ABSTRACT
Bruce Springsteen has made Asbury Park, New Jersey, famous. But that’s not really his hometown. He grew up fifteen miles inland, in Freehold, a small town of the sort that has almost disappeared since the freeways re-routed traffic. It isn’t a place of suburban ranch homes and halfacre lots. It’s the kind of community familiar to Americans who grew up before World War II—more than a bedroom to its residents, but without the pretensions of a city. There are a couple of factories—the largest makes Nescafe instant coffee—and the seat of Monmouth County; small shops rather than shopping malls. Towns like this have been sliding downhill for years; in today’s world, the very concept of such places is outmoded. Still, Freehold has a feeling of stability that tract housing can never create.
