Asbury Park’s Museum of Modern Art?

For a long time Asbury Park was known for one thing: Bruce Springsteen. Honestly, that’s it.

The once venerable Jersey shore city has been slowly picking itself up from decades of disrepair and trying to develop into a thriving shore town once again. Over the past decade, the city has been blessed with an influx of new restaurants and shopping centers as it tries to regain the vibrancy it once possessed.

The city is where you can find Springsteen’s roots, at the famous Stone Pony bar. Throughout the town you can find landmarks and discover the Jersey shore imagery “the Boss” captured so well in “Greetings from Asbury Park,” “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle” and “Born to Run.”

Today a different kind of imagery is at the center of the conversation at the Jersey shore city as Robin Parness Lipson tries to bring a Museum of Modern Art to Asbury Park.

Today the New York Times documented Lipson’s efforts to bring modern art to a part of the country that desperately needs to prove to the world it enjoys a little culture with its hair gel. The Jersey shore is plenty more than guidos with steroid-injecting hobbies. What better way to demonstrate and celebrate that fact than bring some modern art to Asbury Park’s revival?

Lipson is without large financial backing, but she’s armed with a famous art-collecting family in her support, and a strong determination. Michael and Susan Hort are annually listed amongst the top 200 art collectors in the world. They also happen to be Lipson’s greatest allies.

Still, building a modern art museum on the New Jersey coast with nothing but sea salt and hope isn’t going to make a multi-million dollar structure appear out of sand. But as it turns out NJ’s MoMA doesn’t need a fancy overpriced new construction. The proposed space would be one of the many extremely underused structures lining the Asbury beach. The Asbury Park power plant has been vacant for over 30 years. It also happens to be designed by Warren & Wetmore, the same crafty cats who designed New York’s Grand Central Station.

The main obstacle right now is getting the building from the current owner, development company Madison Marquette, who happens to own most of Asbury Park’s boardwalk property. Gary Mottola, Madison Marquette’s CEO, seems skeptical about the need or want for a modern art museum in Asbury. In fact, he seems perfectly content with it remaining a pit stop for Springsteen fans touring the Garden State.

During the New York Times article Mottola, rocking a Stone Pony t-shirt, refers to fortune teller Madame Marie as a museum that draws international tourism after Springsteen’s song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” He also had the arrogance or naivete to call Asbury Park “the biggest music destination in the world.”

I mean seriously why would the Jersey Shore need an art museum when it already offers the New Jersey Hall of Fame? How silly of us to forget the millions of people flock each year to visit Shaquille O’Neal’s plaque –- whose NJ claim to fame is simply being born here.

Call me old fashioned but it would be nice to see Asbury Park rise from its own ash and unfinished apartment buildings, but we need to set aside pride for a second and get out of our own way.