(!) A new interpretation of the shore. It was not the physical factors operating upon 

 the coastline which had undergone a dramatic change but rather man's perception of them. 

 The beach was now more than an accumulation of sand. It was a recreational resource and a 

 producer of profit. Increasingly, the ocean generally, and the waves in particular, became 

 depicted as "enemies"— threats which had to be controlled to the greatest extent possible. 



(2) The dollar value of permanent buildings and other facilities, and, later, of land 

 itself. The construction of roads, hotels, restaurants, paviUons, and boardwalks attracted 

 additional vacationers and vacationers' dollars to a given stretch of beach. Such a 

 combination resulted in even-greater values being placed on coastal land, e.g., in 1922 the 

 assessed value of tlie ribbon of land along the entire New Jersey coast was over $300 

 million.^ ^ The 10 years which followed saw tax ratables for that same shore property 

 exceed the $550 million mark, or about $4 million a mUe of beach. 



As Cunningham so aptly stated, "Without giant hotels and boardwalks set rigidly in place, 

 erosion wouldn't matter one bit. . . . Indians who visited the shore each summer centuries 

 ago didn't worry about the shifting sand."^ 



b. Changes in Coastal Theory. The loss of valuable property as a result of beach erosion 

 brought a great deal of attention to the problem. Newspapers of the time, as well as the 

 more technical literature, were replete with articles and pictures describing the destruction 

 which followed severe storms. Reference was often made to the paucity of basic knowledge 

 of coastal processes, a situation which fostered dependence on the trial-and-error method in 

 dealing with the problem.* 



Efforts were made to find a reason which would explain why beach erosion had 

 apparently become so severe over what seemed to be a short period of time, creating almost 

 emergency conditions at some locations. As is sometimes the case when a natural process 

 becomes a "problem" which has been culturally accelerated, many of the people 

 immediately involved were too close to the situation to be able to take an objective view. 

 Thus, rather than seeing coastal erosion as a natural phenomenon and taking full cognizance 

 of this fact when developing shore sites, some other explanation was sought— some 

 broad-scale alteration in nature— to account for this force which was now destroying 

 valuable property. The explanation wliich became widely accepted was that of a general 

 subsidence "at a rate of 1 to 2 feet per century" of the Atlantic coast of the United States, 

 and in particular the coast of New Jersey.^ ^ It was theorized that the slowly sinking 

 coastUne was allowing waves to impinge farther landward than they had been in earUer 



*For example, an article by Henry S. Sharp appearing in The Scientific Monthly in July 1927, contained the 

 following comment: 



"Conditions vary so widely from place to place that rule-of-thumb methods are sure to give a large 

 percentage of failures, and a structure successful at one place may be a dismal failure at another. On the 

 other hand, the engineer who wishes to attack his problem scientifically finds that science has done very 

 little to help him. He is almost entirely without trustworthy facts, and must work up his data from hasty 

 studies of his own."'^ 



