stone Harbor, N.J., around 1922—camera looks northeast toward the ocean on the right, showing a thin ribbon of beach, the early boardwalk, finger-shaped basins on the bay side, and lightly developed blocks of cottages and sand streets stretching the length of Seven Mile Island.

Probably the most challenging thing about determining the date for this second aerial photo view is we need to identify features that we would expect to see only visible after 1920. One such glaring feature is the presence of the what will become the tennis courts in very early initial development as open and cleared land which we can see that is visible between 96th Street and First Avenue. Throughout the borough there is also evidence of just a bit more housing development that occurred during the early part of the decade of the 1920s especially in the extreme southern portion of Seven Mile Island including the 3 basins overlooking the Great Channel. The area between 108th and 111th Streets appears to be becoming more defined and having undergone some more street development.

There is no Villa Maria By-The-Sea which was built in 1937 and the Ocean Drive and the associated Ocean Drive Toll Bridge extending southward to the Wildwoods were not opened and available to vehicular traffic until June of 1940. The consensus of our thinking on this photo is that is was not taken circa 1929 as the records indicate but was actually taken rather shortly after the previous 1920 photo was taken.