The Empress Hotel (New Jersey)
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The Empress Hotel, located on the oceanfront at 101 Asbury Avenue, in Asbury Park, New Jersey, opened as a luxury resort for vacationing families in the 1950s. In the hotel's heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Judy Garland stayed there for a month.
In the 1970s, when Asbury Park began its decline, the hotel began to decline as well, notwithstanding Bruce Springsteen using it on the cover of his 1980 "Hungry Heart" single sleeve. It was very rundown and struggling for business in the late 1980s, and closed in 1988. It reopened in 1991, but quickly closed again.
It was abandoned for nearly a decade when, in 1998, Shep Pettibone bought the abandoned building and opened the Paradise Nightclub inside. The nightclub lured crowds of gay travelers away from Fire Island and instead to the beaches of Asbury Park. The hotel portion reopened in August of 2004, and is very popular among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transvestite travelers in New Jersey. The hotel was a typical doo-wop hotel at the Jersey Shore until Pettibone renovated it; today it is a stylish and clientele-savvy destination.
