For Eileen Chapman, director of the Bruce Springsteen Archives, music has always been a kind of home. Her mother was a gifted pianist; her father adored the crooners. “I’m one of five girls, and we each had a record player in our room,” she says. Her childhood house in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Newark was equipped with a basement stage, where her older sisters’ boyfriends played with their bands. A young Frankie Valli rehearsed in her best friend’s yard right next door.
As a 20-something in Asbury Park, Chapman lived on the same block as members of the Blackberry Booze Band and the Asbury Jukes, whom she watched perform all over the Jersey Shore (including at the Stone Pony, which she’d manage years later). These days, she sets alerts for favorite artists—Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, the Ramones—on her car’s Sirius radio, while her Alexa speaker welcomes her back from work with tunes at 6 pm every night. “When I think of almost any time in my life,” she reflects fondly, “I can hear a song that went along with it.”
It’s fitting, then, that down a tree-lined driveway on the edge of Monmouth University’s campus in West Long Branch, Chapman, 72, directs the daily operations inside an unassuming Cape Cod-style cottage that currently serves as the home base of the Bruce Springsteen Archives. The official repository for preserving the legacy of the Boss (who turns 75 this month), it’s a jewel of a resource—still relatively under the radar—for researchers, historians, writers, filmmakers and fans.
Last fall, the archive unveiled plans for a $45 million expansion to a shiny new 30,000-square-foot structure at Monmouth. (“I will try to do my best,” Springsteen joked at the announcement event, “to do nothing for the rest of my life to embarrass a building.”)
Slated to open in April 2026, the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music will also serve as a broader celebration of America’s musical history and pioneers. Plans include a 250-seat theater, exhibition galleries, interactive elements, and educational initiatives. (A partnership with Steven Van Zandt’s nonprofit, TeachRock, is already underway.)
“Every donation has a story to go with it, which I always love to hear,” Chapman says. Photo: Krista Schlueter
In the meantime, the archive remains in its charmingly scrappy setting, which Chapman has helmed for more than a decade with a refreshing down-to-earthiness and lack of red tape.
It’s not unusual for repositories of similar stature to deny fan access and require formal proof of research projects—but the Springsteen Archives is “much more relaxed,” explains Chapman, whose desk bears a small placard with bubble letters inked in black marker that reads “THE BOSS.”
“Of course, we’re very careful with everything—preservation is our primary concern—so people come in, they put on gloves; we stare them down to make sure that they’re taking care of the items. But we want people to be able to see what we have,” she says.
To schedule an appointment, email [email protected] with at least two weeks’ notice.
Visitors come from all over, sometimes with kids, parents or unannounced guests in tow. The bachelorette party of 16 women, decked out in festive attire and psyched for a tour of the compact space, “was a little bit unexpected,” Chapman laughs. Another day, a knock at the door revealed two guys on a road trip from Florida. They were headed to a show at the Pony, but had heard about the archive and “just needed to get in and see it,” she says with a smile. Recalling a widower’s recent visit, she wells up. “It’s sometimes very emotional.”
Depending on visitors’ particular interests or projects, Chapman might also introduce them to such locals as Carl “Tinker” West, Springsteen’s first manager, or Vini Lopez, an early E Street Band drummer. If an out-of-towner wants to stop by another nearby landmark—say, the Stone Pony, rock photographer Danny Clinch’s gallery, or the humble bungalow where Springsteen wrote most of his Born to Run album—she’s happy to drive them there herself in her silver Ford Explorer.
The archive receives a steady stream of offerings, especially as Springsteen fans age, downsize, or move away from the area. “Every donation has a story to go with it, which I always love to hear,” Chapman says, remembering the woman who found a Springsteen family Bible on the last day of a Middletown house sale for a staggering $5. (It now lives at the archive in a custom-made protective box.)
“I think people feel comfortable donating their items here because they know they’re going to be preserved…[and] made accessible,” she says. “They’ve got visiting rights anytime they want—but so do fans throughout the whole world.”
Chapman estimates that the current archive holds 40,000 artifacts, tidily contained in rows of beige boxes on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Pieces range from magazines, newspapers and books to posters, ticket stubs and textiles to meticulous scrapbooks kept by Springsteen’s late mother, Adele.
Up on the second floor, on a sunny afternoon in late June, two student employees sit cross-legged on the floor, quietly cataloging papers. Fan-made concert signs and Springsteen-inspired wines—one for each album—dwell in the basement. On the main level, sheet music for “Jungleland” is perched atop a corner piano that once belonged to Southside Johnny’s family.
Unwieldy items, like pieces of colorful walls recovered from Asbury Park’s iconic but long-shuttered Upstage Club—since turned into condos—await their fates. “We even utilize the bathtub,” Chapman confesses, later pulling back a white curtain to reveal a mountain of boxes. “Until the new building is built, we are scrambling for space.” (A note taped to the restroom mirror: “Bruce says you’re PERFECT.”)
Chapman moved to Asbury Park in 1974, the same year the Stone Pony opened. Her parents owned a shop on the boardwalk called Country Kitchen Fudge and Peanuts, which she managed, churning out fudge, popcorn and candy apples (and constantly scalding her arms on the steam that poured out of the nut roasters). She loved the people-watching, the boardwalk characters and the Casino building’s frequent concerts, just steps away.
Her father became a passionate city manager in the 1970s, walking the streets daily to strike up conversations with locals and visitors. He referred to himself simply as Bill from Asbury Park.
Chapman, too, went on to become a pillar of her community. She managed Mrs. Jay’s Beer Garden in the early 1980s, and opened Jersey’s first all-CD store, which she ran in Belmar from the mid-’80s to 2000. She managed the Fast Lane for a year, and then the Pony from 2000 to 2003, during which time she purchased its first outdoor stage. (Her “amazing and supportive” husband, Tom, built its first outdoor bar.) She’s served on Asbury Park’s city council since 2016. “I think you always have to feel like you’re in the right place at the right time,” she says.
The archive’s founding collection started out as a fan project. In 2000, editor Chris Phillips and his team at the beloved international Springsteen fanzine Backstreets, which ceased publication last year (and whose founder, Charles R. Cross, passed last month), put out a call for fan donations—especially old press clippings—for research purposes. Their plan was to create an archive that would ultimately become accessible to the public.
The resulting 700-piece collection found a temporary home in the Asbury Park Public Library; Chapman attended the grand opening. In 2010, while working at Monmouth’s Center for the Arts, she read in the paper that the collection had outgrown the library, scattering items among fans’ houses around the United States. She reached out to her longtime friend Bob Santelli, a music historian, journalist and educator, and one of the original curators of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Santelli, then the executive director of the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, had always dreamed about Monmouth (which he attended, and where he later taught) being a “hub for music research,” Chapman says. She pitched the university as the archive’s permanent residence; many conversations with Santelli, school officials and the Friends of the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection (run by Phillips and local preservationist Bob Crane), followed.
Monmouth’s library was not equipped to handle the growing collection, so then-president Paul Gaffney offered an empty, unfurnished house on Cedar Avenue. Chapman recalls thinking that the collection had likely increased to a few thousand pieces; she didn’t realize there were 15,000 until everything was nearly en route to campus.
The friends of the collection cataloged all the items as they came together under one roof—a massive, monthslong effort. “Almost every day was a learning curve for a while,” says Chapman, who created a formal documentation process. She joined a network of the Society of American Archivists for modest archival teams, then called the Lone Arrangers.
But how did the archive house become Springsteen’s official repository? Both Chapman and Santelli had long assumed that Springsteen’s personal papers would eventually go to the Cleveland-based Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. One day in 2017, Santelli phoned Chapman. “I have an idea,” he told her. “Why don’t we ask Bruce about bringing his papers to Monmouth?”
Chapman thought it couldn’t hurt for Santelli to contact Springsteen’s longtime manager, Jon Landau—who, she says, loved the proposal and brought it to Bruce and his wife, Patti Scialfa. They, too, were intrigued. Santelli flew to Jersey for a meeting at the Springsteens’ Colts Neck home, only about a dozen miles from Monmouth.
“Bruce hopped on his motorcycle and came here to this archive house and looked around and said, ‘I think I like this,’” Chapman recalls. “And so here we are. The rest is history.”
The decision was announced during a Monmouth event with Springsteen. Five years later, in 2022, Santelli was named the archive’s executive director.
No two days on the job are ever the same, Chapman says. This spring, they opened a pop-up exhibit, currently running in Asbury Park’s Convention Hall, with a small collection of photos, artifacts and merchandise. A few hours before our interview, she’d been culling items to refresh the display, and spent part of her morning reading through a paper Springsteen wrote in grade school. “He got a B, because they said his handwriting was atrocious.”
As 2026 draws closer, Chapman and her tiny team remain hard at work to ensure a seamless expansion. There are meetings with architects, theater consultants and landscapers, and efforts to keep up with ever-changing best practices—not to mention the daily grind of managing programs, events, visitors, donations and inventory.
They’re also creating a more comprehensive database that will allow future visitors to cross-reference artifacts using searchable finding aids like keywords and dates.
“But in the meantime,” Chapman says, “it’s living in my head.”
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