2) The Towns Around Asbury

Loch Arbour, Page 1

I just love Loch Arbour. I love the fact of it. Here we have a village that is just two blocks wide and five blocks long. It's .04 square miles. It's the county's smallest town, with a population of (more or less) 375 (which makes it about the 10th smallest in New Jersey). It's got a beach club on one side and a cupfull stores (on a branch of Deal Lake) on the other (Loch Arbour shares Main Street with Asbury Park and the dapper town of Allenhurst). Its picturesque south border is the main basin of Deal Lake; its north border joins Allenhurst.

If you have read my pages on Asbury Park you've already encountered the name Loch Arbour. The view from the Asbury side is most delightful, as pictured below.

1.2. Edgemont Drive, Loch Arbour, photographed from Asbury Park, across Deal Lake. (The Allenhurst water tower is at the extreme left of the photo.)

2.2. Edgemont Drive, Loch Arbour.

Many Colonial- and Victorian-style homes grace the confines of this little town.

3.2 Euclid Avenue, looking west.

Loch means Lake and Arbour suggests trees. The tract was partitioned from Ocean Township in 1820. Thomas White, a Scotsman, owned the land (which was previously owned by the founder of Monmouth County, Jacob Corlies). Though the name Loch Arbour appears on some of the earliest maps, it was not incorporated until 1957 (having seceded from Ocean Township).

Now here's a note concerning one of Loch Arbour's pleasanter curiosities. Turn off Main Street and proceed onto Euclid Avenue. Soon as you are at the corner of Euclid, look left and you'll see a kind of neighborhood built at a 90-degree angle into the regular surrounding neighborhood. This section is called Buena Vista Court. I don't know anything about the history of this charming indentation, but it certainly stimulates fantastic thoughts: Do elves live there? Or perhaps it is inhabited by 1920s vacationers who have stayed and who have never grown old (provided that they never leave the spot). Write your own Buena Vista story...

3.3 Buena Vista Court (looking north!)

Loch Arbour is a great place to live or just to bicycle through. If you are coming from the north or south, however, I suggest you don't blink.

Please go to the next page to see a few more pleasant images of Loch Arbour.

 

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