Creative History

  In 1850 local resident Dr. Jonathan Pitney began to promote the idea of Absecon Island, located just off southern New Jersey’s coast, as an ideal seaside medical retreat for many of his patients who suffered from various ailments, everything ranging from tuberculosis to nervous breakdowns. Pitney extolled the healing properties of ocean air and saltwater to all who would listen, and by 1853 Pitney along with civil engineer Richard Osborne, who would be in charge of the building’s design and construction, were able to successfully pitch the idea of building a major seaside resort on Absecon Island in New Jersey to influential financiers and politicians. Within a year of the resort’s construction Philadelphia politicians and railroad investors were persuaded enough by Pitney, Osborne and other New Jersey lobbyists to finance a railway that linked the City of Brotherly Love directly with the Jersey Shore and traversed the whole of the Garden State. On July 4, 1854 by charter o...

  “The storm reached the city shortly after 8 o’clock in the morning and the high winds prevailed for about two and one half to three hours.” - The New York Times September 17, 1903 It seemed to come completely out of nowhere and smash, without warning, right into the New Jersey coastline just north of Atlantic City in the early morning hours of September 16, 1903.  A tropical cyclone with hurricane force winds and drenching rain, ravaging the Jersey Shore, over 1,000 miles north of where storms like this one were supposed to happen. The storm, which at the time was simply called Hurricane Number 4 of 1903 in an era before weather events were given proper names, was so unexpected, and the damage that it caused to the Garden State was so unprecedented that the leading newspaper in Atlantic City at the time, The Atlantic City Press , dubbed it “The Vagabond Hurricane” because it seemed to have mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, destroyed everything in its path, and then l...