The organizers had secured the location at the last minute (Mr. Clinch had said he would only mount the exhibit if it could be on the iconic boardwalk), and the floor was still covered in interlocking foam rubber squares.

The photographer, 45, stood in the center of the room, greeting friends. A Leica M6 was slung over his shoulder like a guitar. “I have it with me all the time,” he said. “It’s kind of my main axe, you know?” Dirty-blond and mutton-chopped, wearing jeans, a vest and an untucked shirt, Mr. Clinch reminisced about the days before he had an all-access backstage pass to any show he liked. He started to build his concert portfolio, which now includes Bob Dylan, Jay-Z and Radiohead, by smuggling his camera past security in pieces. “I would take the lens off, give it to my girlfriend, who’s my wife now. She’d hide it; I’d hide film. I’d take the camera body and stuff it down my pants. Then we’d get in and I’d have to sneak up to the front and assemble everything back together.”

Outside, a mellow overflow crowd drank beer on the boardwalk, mingling expectantly in the late-summer evening air. Where was Bruce? Speculation deepened with the night. He’d roar in on his Harley. He’d sneak up in his Range Rover. He’d have a posse. He’d come alone.

Andra Napoleon, an attractive, dark-haired woman in a black-and-white polka-dot dress, was circling the exhibit with 10 copies of a letter she had written to Bruce in her purse. Each letter was sealed in an individual red envelope, and each envelope bore large, clear handwriting: “1984 – I was 21, you were 34 – Stone Pony.” The reference, Ms. Napoleon said, was to a night she shared a small table and two rounds with Mr. Springsteen at his fabled shore haunt. He told her about his upcoming album—Born in the USA, it would be called—and she tried to sell him a membership to Jack LaLanne, where she was a manager. “We were hanging out for over an hour, and we just clicked.”

The letter, which she was inspired to write after listening to the title track of Mr. Springsteen’s latest album, Working On a Dream, recounted that evening a quarter-century ago, and hinted at what Ms. Napoleon claimed was a lucrative business proposition. “I wish I could blurt it out, but I can’t!” she said. She had promised her mother that she would tell no one but Mr. Springsteen himself. “I want Bruce to launch it, because it is as big as Bruce.”

Ms. Napoleon’s horoscope that morning in Star magazine, which she said she never reads, but had opened while in line to buy lottery tickets at the 7-Eleven, had read: “Make friends with the boss!”

As the event wound down, this seemed less and less likely. Just as the Transom was wondering whether to skip the last train back to New York, Mr. Clinch got a text from Mr. Springsteen himself. The Boss wasn’t coming. Word on the boardwalk was that he had gotten stuck at a birthday dinner for his mother-in-law.

Chetrit paid $16 million for the hotel, with a re-opening planned for summer.

- John Koblin

4th of July, Asbury Park: A
History of the Promised Land,
by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In
July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman (The
Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water)
and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old
house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old
houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves
possessed by “full-blown houselust.” They wanted it: Not the three-story,
arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it—dilapidated, attached
to a “telephone book” of code violations—but as they imagined it once was and
could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr.
Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir,
his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of
what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to
purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the
Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within
the city of Cleveland—a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the
course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As
anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have
predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they
bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the
contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the
original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their
marriage—already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman
having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which
her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his
personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the
renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short
drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child
when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The
Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation
adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that
House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that
looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts
to analyze—or at least recognize—a group of interrelated issues that have
implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the
suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a
suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed
“exurbs” or “edge cities”? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention
of self—so much a part of the American character—ever be reconciled with the
larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family
rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we
bequeath to the future?

Along
with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints
of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with
a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his
“sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality”—and
yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that “contentedness” will be
shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully
worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland,
where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital,
has been in the news recently as “the poorest city in the country,” based on the
results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31
percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to
jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though,
is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30
percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent
of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The
vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning
yet also fastidiously documented 4th of
July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American,
and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870,
when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his
“colored man,” the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey
Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley
had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip
as “our Robinson Crusoe life,” and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation:
He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by
building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might
convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a
well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After
some resistance, Baker also reported that “delight has come into my soul,” and
from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100
years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how
Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that
Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley
establishments that excluded them. By 1924—Asbury Park's heyday as a watering
hole for middle-class whites—it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and
the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at
that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, “more than Alabama,
or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia.” Thanks to spectacular
corruption as well—among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it
seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk—the town began to slide
into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of
much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a
leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The
one thing that the city fathers never tried—investing in the West Side, where
most of the black population has always lived—is still untried. Baker is still
being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to
a hotel for lunch.

Daniel
Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty (You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke).
4th of July—whose chapters are
ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the
times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years,
and of other watershed events—tenderly intertwines a summary history of
American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the
city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story
of Asbury Park—now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of
Bruce Springsteen's songs—is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book
reviews have appeared in The
New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to
freshmen at Barnard College.

4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, by Daniel Wolff. Bloomsbury, 278 pages, $24.95

In July of 2001, author Michael Ruhlman ( The Soul of a Chef, Walk on Water) and his wife, photographer Donna Turner-Ruhlman, entered a large, century-old house on a quiet, curling street of soaring trees and equally dignified old houses in Mr. Ruhlman's native city of Cleveland, Ohio, and found themselves possessed by "full-blown houselust." They wanted it: Not the three-story, arts-and-crafts-inflected structure as they first saw it-dilapidated, attached to a "telephone book" of code violations-but as they imagined it once was and could be again; improved, even, with modern changes and additions. As Mr. Ruhlman recollects in House: A Memoir, his lovely, small narrative built of linked essays, the couple's fantasies of what the house could be induced them to lay out sums well beyond their means to purchase and rehabilitate it. They savored the craftsman's details, the Edwardian solidity, the zigzagging staircase and the countrylike setting within the city of Cleveland-a neighborhood that, as Mr. Ruhlman discovered in the course of considerable research, was one of America's first suburbs.

As anyone who has ever made substantial changes to an older house could have predicted, the Ruhlmans and their two small children got much more than they bargained for, both in terms of the daily exasperations of dealing with the contractors and in terms of cash outlay for the work, which far exceeded the original estimates. The project also put considerable stress on their marriage-already a delicately negotiated arrangement, with Ms. Turner-Ruhlman having given up her vocation to raise the children and create a home in which her husband could pursue his own full-time career as a writer according to his personal requirements of an exacting routine and quiet surroundings. (While the renovation was in progress, in fact, he worked in his father's house, a short drive away. His wife supervised the workmen, looked after the younger child when the elder was in school, and also painted all the rooms.)

The Ruhlmans' story ends on a boisterously happy note; however, their renovation adventures are not the real subject of the book. On his website (www.ruhlman.com), the author explains that House was begun as a novel and then converted into a memoir: It's a report that looks beyond the events it chronicles and, in its chapter-long essays, attempts to analyze-or at least recognize-a group of interrelated issues that have implications for America as a whole. What was the original promise of the suburb when it was invented as the 19th century drew to a close? How does a suburb differ in its effect on the city from the more recently developed "exurbs" or "edge cities"? Can the open-road, light-out-for-the-territory reinvention of self-so much a part of the American character-ever be reconciled with the larger human need for a sense of security, reliable community and rooted family rhythms? And if it can't, what are the implications for the quality of life we bequeath to the future?

Along with these ponderings come hints of resignation with options foreclosed, hints of nostalgia for unreflective happiness. Mr. Ruhlman is a seasoned writer, with a journalistic expertise honed over numerous books of reporting. In House, he plumbs what he calls his "sycamore heart … a deep, spiritual contentedness, a sense of immortality"-and yet he manages to keep us guessing as to whether that "contentedness" will be shared by the people he loves. The last scene is pure Frank Capra, though so carefully worded that within the ending are seeds of another, less exuberant beginning.

Cleveland, where the Ruhlmans have committed their resources and their emotional capital, has been in the news recently as "the poorest city in the country," based on the results of the 2000 United States Census, which determined that just over 31 percent of the city's population falls below the poverty line (owing largely to jobs lost in the steel industry and manufacturing). A close runner-up, though, is Asbury Park, N.J., where the census shows that a fraction less than 30 percent of families live below poverty line, with a little more than 21 percent of households earning under $10,000 yearly.

The vast majority of those households, as Daniel Wolff explains in his page-turning yet also fastidiously documented 4th of July, Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land, are African-American, and they've endured the broken promises of the whites in power ever since 1870, when the New York Methodist brush manufacturer James A. Bradley took his "colored man," the former slave John Baker, to a wooded part of the Jersey Shore, near Red Bank, to investigate some parcels of beachfront that Bradley had purchased back in New York, sight unseen. Bradley later described this trip as "our Robinson Crusoe life," and in the course of it he enjoyed a revelation: He could combine commercial real-estate development with religious devotion by building a strictly regulated vacation spot where members of the church might convene in the salutary sea air. (The city would be named for Francis Asbury, a well-known 18th-century Methodist preacher.)

After some resistance, Baker also reported that "delight has come into my soul," and from there to the emergence of Asbury Park superstar Bruce Springsteen 100 years later, the story of the city has essentially been the story of how Baker's people were consistently excluded from partaking of the best that Methodism had to offer while being exploited as servants in the very Bradley establishments that excluded them. By 1924-Asbury Park's heyday as a watering hole for middle-class whites-it was also a favorite spot for proselytizing and the odd lynching of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan: As Mr. Wolff reminds us, at that time New Jersey was the home of some 60,000 Klansmen, "more than Alabama, or Louisiana, and just behind the state of Georgia." Thanks to spectacular corruption as well-among elected officials, real-estate developers and, it seems, every other small businessman on the boardwalk-the town began to slide into deterioration during the 1930's. Riots in the 1970's sealed the doom of much of its real estate, and although it's still trying to reinvent itself as a leisure destination, Mr. Wolff isn't optimistic.

The one thing that the city fathers never tried-investing in the West Side, where most of the black population has always lived-is still untried. Baker is still being left to care for the horses after the long trip while Bradley goes off to a hotel for lunch.

Daniel Wolff is known as a chronicler of popular culture, with music a specialty ( You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke). 4th of July-whose chapters are ingeniously organized around celebrations of the national holiday during the times of Bradley, of Asbury resident Stephen Crane, of the Klan's mighty years, and of other watershed events-tenderly intertwines a summary history of American popular music, black and white, with the history of racism in the city, a braiding that gives strength to the recurrent suggestion that the story of Asbury Park-now significant to most Americans because it's the backstory of Bruce Springsteen's songs-is also the story of America in a larger sense.

Mindy Aloff, whose book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Forward and The Threepenny Review, teaches a course in the personal essay to freshmen at Barnard College.

Back in 1996, Mr. Wolffer's company, Euro Investors, purchased a majority stake in the Sea Life and Waimea Falls parks by assuming the $12 million mortgage for the two attractions, which were on the verge of foreclosure.

But after angering the locals with his development plans for Waimea Valley, the last intact ahupua'a –valley-to-sea ecosystem–on Oahu, and after wrangling with the bank that holds the mortgage, Mr. Wolffer put the 1,875-acre preserve up for sale last year. When he got no takers at $25 million and then $19 million, Mr. Wolffer put the parks under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection here in New York to keep the bank from foreclosing on the properties.

Now, in an effort to wrest Waimea Valley from Mr. Wolffer's control, the city and county of Honolulu are attempting to exercise eminent domain by condemning the property and buying it for $5.2 million, a price Mr. Wolffer called too low. "Condemnation you cannot fight," he said. "The only thing you can fight is the conditions."

"I don't know if Christian Wolffer is an honest man or an honorable man, but he has simply worked on a course that is in direct opposition to the best interests of the Hawaiian people," said Ralph Bard, a venture capitalist who lives on Oahu's North Shore, where Waimea Valley is located.

But Mr. Wolffer told The Transom that what the critics are saying is "absolute rubbish. I'm a simple businessman. I bought two attractions in Hawaii for a healthy price, and we are trying to make the best out of them in a bad economy.

"We are maintaining everything we have to maintain," he said, adding: "And it's my park."

Locals contend that gaining control of the land will be well worth the expense. The valley consists of approximately 80 million square feet of gorges, cliffs, forests, waterfalls and streams, as well as culturally and archaeologically significant temples, burial and living sites and the Waimea Arboretum and Botanical Garden, which maintains a number of endangered indigenous plants.

When the Waimea Falls Park first opened to tourists in 1974, it functioned largely as a showcase of Hawaiian culture, flora and fauna and was once Oahu's third-largest visitor attraction. But attendance and revenues nose-dived in the 90's. When Mr. Wolffer's company took over, he envisioned 120 private cabins built on the valley's floor, a wellness center and a tram that would whisk visitors over the treetops. He renamed it Waimea Valley Adventure Park (the name has since changed back to Waimea Falls Park), and marketed it as a place where visitors could take all-terrain-vehicle rides or scamper around a paintball range.

"The man didn't realize that he'd bought one of the most sacred Hawaiian spots in the state," said Scott Foster, director of communications for the Stewards of Waimea Valley, an ad hoc consortium devoted to the preservation of the area, who said Mr. Wolffer's decision was like deciding to "put an amusement park in the Vatican."

The amusement seemed to be coming at the expense of the park staff members who cared for the park's botanical and archaeological elements, as well as the elements themselves. Mr. Bard alleged that the park A.T.V.'s were running through archaeologically significant sites.

Residents of Oahu's North Shore began to organize.

"When New York developers with no connection to the cultural aspects of Hawaii come in here and just shit all over us, it kind of pisses us off," said the Stewards' Mr. Foster, who called Mr. Wolffer "a cultural vandal."

"We have done everything right," Mr. Wolffer said, and called the Stewards "a bunch of nonworkers who have no say. They're just a bunch of critics. We're trying to run a business."

Mr. Wolffer had more pressing concerns than the Stewards, however. Last July, the Bank of Hawaii, which holds the mortgage to the two parks, said Mr. Wolffer had defaulted. But Mr. Wolffer, who had renegotiated the terms of the loan four times since taking over the parks, sued the bank, claiming that his company owed the bank less than $500,000 on the mortgage, not the $4.3 million it was claiming.

Then, in August 2000, Mr. Wolffer enlisted Coldwell Banker Pacific Properties to sell the entire 1,875-acre property as a private retreat. Asking price: $25 million.

The notion that some billionaire might attempt to close off Waimea Valley to the public and make it a Pacific version of Ronald Perelman's Hamptons estate, the Creeks, "set off a firestorm," Mr. Foster said.

But Mr. Wolffer contended: "We told the city five years ago that they should own the park. Only when we put it up for sale did the city start to evaluate the situation."

As Honolulu and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs scrutinized the matter, Mr. Wolffer dropped his price to $19 million and walked representatives from Anheuser-Busch-owned SeaWorld through the park, but, at press time, no takers had been announced. Calls to the mayor's office and to Mr. Wolffer's attorneys in Hawaii and in New York went unreturned.

In April, Attractions Hawaii, the general partnership that owns the parks, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York. Mr. Wolffer said that he filed here because "I'm the owner and I'm sitting here." Most of the company's creditors were also based here, he said.

Mr. Foster said that the city is moving closer to acquiring the Waimea Valley via condemnation. If that happens, he said that the Audubon Society and O.H.A. might partner together to "fund the restoration."

But Mr. Foster isn't about to exhale yet. "You never know what the back-room political dealings are going to produce," he said.

–Frank DiGiacomo; additional reporting by Petra Bartosiewicz

New Yorker, New Yorker

Since her college days, writer Cheri Coons has wanted to make a musical about the raconteurs of the Algonquin Round Table. "The play that they had with language is the sort of lyric writing that I really enjoy doing," she told The Transom by phone.

This summer, Ms. Coons–who, at 42, is well out of college–finally realized her dream. She saw her Algonquin musical, At Wit's End , debut way off Broadway at the Florida Stage in West Palm Beach, Fla. And now she's set her sights on the Great White Way.

At Wit's End opens with Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Helen Hayes, and George S. Kaufman singing and dancing around the table. "You edit my columns with a cleaver and a hatchet," Kaufman brays at Woollcott, "I'm such a lucky bastard you're my Scrooge and I'm your Cratchit. / Some days I get discouraged, some days I feel like quittin'/ / And then I see your byline over something that I've written."

Ms. Coons' play begins in 1919. Even though Woollcott, who was The New York Times' theater critic, was a "sexual neuter" according to Thomas Kunkel's Genius in Disguise , the biography of Harold Ross, in At Wit's End he's in love with Jane Grant, who was the first full-time female reporter in The Times ' city room. But Grant gets married to Ross, which would put an end to it if the three didn't live together–which they did in real life, along with Hawley Truax, at 412 West 47th Street.

In real life, Ross told Grant to tell Woollcott to leave–"I don't know why there always came a time with Aleck when you couldn't stand it anymore," Grant once said–but in Ms. Coons' play, the scheming Woollcott departs of his own volition.

Ms. Coons combined this sexual tension with the drama of starting The New Yorker . The first issue bombed, but thanks to the last-minute generosity of yeast scion and Round Table member Raoul Fleischmann, the magazine stayed afloat.

"The end is bittersweet," Ms. Coons explained. "Woollcott realizes the bad things he's done and takes responsibility for himself."

Setting all this to music was easy for Ms. Coons, who has written a number of musicals, including Phantom of the Country Palace . "The fact that people like Irving Berlin and George Gershwin were both members of the Round Table, I immediately heard in my mind what I thought the show could sound like," she said. But making Ross–whom Grant once called the "homeliest man I'd ever met"–and rest of the Thanatopsis Pleasure and Inside Straight Club prance gracefully took a little imagination.

"Harold Ross was a cynical person, especially with regard to music," Ms. Coons said. "He wasn't a great fan of music …. And Woollcott, who is the most unlikely romantic figure–we gave him all of the love ballads in the show."

Down in Palm Beach, Ms. Coons' play was a hit. "I thought that the lyrics and music were very good. It's a very fast-moving, clever presentation," resident Morris Ball, 77, told The Transom. His wife, Roselyn, 74, agreed. "You're always interested in how are they going to work it out as a musical. They did it very well," she said. Mr. Ball added: "I was able to hear every word, and I don't hear that well."

Now Ms. Coons' biggest challenge is getting At Wit's End produced in New York. "We have a number of New York theaters reading it," she said. "I'd love to bring it to Broadway."

John Lahr, the drama critic for The New Yorker , was cautiously optimistic when he heard about the show. "Ross loved the theater," he said. "Loved Broadway. I don't think any magazine ever has had a stronger connection to a theatrical milieu than The New Yorker . I would have thought Broadway was Harold Ross' natural habitat." But Mr. Lahr also noted: "The difficulty will be making the lyrics as witty as the people."

Or as Ms. Coons' Harold Ross sings in the number "The Little Old Lady from Dubuque": "We have the wit of Robert Benchley / The punch of Dotty Parker, / We're as honest as the Gospel of Saint Luke. / Though our tone is somewhat posh, / We're not above a josh, / But we're not for the little old lady from Dubuque."

Somewhere, Dorothy Parker must be clearing her throat.

–Ian Blecher

Readings from Asbury Park

The rusted-out seaside town of Asbury Park, N.J., is taking another step toward economic recovery and cultural preservation by again honoring its most famous beach bum, Bruce Springsteen. Last week, the Springsteen fan site Backstreets posted an announcement soliciting contributions to the Springsteen Special Collection, which it plans to donate to the Asbury Park Public Library by Sept. 23, the Boss' 52nd birthday.

"Suppose there was a place that did have it all–or, at least, had the world's most complete collection of books and magazines written about Bruce," read the Backstreets posting. "And suppose that place was in a real library, which you could visit. And it was in Asbury Park, NJ …. Well, this ain't no dream."

Robert Stewart, director of the Asbury Park Public Library, sounded like he was unprepared for the reality of such a collection. "Asbury Park isn't a very big town. Our library is what you'd call medium-sized," Mr. Stewart said, clearing his throat.

As a result, don't expect the library's Springsteen room to feature the latest in bootlegged concert recordings–an illegal but essential facet of Bruce scholarship. "As far as I know, it's just going to be print material, because videos and CD's and cassettes are a much bigger preservation problem," Mr. Stewart said. He explained that the library is already slightly overwhelmed by the costs of preserving the printed material with tools like Mylar sheaths for magazines and acid-free boxes for papers products. "They all cost money, and Asbury Park is one of the poorest cities in the state of New Jersey," Mr. Stewart said. "We're in the bottom 1 percent poverty level and we don't have the money."

But won't a shrine to Mr. Springsteen generate money? Mr. Stewart laughed. "It's a prestigious thing for a library to have unique special collections because people come to use them for research, but generally they don't produce income."

As for the academic legitimacy of a library collection devoted to a man once called "the future of rock 'n' roll," The Transom went to John Baky, director of La Salle University's library, which recently made news for its Bob Dylan special collection.

Mr. Baky opined that unless the Boss himself got involved, the collection would consist mostly of "T-shirts and ticket stubs and flyers." La Salle's Dylan collection includes around 300 to 500 vinyl and cassette recordings, and another 600 to 700 books and magazines containing information and analysis about the folk singer.

"There's no way that Springsteen is going to have, over a 50-year period, the kind of iconic nature that Dylan had," Mr. Baky said. "He's too derivative. It just doesn't seem like the range of his material is wide enough to sustain the kind of interest we're talking about." Mr. Baky added: "You're not going to find the kind of serious writings about Springsteen as might exist about Dylan."

Then again, Mr. Springsteen never appeared on an episode of Dharma & Greg .

According to Backstreets' list of materials already in the collection, there are currently 597 magazines, which according to Backstreets editor and publisher Chris Phillips "have been very well taken care of" by enthusiastic, not to say compulsive, collectors. They've got the July 1973 Rolling Stone Lester Bangs review of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. , but are still looking for someone to donate the July 1985 edition of Muppet Magazine featuring the "Kermit Greensteen, Born in the SWAMP" cover. "We're looking for stuff that's in really good condition," Mr. Philips said.

Lest anyone believe that there are no "serious writings" about Mr. Springsteen, the 62 books already in the collection include copies of Tramps Like Us: Music and Meaning Among Springsteen Fans , written in 1998 by Daniel Cavicchi and published by Oxford University Press, as well as A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen , a 2000 University of North Carolina Press book. And for the Germans, there's Idole: Von Hibbing nach Asbury Park by Siegfried Schmidt-Joos, published in 1984 by Populare Kultur.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Baky.

A publicist for Mr. Springsteen could not confirm that the performer was aware of the undertaking.

– Rebecca Traister

E.A.T. in Provence?

Sandwich king Eli Zabar might be able to wow Upper East Siders with his haricots verts (at $18 a pint) and potato dauphinoise ($15 each) at his Madison Avenue hangout E.A.T, but what will the inventors of les dauphinoises think? Gallic sources told The Transom that the walls of Café Le Progrès, in the picturesque village of Ménerbes, have recently been acquired by Mr. Zabar, who owns a vacation home in the village, and rumors have been swirling about as to what le milliardaire américain intends to do with le establishment . The café, which is smack in the middle of Peter Mayle country, boasts dramatic views of the Luberon mountains, as well as its very own in-house newsstand and mustachioed cafetier (the current manager, who is leasing from Mr. Zabar). And thanks to Mr. Mayle, throngs of Americans have taken to the region.

But local sources told The Transom that noticeable changes have yet to take place at Le Progrès, and that Provençaux might have to wait a little longer to discover the appeal of a New York bagel and lox. The sources said that Mr. Zabar's purchase may have been motivated by nothing more than sheer altruism–an effort to keep his local café from being turned into a tourist trap. Reached at his Ménerbes home, Mr. Zabar declined to comment. The café's manager, calling Mr. Zabar a "discreet man," also refused to comment, adding that he didn't see why an American couldn't own his French café. A question, however, burned his lips. "So, he's famous in New York, this monsieur ?" he asked. "He owns a lot of restaurants?"

–Elisabeth Franck

I've always had a guilty fondness for Bruce Springsteen too, the bittersweet fusion of exhilaration and dread bred in disintegrating boardwalk towns like Asbury Park. Although I can go through long periods of not listening to him at all, suddenly a single song on the radio will drive me back to incessant, obsessive replay of certain others to the point of emotional exhaustion and drained walkman batteries.

This happened most recently with two songs on his Greatest Hits tape, two songs that share a fateful overlap, such that if you've got an auto-reverse on your walkman, you can hear "Atlantic City," then flip the tape-direction switch and hear "Secret Garden" on the other side–a one-two punch of mesmerizing emotional power. Sometimes I think "Atlantic City" may be the great Springsteen song. In the same way that Atlantic City itself seems to sum up in an intense, compressed way all the desperate longings and anxieties that roll down all the pitted boardwalks of all the beach towns of the Jersey Shore to fester in close quarters in that casino hell, "Atlantic City" as a song can be seen as a compression of all the most urgent and powerful Springsteen songs, a single that combines his multiple songwriting strengths–narrative, musical and emotional. It's a terse elliptical account of a desperate guy with debts "no honest man can pay," who's called on to "do a favor" for a friend down in Atlantic City in the midst of a bitter mob war. He's hoping the deed (presumably a hit) will wipe the slate clean, settle the debts of the past, allow him to disappear into America and start a new life with his sweetheart. It's what he hopes, but it's clear from his tone in the terse, compressed James M. Cain-like cadences of his voice that he doesn't believe it for a minute.

And when you hear the refrain–" Meet me tonight in Atlantic City "–you know he's meeting more than his girl; he's meeting–after one last gaudy night–his grim destiny. There's something about that refrain that captures that peculiar, haunting Springsteenian urgency, that fusion of romance and dread, of love and metaphysics, that kills me:

Everything dies, baby, that's a fact

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty

And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Meet me tonight in Atlantic City.…

He's meeting more than a girlfriend, he's dressing up for Death. It's Antony and Cleopatra on the boardwalk. ("Let's have one other gaudy night. Call to me all my sad captains.") It puts you in a state and I'm not talking about New Jersey. And then when the final incantatory reiteration of " Meet me tonight in Atlantic City " comes to a close on an echoing diminuendo, you can flip the auto-reverse and right there on the other side it seems like the same brooding chords start stirring themselves into the somber erotic mystifications of "Secret Garden."

Don't give me the ol' raised eyebrow about "Secret Garden" either, just because it was on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack and some idiot West Coast Top-40 DJ started the fad of interpolating movie dialogue into the song's silences and turned it into a mega-hit that made way for the even more unfortunate mega-hit remix of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On" with moist Titanic dialogue morsels.

It's always seemed to me that the trick to truly appreciating the glories of American popular culture at its best is to overcome the tacky adhesions of mere popularity–to get over the Jerry Maguire associations of "Secret Garden"–and tune into the thing in itself, appreciate its pure empyrean pop sublimity. So if you lower the raised eyebrow and listen to "Secret Garden" you'll find it to be an ecstatic expression of awe at the elusiveness and mystery of women, a mystery that transcends traditional "chicks are strange, man" mystification to gesture lovingly at some mystical apprehension beyond that–something akin to the beautiful awestruck hopelessness of Neil Young's "Helpless" with its "Blue, blue windows behind the stars" gesturing to a Mystery beyond the mystery. Like "Atlantic City," "Secret Garden" puts you in a state, and again, it ain't the Garden State.

So I set out for the Jersey Shore, for the drive to Asbury Park and then down to Atlantic City with the echo of those two songs ringing in my ears–and thoughts of Springsteen as a songwriter revolving in my head. My "Atlantic City"/"Secret Garden" jag had prompted me to shell out fifty bucks for the big new Springsteen lyric book Songs (Avon Books), a fascinating document in the history of fin de siècle popular culture whose release seems to have been overshadowed and overlooked in the hype over the release of the expensive four-disk box set of unreleased Springsteen songs, outtakes and alternative versions. I'm still listening to that, studying it, and I'll have more to say about it, but I found the lyric book (which contains the words for all the songs that had been released on previous albums) a revealing and thought-provoking evocation of Bruce's evolution as a songwriter, one that might require more than one column to explore. But one thing it did was focus the Bob Dylan comparison for me.

When I spoke of the way Springsteen was "a guilty pleasure" for me, part of the guilt comes from the fact that a powerful strain of pop-culture conventional wisdom holds that if you like Bob Dylan you can't really like Springsteen, too, or you can't like him as much because he's so derivative of Dylan, or you can't like him in the same way. Or if you really like him then you don't really like Dylan (in the correct way) and you're kind of shallow for not realizing it.

I disagree. I think there was really a kind of premature judgment on Springsteen made too early in his career by many, especially by many Dylan fans, a judgment based mainly on a dismissal of his early Dylan-derivative work, a judgment that ignores his extraordinary subsequent growth as a songwriter, a growth the lyric book demonstrates: the way he shed the Dylanesque training wheels, the shallow surrealism and cheap carnivalesque imagery that hobbled his early work and permitted him to emerge full-fledged as an artist in his own right, with a voice and a spell all his own.

The lyric book itself seems a deliberate echo of the Dylan lyric book, Lyrics 1962-1985 (now out of print, with the long-promised updated successor apparently stuck immobile in some Dylanesque publishing limbo). Bruce's book is a big production, featuring words to nearly 150 songs interspersed with reproductions of the lined sheets of three-hole-punch notebook paper on which Bruce scrawled many of his first drafts. The inclusion of the first drafts with the writerly cross-outs, revisions and re-thinks suggests that Bruce wants to be taken–like Dylan–as a real writer, not just another pop singer. And that he deserves to be.

Sure, you see the way–particularly in the lyrics for his first two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. , and its follow-up with the painfully pretentious title, The Wild ,The Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle –Dylanesque pretensions crippled his early work and prevented many people from taking his later work seriously for too long. I know it did for me. Sure I loved "Rosalita" (if you don't love "Rosalita," your soul's too dead to appreciate any pop music) but whenever the super-fast tempo of songs like "Blinded by the Light" slowed enough for me to hear the lyrics, I felt repelled by what seemed to me such obvious copping from Highway 61 Revisited -period Dylan. It was Highway 61 Revisited revisited. "Mary Queen of Arkansas" is "Queen Jane, Approximately"–all too approximately. (And the lyric book now reveals to me that the one line I thought original and daring–a line in "Blinded by the Light" I always heard as "cut loose like a douche"–a line I kind of admired for injecting a joyful vulgarism into Top 40 pop–is really the far more conventional "cut loose like a deuce ." I hate when that happens.)

Still, despite many bad-Dylan moments (like the opening of "Blinded by the Light" which goes, "Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat"–yuck!) you can catch glints and glimmers of what's to come, particularly in "Spirit in the Night," that soar beyond the still-clunky derivativeness (did he lift "Crazey Janey" from Yeats' "Crazy Jane"?) to some ecstatic incantatory Springsteenian realm of its own.

And there's a line I hadn't paid attention to before in "Growin' Up" that could be the metaphor for the way Bruce unlocked his own voice, his own place in the rock-'n'-roll pantheon; "I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car." That engine in that old parked car was rock-'n'-roll when Springsteen started playing with a bar band in Asbury Park in the late 60's. Post-Dylan, post-Beatles, the engine of its inventiveness was stalled and–like Van Morrison, like Neil Young, like Tom Petty–Bruce found the key not in some new means of transportation but in hot-wiring the old. It wasn't dead, or if it was, it was a case of maybe everything that dies someday comes back , and with Born to Run it came back. He brought internal combustion back to that dead engine again.

Part of it had to do with a trade-in: He traded in Dylan for Roy Orbison and Phil Spector, a shift signaled in the opening lines of the very first song on Born to Run , the still incomparable "Thunder Road": "As the radio plays Roy Orbison singing for the lonely/Hey that's me …"

"That's me": That's him finding his voice, finding a purer, simpler lyricism, but one no less haunting and powerful. A process of purification and simplification would rid his work of sophomoric Dylanesque surrealism and ultimately produce such elegant, compressed masterpieces as "Atlantic City" and "Secret Garden."

But I have to admit I was slow to catch on. I liked "Born to Run" as a radio hit, but I refused to buy the album until finally someone turned me on to its successor, Darkness of the Edge of Town , which was so dark, so noir, so edgy , it finally caught my attention, and then sent me back to Born to Run and forward to The River . He's done some great songs since then, but to me Darkness on the Edge of Town is the heart of Springsteen's darkness–and greatness. Darkness featured what still might be the three strongest Springsteen songs: "Badlands" (an homage to the amazing Terrence Malick film), "The Promised Land" and the searing, soaring title track.

Before I get deeper into Darkness on the Edge of Town , before I get deeper into the Darkness on the Edge of Asbury Park that has enveloped not just the edge but the whole, the soul of the town, indulge me. Let me cite from my study of the lyric book my newly revised, highly personal list of absolutely indispensable Springsteen songs. A list that includes only two songs from the first two albums, "Spirit in the Night" and "Rosalita," then three from Born to Run , "Thunder Road," "Backstreets" (which at times rises to a doomed grandeur) and the title track. Three from Darkness ("Darkness" itself, "Badlands" and "The Promised Land"), three from The River ("Hungry Heart," "The Wreck on the Highway" and "The Price You Pay"–one of the all-time greats). Only one from Nebraska , "Atlantic City." (I just don't like Bruce in his ersatz Woody Guthrie mode, it's well intentioned but it just doesn't play to his strengths as a songwriter. So no selections from The Ghost of Tom Joad .) Only one from Born in the U.S.A. , "Dancing in the Dark." (I just don't like brassy stadium rock.) Two from Tunnel of Love , "Tougher than the Rest," one of his most beautiful pure love songs, and "Brilliant Disguise." Only one from Human Touch , but it's a killer: "I Wish I Were Blind" a shattering ballad of stricken jealousy. One from Lucky Town , "If I Should Fall Behind"; and two that appeared only on the Greatest Hits compilation "Streets of Philadelphia" (commissioned for the Jonathan Demme film) and, of course, "Secret Garden."

There! Dispute it if you like, but I'd argue that these 19 songs, my personal greatest-hits list, rival Dylan's at his most powerful and lyrical (although not at his most visionary and Joycean). I'd argue they approach the level of the songs Dylan was writing in his love-tormented Blood on the Tracks period. A period in which Dylan's work–and I know this will be heresy to some of his fans–sounds most Springsteenian.

I'll return to these songs and their strengths in a later column but I want to return to the Jersey shore for a moment, to that Jersey shore pilgrimage that took me as far south as the Hieronymous Bosch-like hell of the Trump Taj Mahal on a holiday weekend, just about as low as you can go. But I want to talk about an earlier moment, a moment on the desolate, blighted, boarded-up Asbury Park boardwalk.

In the best of Springsteen songs you hear the echoes of Asbury Park in its first stages of decline, a distillation of its disintegrating beach-town glamour that transformed the tacky organ-grinder grandeur of beach music into something rich and strange.

But the decline and fall that Springsteen limned has turned into a dismaying plunge. Some 10 years ago, when I last checked out the Asbury Park boardwalk, it had turned grim, dingy and menacing, but I could still play Skee-Ball and get a little frisson of post-Bruce boardwalk vibe. But now it looks like frozen death, a desolate, blasted landscape of the sort I used to see when I hung out with Brooklyn homicide cops in the bad days of East New York in the late 80's. A bitter, blighted wasteland. I hope someday if Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey gets nominated for national office (as many speculate she will in the year 2000) that someone comes here with a camera crew and captures the reality–the skull beneath the skin–of Govenor Whitman's New Jersey. But it's Bill Clinton's boardwalk and Al Gore's America too, this scarred and scary damaged vista that gives the lie to the notion that the rising Dow lifts all boats. There's a lot of wreckage here, structural and human, that should wipe the grin off Alan Greenspan's mug when he boasts about our fabulous full-employment economy.

And where's Bruce, why isn't he doing anything about the hellhole his home base has turned into? Shouldn't he be writing an open letter to Governor Whitman demanding that she take some action to revive the corpse of this boardwalk, this town that was the birthplace of his sound and sensibility? Maybe everything that dies someday comes back .

Where's Bruce? Well, one place he could be found, in spirit at least, in the frozen desert the Asbury Park boardwalk has become, is in a haunting image I came across on the wall of a long-decayed and shuttered barn-like structure called "Palace Amusements," that once featured something called the "SKOOTER RIDE." A kind of Pompeian mural of lost joy in a city of the dead.

The damaged signage seemed to have more to communicate than mere decay: all that was left of PALACE was ACE and the T had dropped off AMUSEMENTS. So if you stared too long at that Asbury Park Skooter Ride mural (as I obviously did) it could be saying ACE, AMUSE MEN! Or ACE, A MUSE, MEN! Was this an oracular message the young Springsteen, Asbury Park ace, saw speaking to him from the Skooter Ride Wall? There is that line from "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out": "Teardrops on the city, Bad Scooter searching for his groove."

I found myself transfixed by the frozen smiles painted on the depictions of the Skooter Riders suspended on the wall in their primitive bumper-cars. A strange mixture of what appeared to be terror and pleasure affixed on their faces. Frozen smiles that seemed to reflect some alchemy of fear and desire–that signature Springsteen fusion of exhilaration and dread. Is this where Bad Skooter found his groove–his muse? Is this where he first saw the skull beneath the skin of the Amusement Palace of life? The darkness on the edge of fun there in those painted faces. The price you pay for a few brief moments in the promised land. Meet me tonight in Atlantic City and I'll tell you.