The Jersey Shore Is Opening Up, But That Won’t Save Beach Towns

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- On Saturday, May 16, Anthony Vaz, the mayor of Seaside Heights, surveys the 16-block boardwalk in his archetypal New Jersey beach town, once the backdrop for MTV’s Jersey Shore. The pandemic has left the area more sedate than it appeared on the show. The sun is out, the day breezy and warm, but the 28 acres of beach are nearly empty. Bars and restaurants are closed, or limited to takeout. The Ferris wheel, roller coasters, and tilt-a-whirl are idle, along with the boardwalk’s arcades, their jangling coin-operated games silent.

Yet Vaz, a tightly coiled, bantamweight Republican with thinning gray hair, is encouraged by the few hundred visitors he sees along the boardwalk this afternoon. About half wear masks, but most keep their distance from one another, as federal and state officials had implored them to. “As you can see, people are complying,” Vaz says. “They’re not walking in big, big groups.”

This is two days after Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s Democratic governor, declared that the state’s 140 miles of beaches would be open for Memorial Day. In anticipation of the announcement, Vaz’s office has put together a plan to reopen the Seaside Heights beach and boardwalk. As of mid-May, the town of roughly 2,900 people—whose numbers can swell to 30,000 on a sunny holiday—reported 29 cases of Covid-19 and a handful of related deaths, according to local health officials. The mayor wants to move surely but slowly. During the first week back, the beach and boardwalk close at 5 p.m. There is no swimming. People on the boardwalk are encouraged to keep moving.

By order of the governor, restaurants can’t offer table service, indoors or out. The town has forbidden hotels and motels from opening before June 1, at which point they can rent no more than 1 in 4 units. It has also reduced its parking capacity by almost half to discourage large numbers from inundating the beach. Such restrictions will likely save lives. New Jersey’s coastal towns, which together generated $23 billion in revenue last year, according to the Jersey Shore Chamber of Commerce, are trying to keep their businesses going, too.

Vaz says the first day and a half went well enough. Now he has to worry about the discontented business owners. Whether they run bars, restaurants, motels, or arcades, none had been allowed to fully reopen in time for Memorial Day Weekend, and might not be able to for the rest of the summer. As soon as he’d parked and gotten out of his car near the boardwalk, two motel owners approached, pleading with him to let them reopen more rapidly. “I said I understand where you’re coming from, but I can’t,” he says.

Enforcement is going to be a problem. Beach passes and parking fees alone generated 30% of the town’s $17 million budget last year. Vaz expects to have to cut the numbers of lifeguards and cops on duty this summer, making it difficult to maintain order, let alone keep people six feet apart.

Beach towns up and down America’s East Coast are wrestling with similar concerns on the eve of Memorial Day—at once, too many people and, for local businesses, not enough. Mayors like Vaz are in an untenable position: They can’t reopen quickly enough to make their loudest constituents happy, and they can’t do it slowly enough to keep their most vulnerable constituents safe.

In Massachusetts, Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, has told hotels and restaurants they won’t be able to begin returning to normalcy until at least the second week of June. That’s a daunting proposition for owners of seasonal operations, whose margins are slim even in good times. “You really rely on those big, big days to pay your bills—those Memorial Day weekends, Fourth of July, Labor Day,” says Jordan Wallace, whose family owns the Sandbar and Grill on Martha’s Vineyard. “We’re really entering into uncharted territory.”

Even businesses in towns where restrictions have been relatively loose face an uncertain future. On May 11, South Carolina permitted restaurants to begin serving customers indoors as long as they limit seating to 50% of their normal capacity. Soon after, Myrtle Beach allowed its hotels to resume operating at full capacity. Even so, the outlook remains dire, acknowledges Karen Riordan, president of the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. She fears that one-quarter of her organization’s 2,700 members might fold, she says. “People call and just say, ‘I’m three months behind on my business rent, I haven’t paid my utilities, and If I’m not careful, I’m probably going to lose my house.’”

Ashish Jha, faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, sympathizes with business owners eager for towns to hasten their reopening processes, but says everyone needs to understand what’s at stake should they move too fast. “If there’s a large outbreak in that town,” he says, “nobody’s going to want to go back there for the whole summer.”

“Come on, I’ll walk with you,” Vaz says, leading me down the Seaside Heights boardwalk. He wanted to introduce me to some of the businesses’ owners. The first is Jeff Jackson, the owner of Jimbo’s Bar and Grill, which has been a fixture along the beach for a dozen years. “Tell him the mayor’s here to see him,” Vaz tells one of the few employees on duty in the empty restaurant.

Jackson emerges from the back. Any other year, he says, his 300-seat indoor space would be half-full at this time of day. “We’ve been operating at maybe 5% of what we would have done in the past,” Jackson says. “So, pretty horrible. I think we’ve had, so far, two customers today.”

“We can’t survive like this,” says Peter Jarkasian, the owner of Candy Planet, as he sits in front of his boardwalk store, hawking ice cream and saltwater taffy to the occasional passerby.

Vaz passes businesses lower down on the reopening list, including a tattoo parlor and a stand where people usually toss darts at balloons. He runs into two guys in sunglasses whose families own local bars, nightclubs, and parking lots. They’re furious with state and federal officials for putting them in what they describe as an impossible situation. They have to fill their places to turn a profit, they say, or even to cover the cost of their liquor liability insurance. The two men also complain that visitors have been using the spaces behind their establishments as alternatives to the closed public bathrooms.

Vaz does what he can to console them, advising one to run for Congress. After they exchange goodbyes, he says he’s had a lot of sleepless nights recently, but isn’t taking these kinds of complaints personally. “I have to tell them they can’t reopen,” he says. “It’s not me telling them. It’s the law.”

The final stop on Vaz’s impromptu tour is Spicy Cantina, a Mexican restaurant owned by Wayne Cimorelli. Donning a mask, Cimorelli steps outside and points to his empty downstairs bar and rooftop restaurant. He says the takeout business he’s been doing basically amounts to nothing. “You really can’t call this open,” he says.

There’s been talk in the restaurant business about trying to persuade the governor to allow 25% capacity seating by July 4. Cimorelli says the operators who own their buildings, like he does, will survive, but the smaller ones will go under because they can’t pay their rent. He says that while he doesn’t fault Vaz, many of his peers say the mayor should exercise his power to keep the boardwalk open later. “They think the boardwalk, especially with this weather, should not be closed at 5 p.m.—it should close at 10 p.m.,” Cimorelli says. “But his point is, it’s a trial run. Let’s open and let see what the public actually does.”

One of Vaz’s most visible critics is Mike Carbone, president of the borough council. Carbone also owns the Beachcomber, a boardwalk bar and restaurant best known as the place where Snooki got sucker-punched during an episode of Jersey Shore. At the Beachcomber on May 16, Carbone is bearded, wears an untucked plaid shirt, and speaks in clipped sentences. A year ago, he says, he would have had a band playing to his packed house. What will Memorial Day Weekend be like? “A disaster,” he says.

Pointing to passersby wearing masks and keeping a respectful distance, Carbone invokes the Third Reich. “It’s our second day,” he says. “Looks fine to me. And at 5 p.m., it’s going to turn into Nazi-land. They come down with the police and the firemen. Like, you know, ‘Leave the boardwalk immediately.’” He adds: “I’m saying, let people make their own choice.”

Then he shoos off a guy drinking a can of Budweiser outside his establishment, in violation of the town’s open container laws. Even in the time of Covid-19, some things don’t change in Seaside Heights.

Even in beach towns that are further along with reopening, business owners are likely to face additional hurdles. In Myrtle Beach, whose home county of Horry has reported 303 cases of Covid-19 and 20 deaths, Heidi Vukov, owner of Hook & Barrel, sounds weary as she recites the new safety routine at her 260-seat seafood restaurant. It now takes 10 minutes to clean tables between customers, she says. Before seating a new party, workers have to wipe down each space with soap and water, disinfect it, wipe it down again, then sanitize it. Every time a customer uses the bathroom, it has to be sanitized. Her employees are already masked and gloved, but Vukov is purchasing facial shields for the ones who deal directly with customers. On May 16, Vukov says, the Hook & Barrel was crowded with tourists who seemed to think that just because they were in South Carolina, there was nothing to fear. “We realized that people are coming here, thinking everything’s normal,” she says. “So we had to police the whole social distancing thing.”

A few days later, Vaz says visitors to Seaside Heights are still behaving. He hopes Memorial Day weekend will be just as orderly. One thing is sure: the boardwalk will see more people. On May 23, Vaz plans to begin keeping it open until 11 p.m. The bathrooms will be open, too, and the town will be following a new set of protocols to maintain them. “You can’t have 10 people in a bathroom,” the mayor says. “We’re going to stagger it. We’re going to have a line. Then you're going to have to have a monitor. ‘Okay, two came out, two come in.’ It all has to do with social distancing.”

He gets mildly annoyed by Carbone’s criticism, saying he has to follow the governor’s orders even though he acknowledges the town controls the boardwalk, beaches, and hotels. “Michael’s a libertarian—his attitude is, open everything up. No, you can’t do that,” Vaz says. “I would love to see 100% of the people come back to the beach. It’s not going to happen this season. If Michael thinks it is, he’s dreaming.”

If the next phase of reopening goes well, says Vaz, more parking spaces and motel rooms might follow. He’ll have plenty of time to ponder what comes next: His second four-year term began just a few months ago.

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