A Mural Is Born

Well, Four, Actually

Chloe's mural at the start.

Asbury Park's beloved sewage treatment plant has become the beating heart of the city's vibrant mural culture. Wow - talk about florid prose. Actually, until the murals arrived I don't know that anybody loved this low-slung, almost windowless building that sits next to the boardwalk and, if it had a roof deck, would have a great view of the ocean.

The murals arrived on the south facade last year, and they actually put this black hole in space on the tourist map.

And then the people who look after these things said, "Let's do it again!" (Not an exact quote, but the sentiment was clearly there.)

The seagull and the sketch.

And so this spring the place that processes our poop got four new murals on its blind east facade, facing the boardwalk and the ocean. 

I watched this process intermittently - I'm not in Asbury all the time, but whenever I return I'm struck by how happy I am to be here. Of course there's the beach and the (normally) clean air and the other things that are obvious to any new arrival.  But these days, I  think my feelings also have two deeper causes. First, we have a competent and well-meaning government that can make good things happen quickly and without fuss. Second, there are scads of very talented people who have good ideas and the skills to make the dream come true whenever they are offered an opportunity - be it a derelict beach pavilion or a no-name structure with blank walls that used to smell bad but doesn't so much anymore.

The first work-in-progress that I noticed on the east facade was a child's-eye view of the boardwalk. It had barely begun, but there was a color sketch taped above the artist's ladder, and the main outlines of the mural had been sketched on the wall.  

Working around the guitar.

Later I came back and met the artist, Chloe. She told me that this is her first mural. Until now she has focused mainly on animation, and she's thinking of creating an animation based on the mural.

My response to this mural was immediately positive and strong, partly because it took me directly back to November 8, 1998, when I ran a 10K race from the aquarium in Camden to the zoo in Philadelphia. The race t-shirt was illustrated with the legs of various denizens of the zoo. I responded to this t-shirt in the same way I responded to Chloe's mural - as a three-year-old, so happy the grown-ups could glimpse the world as I saw it. I still have the t-shirt, although the pictures are faded from much washing.

I hope Chloe does the animation and hooks it to a QR code next to the mural.

Directly to the right of Chloe's mural there was a fish chasing its tail. Judi, the artist, explained that she was inspired by a similar fish that appears on the walls of nearby Convention Hall - multiple times. I told Judi I liked her version better. 

Last year, Judi painted the Flower for Ukraine on the east facade of the building. It's still one of my favorites.

Chloe and Judi aloft.

Just to the left of the boardwalk scene, there is a mural of a small child sleeping. It's by Jude. Last year she did a sleeping child on an airborne carousel horse, again one of my favorites. The child and the carousel horse put me in mind Eugene Field's poem Wynken, Blynken and Nod, where travels on the water and in the sky are also melded together. 

You can see a piece of her new mural in the picture below, along with a piece of Zac's vertical stripes, and Zac conferring with Chloe. Note that the background of Jude's mural is white. We'll be coming back to that.

Zac told me how he came to the vertical stripes. He asked people to put colors to their moods, and then rendered those pairings as stripes. It's a deceptively simple idea - create a harp whose strings give us not just color but also emotion. I, for one, find it resonant.

And here's what the group looks like from the boardwalk. I like it that the new dunes and dune grasses obscure parts of the murals. People will need to get closer for the full effect. And I think the greens of the plantings and the bright colors of the murals together make a composition of their own.

What follows are my formal portraits of the individual murals, none of which are entirely complete. But if you like detective games, you can use these shots to compare with the live mural and figure out what the finishing touches were.

Judi's fish.

Chloe's boardwalk.

Jude's sleeping child.

You can see that the background here is not white. This particular photo was taken right about sunset, when the light is often very blue. I'm particularly fond of the way this mural performs in this light.

Zac's stripes.

Almost finally, here's a shot from the beach. You can't get away from these murals. They follow you everywhere.

And finally, here's the black-headed gull that we saw in outline in the picture at the beginning of the story. Until the last few years, I had no idea that such a seagull existed, but a smart avian travel agent seems to have convinced them that Asbury is a good destination. And Asbury Park says, as it does to all visitors, welcome!

For more on sewage treatment, see Jessica Leigh Hester, Sewer (2023).

See also Art Meets Sewage, Coney Island 2022.