Jersey Shore Magazine

J e r s e y s h o r e • S p r i n g 2 0 1 9 12 BEACHCOMBER continued from page 11 Eugene O'Neill in Point Pleasant - A Winter of Discontent "The Old House" on the northwest corner of Hall Avenue and Herbertsville Road in Point Pleasant, circa 1980. The house was built in 1863. O'Neill and his second wife, Agnes Boulton, moved into what they always called her family home in November 1918 and stayed till May 1919. The house was demolished in the early 1990s. B efore he became America's preem- inent playwright, Eugene O'Neill spent one winter and spring, from November 1918 to May 1919, writing and brooding in Point Pleasant. Seeking peace and solitude for his work, as well as a rent-free place to live, O'Neill and his second wife, Agnes Boulton, moved into what they always called "the Old House," her family home in Point Pleasant. It was a rambling two-story structure on the northwest corner of Hall Avenue and Herbertsville Road. The house was directly across Herbertsville from the rear of where the Quick-Check now stands. Built in 1863, it had just been wired for electricity the previous spring. A creaky windmill supplied water. Heat came from a series of individual coal stoves that required daily stoking and cleaning. Twenty- seven windows and northeast winds coming off the nearby Manasquan River insured lots of cold, drafty, win- ter days. The area was known as West Point Pleasant and at that time was still quiet enough so the approach of a motorcar was noticed. There was an attractive grove of small pine trees next to the Old House between it courtesy of the Point Pleasant Historical Society Museum and the river. Also near the river, and a couple of blocks away, Dr. Frank Denison had just founded Point Pleasant Hospital by putting aside four upstairs beds in his home for patients. The Point Pleasant Canal was under construction. The long- established West Point Pleasant Hotel (now The Shore House Bar & Grill) was nearby. O'Neill loved the sea and the coastline. In his early youth he had been a seaman on sail and steam ships. More recently he lived and worked in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This year he chose to live in Point Pleasant. He had a play in rehearsal in New York and when his presence was required, he could get to the city by train in two hours. However, the dramatist quick- ly discovered the Point Pleasant area oceanfront did not enchant him as Cape Cod had. "There was nothing in that flat New Jersey landscape that he could identify with any part of his own per- sonality," Agnes wrote in her mem- oirs Part of a Long Story. "Even the ocean appeared uninteresting to him, with its waves breaking monotonous- ly on the sand close to the old wood- The dramatist's unhappy stay in Point Pleasant 100 years ago inspired him to write a play that he ultimately destroyed. en boardwalk, the decrepit summer hotels and the flimsy summer cottag- es, and before long he stopped walk- ing down there." While O'Neill could be a notable drinker, he never went to a local bar. He seldom entered a store. Although the O'Neills came to Point Pleasant largely to get away from people, he nearly wound up living with a large group of in-laws. Unbeknownst to Agnes, her parents had decided to move back into the Old House for the winter, along with three sisters, a grandmother, three cats, and a dog. Obviously, this would not be an ideal living situation for creative writing. When Agnes realized the mix-up, she convinced her family to rent a small oceanfront cottage in Point Pleasant Beach and did not tell O'Neill about their presence just a few miles away. Agnes' father took a job at the local hardware store to pay the rent. When the thirty-year- old playwright finally found out his in-laws were living nearby and some of them whom he had not yet met came to call, he hid in the closet. A typical day in Point Pleasant for the man who was destined to Eugene O'Neill

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