Pinewald, New Jersey

 unincorporated area / community, draw only border

 Upload a photo

Army officer named Lt. Edward Farrow began buying up woodland with the idea of building a retirement community for former Army and Navy officers.

Farrow built a railroad station, shops and even a resort hotel called The Pines with the idea of attracting people. But only 11 people ever built houses in what Farrow called "Barnegat Park," and eventually he went bankrupt.

In the 1920s Benjamin Sangor purchased the area. The New York and Miami developer imagined a vast and luxurious resort town catering to wealthy urban vacationers. Between 1928 and 1929, about 8,000 lots were sold in Pinewald, a "new-type, residential, recreational city-of-the sea-and-pines." It was to contain a golf course, recreation facilities, and estate homes.

The developers immediately began construction of the Pinewald pavilion and pier at the end of Butler Avenue. The Royal Pines Hotel, a $ 1.175 million investment facing Crystal Lake, was built on the site of an earlier hotel dating back to the days of Barnegat Park. It was the focal point of the new community. The hotel was also used as an asylum, then later a nursing home which changed ownerships. It's now the Crytal Lake Nursing & Rehabilitation center.

Mystery surrounds the former hotel. It was constructed by Russian architect W. Oltar-Jevsky in the early 1920s. Al Capone may have frequented its halls, perhaps even venturing beneath the lake in tunnels especially designed for smuggling alcohol during the Prohibition. One newspaper article interviewed an unidentified man who claimed that "in the early 1930s the then Royal Pines Hotel was frequented by society's elite who, for $1.90 a drink, consumed prohibition liquor under the watchful eye of men who had guns strapped under their coats."

In 1929, during the Great Depression, the resort community went bankrupt. Now, development is starting off slowly.