The Jersey Shore we grew up with is still there if you know where to look

Look out your window right now. The grass is getting a little greener every day. Easter is a few weeks out. And Memorial Day Weekend is under twelve weeks away.

The countdown to the summer of 2026 is already underway, and if you have been paying attention, it actually started last month when Shore rentals began booking up at a pace that felt more like a sprint than a stroll. That early surge is its own kind of signal. People are ready. After a winter that felt long even by New Jersey standards, everyone is pointing themselves toward the water.

There is something about the anticipation of a Shore summer that carries the same emotional weight as the countdown to Christmas. The reason for both is the same thing — warm memories of seasons past, and the quiet hope that this one will be just as good. We put pressure on ourselves to make it the best summer ever, the best Christmas ever, the best everything ever. But if we are being honest, the best times we ever had just sort of happened. We planned the vacation. The magic was mostly serendipitous.

READ ALSO: Don't skip the shore this summer - think differently about where you go 

The Shore I grew up with

I never considered Mays Landing the Shore, but we were close enough that the beach was never more than a twenty-minute drive. Mom would load us up and head to the towns between Atlantic City and Ocean City — Margate, Ventnor, Longport, sometimes Ocean City itself. Those drives are some of the clearest memories I have from childhood.

The Shore looked different then. Atlantic City's grand old hotels, the ones that gave the boardwalk its elegance and its gravity, were being replaced one by one by casinos through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. The rebuilding of the dunes along the Atlantic City beach changed the whole feel of the boardwalk there too. Before they went up for safety reasons, you could stand on those boards and see the ocean stretching out in front of you. That unobstructed view is gone now.

But some things held. Ocean City's boardwalk is still remarkably close to what it was. Pork roll sandwiches. Johnson's Popcorn. Kohr Brothers ice cream. Steel's Fudge. Manco and Manco pizza. The smells alone take you back thirty years the moment you step onto those boards.

The bungalows that defined a Shore summer

From Ocean City south, the biggest physical change of the past thirty years is the bungalows. Those small, humble, absolutely perfect Shore cottages have been disappearing steadily, replaced by three-story houses that maximize every square foot of the lot and cast long shadows over the neighbors. The math made sense for developers. The soul got lost in the transaction.  The disappearance of the shore bungalow was accelerated by the destruction of Superstorm Sandy and the rebuild that followed.

When our kids were little, we rented a bungalow in Avalon every summer. You know exactly the kind I am describing. Knotty pine walls. Stones for a lawn. Outdoor shower with a wooden door that never quite latched. Furniture that had been there since 1974 and was somehow perfect. No pretense, no granite countertops, no open-concept anything. Just a little house near the water that smelled like salt air and sunscreen and everything good about summer.

Those rentals are almost entirely gone now. The houses that replaced them are nicer by every measurable standard and somehow less of what the Shore was supposed to be.

What the Shore still gets right

Here is what I keep coming back to though. The ocean has not changed. The smell of the salt air when you roll the windows down three miles out has not changed. The feeling of sand under your feet at the end of the first full day of vacation has not changed.

The Shore we grew up with still exists in pieces, in the towns that held on to their character, in the boardwalks that resisted the urge to become something else, in the ritual of going back to the same places your family went before you.

The best summer ever does not require a three-story house with a rooftop deck. It never did. It just requires showing up, putting the phone down, and letting the serendipity take over.

That part has not changed at all.