The Future Of Old AT & T Building In Bayville Looking Doubtful

BAYVILLE, NJ - Motorists who drive along the nearly deserted stretch of Bayview Avenue near Good Luck Point may wonder what the massive brick building perched in the marshlands is doing there.

Look a little closer. The building is fenced in. It has obviously been vandalized. There's probably not an intact window left.

"The building is at the end of its useful life," Berkeley Township Planner James Oris said. "It's in disrepair. It's really just not something that's easily repaired."

The land was purchased in the late 1920s by AT&T to use as a major, state-of-the-art communications center on the Jersey Shore. The facilities were a high-frequency, shortwave radio transmitting station providing telephone high-seas service to ships at seas and to overseas locations under the call sign WOO, according to www.long-lines.net.

Once the surrounding marshlands were covered with poles and attennas, jutting out into Barnegat Bay. They were removed several years ago and the property was donated to the Edwin B. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge.

The state of the building has deteriorated since it was first closed, even before Superstorm Sandy roared in on Oct. 29, 2012, Mayor Carmen F. Amato Jr. has said.

Now conditions inside are probably even worse, since the building stands only 18 inches above sea level.

Berkeley received a $30,708 Hazardous Discharge Site Remediation Fund ("HDSRF") several years ago to determine the state of the building and what if anything could be done with it.

The result of the study by T & M Associates should be revealed within the next week or two, Oris said.

The report will examine several possibilities, including saving the building, which Oris thinks is doubtful, sharing the property with environmental groups or building some sort of wildlife observational facility.

Berkeley Township bought the building for a dollar years ago, during the administration of former Mayor Jason J. Varano. Oris is fairly certain there aren't any environmental hazards from the building. The contents of a storage tank on site were removed years ago and the tank was fillled with concrete, he said.

But the state of the building has deteriorated since it was first closed, even before Superstorm Sandy roared in on Oct. 29, 2012, Mayor Carmen F. Amato Jr. has said. Now conditions inside are probably even worse, since the building stands only 18 inches above sea level. The nearby Good Luck Point development was decimated by the storm.

"The building needs to come down," Amato says bluntly. "It's been an attractive nuisance since the Township assumed ownership. It's been vandalized numerous times and the metal and copper wiring was stolen as well. In an effort to stop the building from being vandalized, the power was cut and the building was boarded up sometime in 2010. The interior of the building and basement is in disrepair. Of course Superstorm Sandy exacerbated it."

The acres of marshlands surrounding the building are now part of the Edwin F. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge, home to egrets, ospreys herons and even bald eagles.

AT&T bought 175 acres of the "Good Luck Tract" back in 1929. The Good Luck Point site was selected as a transmitting station and a site in Forked River as the receiving station.

"This location of the stations almost literally at high water mark was due to the fact that these experiments had demonstrated in a striking way the attenuation of signals traveling over an intervening strip of land between the station and the ocean," according to an article written by Fred Bunnell in 1940, now on www.mysite.verizon.net.

The original electronic facilities installed at Ocean Gate included a 15 kW shortwave transmitter... together with two curtain antennas seventy feet high, according to an article in www.ontheshortwaves.com.

"The death knell for the Good Luck Point station was a result of additional undersea cables laid between Europe and North America and satellite communications," the article states.

What do you think should be done with the building? Tell us in the comments section below:

Photo: Patricia A. Miller

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