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Architects say it often enough, “Poverty is the best preservationist.”
The statement is quite true and shows its truth nicely in the Raritan Bay town of Keyport, New Jersey.
The building stock in neglected shore towns often retains its 18th and 19th century integrity, while more prosperous areas have been modernized out of any recognizable past. Keyport is an excellent example of a town that has gone through a long period of decline and has now picked itself up and brushed itself off.
The Raritan Bay sits between the south shore of Staten Island, New York, and the Jersey Coast north of Sandy Hook. Towns ringing the Bay in both states were great oystering centers throughout the 19th century. The broad and navigable rivers on the Jersey side made the Raritan Bay towns a natural for oceangoing commerce and for shipping out Jersey produce and manufactured goods to New York City.
Steamships docked at Keyport on the Raritan Bay, down Matawan Creek three miles to Matawan, called then Middletown-Point, back out again into the Bay, and on to Red Bank in the Navesink River. It is hard to fathom today, but in 1840, Keyport outshone Red Bank as the fastest growing village in the state.
The Raritan & Delaware Bay Railroad opened in 1854 with branches into the marl beds of Squankum and Marlboro. A short line came out from Freehold to Keyport to offload at the steamship docks. With the New York & Long Branch Railroad opening around 1870, the traditional dependence on steamships for moving freight, as well as moving visitors, came to an end.
Today the railroad, the North Jersey Coast Line, bypasses the Bay towns altogether soon after leaving South Amboy. Where the railroad used to spur off at Keyport and run through Union Beach to Keansburg and its amusement park, in a kind of creative recycling, the abandoned railroad bed has become a walking path as part of the nationwide “Heritage Trail.”
If you are visiting the Jersey Shore and are looking for a very nice two-mile walk, take the trail beginning near the train station at Matawan and head for Keyport, where you will leave the trail at Broad Street and take a left to Front Street.
Keyport was laid out in the 1830s and a stroll along Front Street beyond the downtown gives a look at some lovely early 19th century residential architecture set against dramatic views of the Raritan Bay. Continuing on will take you into the area’s 18th century beginnings, where residential streets lead to promontories offering fine viewing of the Lower New York Bay, the Narrows, and the Atlantic Ocean.
Front Street, Keyport’s main street, has had almost no tampering with its streetscape. The redbrick buildings are in excellent condition, and in face of its long decline, the town has retained its early mercantile appearance. Residential streets radiate off Front Street, close-packed with fine old houses, from the oldest, the Tenant Farmer's House on Snyder Lane, circa 1715, to the grandest, such as the 18-room mansion built by a Danish sea captain in 1860. Interspersed are small public squares and churches as old as the town itself.
For as close and personal a maritime experience as you can get while keeping dry, nothing beats the short street that runs below and behind the downtown part of town.
Take Broad Street down a steep decline to the water and swing around the waterfront on this short street that leads back up again into the town. This street should be named Front Street and Front Street should be named High Street, but, forget it, Jake, this is New Jersey; the street is named patriotically, if unimaginatively, American Legion Drive.
You are now as close to the Raritan Bay as you can get without being underwater. The street sometimes is, as the Bay sweeps in and rushes to the foot of the highland on top of which sits the town. When they talk about a breathtaking view, this is it.
The new ferry to New York City may dock at the town pier, instead of steamships. Sailboats, not sailing ships, dot the Bay. But fishermen still line the railing when the tide is out. There are more than 1,000 boat slips in Keyport harbor, including those docked at the century old Keyport Yacht Club. At the other end of the loop you come upon some salt meadow with traditional boat yards that are left of a long history of Keyport boat building, and then up again to Front Street.
Small shops, bakeries, restaurants, and antique stores, for the several block downtown stretch, now tenant what were offices and warehouses in the town’s days of commercial glory. But traditional storefront businesses are not lost in a wave of boutiquery, and there is a nice and comfortable mix here of old and new retailers.
The small downtown commercial district running only a few blocks along Front Street has two large malls devoted to antiques and collectibles, the Antique Center of Keyport and the Antique Market of Keyport. Also on Front Street you will find Haas Cienda Antiques, Keyport Antique Emporium, North River Antiques, and Patricia’s Antiques and Collectibles, Collectors Cottage, and Grandma's Olde & New Shoppe. On nearby Broad Street is the Antique Station.
If you like shopping for antiques in an antique town, Keyport is the place.
You can’t get lost in Keyport. Just look for a 7 1/2-by-15-foot mural by Phyllis M. Araneo at the corner of Main and West Front streets. The Raritan Bay town of Keyport is up there on a brick wall, the streets, the stores, the houses, the churches, the docks, the ships, for all the world to see.
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