4th of July, Asbury Park : a history of the promised land

When Bruce Springsteen called his first album Greetings from Asbury Park, he introduced a generation of fans to a fallen seaside resort town that came to represent working-class American life. Starting with the town's founding as a religious promised land, music journalist and poet Daniel Wolff plots a course through Asbury Park's 130 years of entwined social and musical history, in a story that captures all the allure and heartbreak of the American dream A history of Asbury Park, New Jersey, chronicles the evolution of the seaside town from its founding as a religious commune through more than a century of social and cultural development, its decline into blight, and the potential for its future