Berkeley Township is located in Ocean County, New Jersey. It
was incorporated as a township by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature
on March 31, 1875.
It began with an Army officer named Lt. Edward Farrow, who began
buying up woodland with the idea of building a retirement community for
former Army and Navy officers. He built a railroad station, shops and
even a resort hotel called The Pines with the idea of attracting people.
But only 11 people ever built houses in what Farrow called "Barnegat
Park," and eventually he went bankrupt.
In the 1920s Benjamin Sangor purchased the area. The New York and
Miami developer imagined a vast and luxurious resort town catering to
wealthy urban vacationers. Between 1928 and 1929, about 8,000 lots were
sold in what called "Pinewald", a "new-type, residential, recreational
city-of-the sea-and-pines." It was to contain a golf course, recreation
facilities, and estate homes.
The developers immediately began construction of the Pinewald
pavilion and pier at the end of Butler Avenue. The Royal Pines Hotel, a $
1.175 million investment facing Crystal Lake, was built on the site of
an earlier hotel dating back to the days of Barnegat Park. It was the
focal point of the new community. The hotel was also used as an asylum,
then later a nursing home which changed ownerships. It's now the Crytal
Lake Nursing & Rehabilitation center.
Mystery surrounds the former hotel. It was constructed by Russian
architect W. Oltar-Jevsky in the early 1920s. Al Capone is said to have
frequented its halls, perhaps even venturing beneath the lake in tunnels
especially designed for smuggling alcohol during the Prohibition. One
newspaper article interviewed an unidentified man who claimed that "in
the early 1930s the then Royal Pines Hotel was frequented by society's
elite who, for $1.90 a drink, consumed prohibition liquor under the
watchful eye of men who had guns strapped under their coats."
In 1929, during the Great Depression, the resort community went
bankrupt. Today, development in the area has resumed and is progressing.
Berkeley Township Education
The Berkeley Township School
District service public serves public school students in grades K
through 6. Schools in the district are Bayville School, Carla B. Worth
School, and H & M Potter School, all of which serve K-4, and
Berkeley Township Elementary School for grades 5&6.
Public school students in grades 7 through 12 attend the schools of
the Central Regional School District, which serves students from the
municipalities of Berkeley Township, Island Heights, Ocean Gate, Seaside
Heights and Seaside Park. The total student population in the district
is approximately 2,400, instructed by 200 staff members. The schools in
the district are Central Regional Middle School for grades 7 and 8 (833
students), and Central Regional High School for grades 9 - 12 (1,494
students).
Berkeley Township Transportation
The Garden State Parkway is the primary access route, with two
exits in the Township. U.S. Route 9 and Route 38 run westerly from the
Barrier Island to Route 70.
