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Wesley Lake. Undated. Ocean Grove, NJ. Citizen photographer for Blogfinger. ©

Pondweed in Wesley Lake August 2015. This is an invasive species which grows in shallow, polluted, murky waters. Low oxygen is often present. Lake Ave. citizen photo. Special to Blogfinger ©

1873. Partial map of Monmouth County. Note the stream heading southeast  into  Long Pond  estuary and then out to the ocean. That stream contained crystal clear fresh water. Where is it now?  Submitted by Paul Goldfinger from the original. © 10/31/16

By Paul Goldfinger, Editor @Blogfinger and Jack Bredin, Blogfinger reporter and researcher.

Question: When is a lake not a lake?

Answer: When it is needed by developers.

When Ocean Grove was founded in 1869, Wesley Lake was called “Long Pond.” It was an estuary. This means that a network of fresh water streams flowed from the west and emptied into the Pond; then the Pond emptied directly into the Atlantic Ocean.

Within the estuary, salt water from the Ocean would flow in with the high tide and mix with the fresh water in the Pond. Then the water would flow out with the low tide.

The clear brackish water in the Pond created the perfect conditions for an abundance of life to thrive there; the Pond was a rich source of food for many generations of Lenape Indians and it was a spectacular natural ecosystem when the OGCMA established Ocean Grove.

When the OG Camp Meeting Association purchased all the land parcels needed to establish the town, the Ross Pavilion and Campgrounds, located at the North End, next to Long Pond, were already operating.

The OGCMA’s original plan at the North End was for single-family houses, but the Pavilion and the Campgrounds would become a popular vacation destination on the Jersey Shore, and the Pavilion could serve up to 2,000 meals each day.

As the Town of Ocean Grove had no sewer system, the Pavilion’s owners developed their own private system.

A dam was built at the Pond’s Ocean inlet, separating the Pond from the Ocean. With that event, the estuary no longer existed, and the estuary had become a lake. The OGCMA changed the name to Wesley Lake.

The fresh clean water from the Lake would then flow over the top of the dam and into a water retention basin located about 4 feet below the top of the dam.

A sewer pipe would carry the wastewater from the Pavilion to the same water retention basin. That dirty water from the Pavilion consisted of raw sewage from indoor toilets and water from sinks, cooking, and bathtubs.

That mixture of Lake freshwater and untreated wastewater collecting in the basin would then flow through another pipe, running under the beach, to be discharged hundreds of feet out into the Atlantic Ocean.

The Ross pavilion sewer system was later used for the CMA’s plan to replace the Pavilion with the 1910 North End Complex that included a hotel, a new pavilion, swimming pool, cafeteria, boardwalk amusements and the Strand Theater. The North End Complex closed years ago, but the dam, basin and piping to the ocean remain intact.

Today, Ocean Grove has a sewer system to treat the wastewater from indoor plumbing, however the clear fresh water from natural streams that used to run into Wesley Lake has been cut off by urban sprawl and replaced in large part with the dirty-water run-off from paved streets, mostly in Asbury Park, and it is killing the Lake.

The amount of dirty-water run-off from the streets of OG into Wesley Lake is miniscule by comparison, but that could change with the proposed North End Redevelopment Plan.

That street dirty-water mostly comes off paved streets and it contains silt, toxins, chemicals, garbage, animal feces, and dead animals. Toxins from under the ground (eg from old gas tanks in Asbury) leach into the soil to wind up in the Lake. Canada geese, which used to stop temporarily at the estuary, now stay permanently to foul the ground water. The Lake water became inhospitable for healthy plant and animal life. The vibrant living ecosystem of the area had been destroyed.

The Redevelopment Plans for Asbury Park and Ocean Grove need to address the street-water run-off into the Lake, or maybe they already have, but now, for all intents and purposes, Wesley Lake is dead, even though there is a bi-town “Wesley Lake Commission” charged with the responsibility of protecting the use of the Lake for “Recreation and Conservation” only. Their mission is not to deal with street water run-off.

Under the jurisdiction of the Wesley Lake Commission, in 2014, the name of the Lake was officially changed on the Tax Map to “Wesley Lake Detention/Retention Basin. “ In other words, the entire Lake is now a bi-town municipal facility.

The plan is for the Lake to be used to decontaminate dirty-water run-off from the streets of Asbury Park predominantly, using that same old “sewer system” that empties into the Atlantic Ocean.

By allowing dirty-water drainage due to urban sprawl to enter the Lake and the Ocean, the Wesley Lake Commission has failed in its mission and it has written its own obituary.

Concluding topics for Part 1 of this sad environmental saga:

1. Where is the AWOL Ocean Grove Home Groaners’ Association on this issue?
2. Where is the State Dept. of Environmental Protection in all of this?
3. Wesley Lake is on the Green Acre list and map of “Public Open Space” where it is reserved by the State of New Jersey for “Recreation and Conservation in Perpetuity?” Who is enforcing that mandate of “recreation and conservation” at Wesley Lake?
4. There should be a recorded Deed Restriction that reserves the use of Wesley Lake for recreation and conservation. That should be located at the County.

We at Blogfinger suggest that the mission and master plan of the Wesley Lake Commission should be to restore the Lake back to an estuary.

The State or the Army Corps of Engineers should develop a plan to remove the Wesley Lake dam and restore the Ocean Inlet, letting Mother Nature reestablish the estuary and secondarily the health of the lake. Of course something would have to be done to pipe the filthy storm sewer drainage elsewhere.

Watch for more installments of this important topic.

MOZART:   “Motet in D Major” with the Latvian Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir

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