Historic Wayside

760 Poplar Road, Wayside, NJ
Asbury Park Airport

An interesting fact. During its life, there have been three (3) airports in the Township of Ocean. The first, which only lasted a month, was built in 1910, for the Wright Brothers to hold their ten (10) day “air show” at Asbury Park in August of that year. It was built along Wickapecko Drive in the area that is now the western end of the Borough of Interlaken (Interlaken did not break away from Ocean until 1922). More people probably went to the air show, than ever flew out of the other two.

The second was built in the early 1920s at the northern part of what today is Joe Palaia Park, along Dow Avenue. At that time, the property was used by Western Electric Company to test new radios, and they wanted to test them for use in planes.

In the 1930s, the Asbury Park Airport was built on the corner of West Park Avenue and Poplar Road, where the Cotswold at Ocean Condominiums are today. However, the neighbors (especially the Gimbel family, that owned the estate across the street) did not like the airport, and in September 1941, the Township Committee ordered the airport to be shut down. However, in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, all airports were taken over by the U.S. Army as a war measure, so the airport remained open.

The Asbury Park Airport was there until 1950 when it finally moved to Route 66 and Jumping Brook Road in Neptune, where it existed until the 1980s.