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In 1995, when Asbury Park was riddled with drugs and crime, a ramshackle former boarding house on Fourth Street went on the market. The roof was caving in; inside, garbage cans caught rainwater that dripped from the ceilings. The price was $7,500, roughly the value of the land.
Against the odds, the house, a brown-and-white Victorian with an expansive porch, escaped the wrecking ball that has remade Asbury Park. It still stands at 508 Fourth Street, now well maintained and bearing a gold sign: “Stephen Crane House, circa 1878.” Another marks the building as the headquarters of the Asbury Park Historical Society.
It was a miracle that the house, thought to be the oldest in Asbury Park and the childhood home of the groundbreaking author of The Red Badge of Courage, survived, says Frank D’Alessandro, a member of the society and a key player in the effort to save the house.
The saga began when Tom and Regina Hayes, who lived on Sixth Street and planned to buy the house as a teardown, were told by a neighbor that Crane had lived there. They confirmed through property records that the house was built in 1871, the same year that Asbury Park was founded, and that the Cranes moved there in 1878. (The family played a prominent role in New Jersey history as well; forebears founded Cranetown, later called Montclair, and in 1776, a Stephen Crane, for whom the author was named, was a member of the Continental Congress.)
The author, who died at 28, packed in enough scandal, adventure and writing for several lifetimes, says Susan Rosenberg, a docent who gives tours of the house on Sundays and by appointment. At 18, he was a cub reporter covering the boardwalk for Crane’s New Jersey Coast News Bureau, which became the Asbury Park Press. He was a war correspondent during the Spanish-American and Greco-Turkish wars, survived a shipwreck, and died of tuberculosis in Europe, where he had hobnobbed with Joseph Conrad, Henry James, J.M. Barrie and H.G. Wells.
In between, he wrote seven novels, two volumes of poetry, scores of short stories (several of which are set in New Jersey), and hundreds of newspaper articles. He influenced a generation of writers with his spare, journalistic-style writing, including Ernest Hemingway, who hailed him as “one of the best writers, along with Henry James and Mark Twain.”
Recognizing the house’s historic value, the Hayeses bought it, but with a new goal of saving it rather than demolishing it. They tarred the roof and opened it up for community events.
In 2001, preparing to move out of town, they put it up for sale, but asked their next-door neighbor, Frank D’Alessandro, to put in a bid. “They knew I wanted to keep it as a community resource and museum,” says D’Alessandro. They accepted his offer even though another was higher.
Another stroke of luck hit later that year, when Bruce Springsteen donated proceeds from a benefit concert, which the historical society used to replace the roof. “From that moment on, the building stabilized and now is in pretty decent shape,” says D’Alessandro.
In 2015, he sold the house for $1 to the historic society and helped get it named to the state and national historic registers. Funds for upkeep come from grants and fundraisers, as well as rent from a second-floor apartment. In addition to tours, the society hosts readings, talks and films. “It’s become a little literary mecca,” says D’Alessandro.
Photo: James J. Connolly
Despite Crane’s huge influence on modern writing, most who visit the house know him only vaguely as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, which used to be required reading in schools. D’Alessandro himself was underwhelmed by the book in high school, but has since reread it and is “really quite impressed by a guy who did this in his twenties and died at the age of 28.”
D’Alessandro has become a bit of an expert on Crane’s short, colorful life. From a young age, the author forged his own path, rejecting the Methodism of his minister father that brought his family to Asbury. Modeled on the adjacent Methodist community of Ocean Grove, Asbury was dry and quiet, quite a contrast to the town it has become. His mother was involved in women’s suffrage and the temperance movement.
When he was 18, he began working in the summers for his brother Townley, who owned the news service. He briefly attended Syracuse University, where his maternal uncle was one of the founders. In 1892 he ignited a scandal while reporting on a parade on the Asbury Park boardwalk, contrasting the finery of the Gilded Age spectators with the grimier marchers, inadvertently insulting the working men. Driven from town by that and his affair with a married woman, he moved to Manhattan, where he wrote his first novel, Maggie of the Streets, about a girl whose poverty had forced her into prostitution.
He and his common-law wife, Cora, who was reputed to have run a brothel, traveled the world together. Between stints as a war correspondent, Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage, about the inner thoughts of a young soldier in the Civil War. It’s notable for having been written at age 24, completely from his imagination. Hemingway called it “one of the finest books in American literature.” Crane’s short story “The Open Boat,” based on his experience of being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida, is thought to have been the inspiration for Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Crane and Cora bought an estate in Surrey, England, where, despite their lack of money, they lived a fashionable life. He died of tuberculosis in a sanitorium in Germany’s Black Forest at 28.
D’Alessandro, who moved to Milltown in 2021, hasn’t lost touch with Crane’s spirit, especially once he discovered that the author’s grave is in Evergreen Cemetery in nearby Hillside. “He was the last of 14 siblings, and the whole Crane family is buried there,” he says. “I stop every so often and put a little flower down.”
Free tours of the Stephen Crane House are given every Sunday from noon to 2 pm, and by appointment.
