Asbury Park may be more closely associated with the star but a new exhibition in Freehold – the town where the Boss grew up – tells an earlier tale, along with 250 years of
American history
Darkness on the Edge of Town … That Bruce Springsteen song always comes to mind when, on visits to my mother, I drive through Freehold, the town I grew up in, and hit the intersection of East Main Street and Jackson Terrace. This is actually the meeting point of two Freeholds: Freehold Township, once farmland and now McMansions and other unchecked suburban horrors; and Freehold Borough, the old colonial town, dating from the 1600s. Long before that, the area was steeped in the traditions of the displaced Leni Lenape people.
The junction of Jackson and Main still feels like where farmland meets town, a stretch of dark country road, marked by a lonely gas station and a dilapidated barn before the asphalt corridor redefines itself with late-Victorian and early-20th-century buildings often draped in red, white and blue bunting. One
Queen Anne-style house is so striking it was used as the family home in 1990s TV show Sabrina the Teenage Witch.