A planned bayfront park at the old Trader’s Cove Marina in Brick could be a new home for the New Jersey Museum of Boating — and donors have already helped raise $350,000 toward building new quarters, said the museum’s Robert B. O’Brien Jr.
“We are definitely on our way with this,” O’Brien told members of Save Barnegat Bay, the environmental group that pressed the Brick Township Council to acquire Trader’s Cove as a public park instead of seeing a townhouse development built there.
O’Brien even had a sort of architectural rendering to show the group: an old photograph of the 19th-century U.S. Lifesaving Service Bay Head station. Museum trustees have copies of the original architect’s plans, located in the Library of Congress, and want to recreate the Victorian-style building at Trader’s Cove.
About the size of a large modern garage, the station was one in a series built by the federal government after a series of catastrophic shipwrecks that killed hundreds of people just a few hundred feet off New Jersey beaches in the 1850s. (more…)
