The 25-year-old woman walks off the dance floor and looks around. The music is loud, but the crowd is quiet. A few friends from a local military training base sit at a table. A group of regulars hovers around the outdoor bar.
It used to be like this all the time, says Jennifer Petruski. Then one day cameras showed up at the club.
Suddenly the music got better. The cover jumped.
A glance at the places on our “Jersey Shore” tour.
THE “JERSEY SHORE” HOUSE
Where: 1209 Ocean Terrace, Seaside Heights
Info: seaside-realty.com/jersey-shore-house-rental.htm
THE SHORE STORE
Where: 1209 Boardwalk (Boardwalk and Kearney Avenue),Seaside Heights
Hours: 10 a.m. to midnight daily; open later on weekends.
Info: shorestore.com; 732-830-6122.
THE BEACHCOMBER BAR GRILL
Where: 100 Ocean Terrace, Seaside Heights
Hours: 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Sunday to Thursday; 10:30 a.m. to 4 a.m. Friday and Saturday.
Info: beachcomberbar.com; 732-793-0526.
RIVOLI’S
Where: 781 Fischer Blvd., Toms River
Hours: Noon to 11 p.m. daily.
Info: rivolis.com; 732-270-3634.
KARMA
Where: 401 Boulevard, Seaside Heights
Hours: 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. Wednesday (teen night); 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Thursday (local night); 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Friday; 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. Saturday; 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Sunday.
Info: myspace.com/clubkarmanj; 732-830-3003.
And Karma became the hot spot to go on a Saturday night.
Call it the “Jersey Shore” effect. The MTV show – which averaged 9.3 million viewers during its most recent season – has been drawing locals and tourists to Seaside Heights ever since its debut 18 months ago.
A few weeks ago, we decided to spend a day at the “Jersey Shore.” We went to the house where cast members stayed, stopped by the T-shirt shop where they worked, ate chicken Alfredo from the restaurant where they dined and even visited the club where they partied.
So take a ride with us.
The cabs are here. It’s T-shirt time.
2:46 p.m., 1209 Ocean Terrace
The wood shingles are peeling. The white railing has been defaced with a black marker. Someone left a desk chair a few feet from the stairs – an awkward lawn ornament for a property that has no front lawn.
And yet people flock to this Seaside Heights home.
Four girls leave Great Adventure and come here. Three Toys “R” Us employees wander over to take a look. A married couple stops by to celebrate a fourth wedding anniversary.
“It seems like everybody comes down to do this,” says Catherine Torres, the woman commemorating her anniversary.
The parade to 1209 Ocean Terrace continues. A few people say the house looks smaller. Most say it looks filthy.
“That one there?” says Robert Delauro of Brooklyn. “That’s a [expletive] house.”
If you watch MTV, then you have seen “Jersey Shore.” And if you have seen “Jersey Shore,” then you know this house. It is the spot where the Situation wore the shirt before the shirt, the place where Snooki ate pickles, the house where Ronnie and Sammi fought. And fought. And fought.
The garage has been painted green, white and red – the colors of the Italian flag – so locating the house is easy. If you miss it, just roll down your window.
“Everyone knew where it was,” says Cheyenne Bauer, a 20-year-old from Clifton Park, N.Y. “They were like, ‘Kearney Street, take a right.’ “
This house has become a base camp for “Jersey Shore” tourists. Fans start here, gawk at the house, pull out their cameras – snap! snap! snap! – and then proceed to the next location. The show averaged 9.3 million viewers this winter. Now those viewers are making trips down to Exit 82, crossing the bridge into Seaside Heights. They visit the bars, the restaurants, stores and beaches that Paulie, Vinny and JWoww made famous.
“They want to get what they ate and they want to sit where they sat,” says Tony Rivoli, the owner of Rivoli’s, an Italian restaurant that the “Jersey Shore” cast made popular.
Some fans who visit these locations walk away with stories. Others go home with T-shirts.
3:20 p.m., The Shore Store
A young man walks inside the Shore Store. He passes the T-shirts on the left wall – the ones with every catchphrase uttered during the show’s 35 episodes.
Cabs are here
Come at me bro
Yeah buddy!
He makes his way to the counter.
“I got a question, man,” he says. “Are you hiring by any chance?”
Danny sizes up his prospective employee. He does not seem sold. The young man pleads with Danny.
“I’ll work as much as you need me to work,” he says.
Danny tells him to come back Sunday. At 10 a.m. He has a shift for him. And he will probably have a shirt for him, too. A few years ago, Danny says he had to beg his employees to wear the store’s official T-shirt. “Now it’s the hottest thing,” he says.
Danny – “The Boss” on “Jersey Shore” – does not like to give out his last name. MTV used his last name to promote the show a year ago. The next day, he says, 700 people sent him Facebook friend requests.
He and his brother own the house where all the show’s shenanigans take place. It’s located right next to the store that he runs. Up until a few years ago, not many people knew who he was.
“The first episode aired,” Danny says. “All of a sudden, people are in front of our door, knocking on our door. ‘Is Snooki there?’ It’s no longer our house. It’s now America’s house.”
Fans cannot go inside the house, but they do wander inside the store. Four girls from Bound Brook … a pair of travel agents from Atlanta …
“I have someone from Australia here every single day,” Danny says. “People that go to New York and Philadelphia now come to Seaside Heights [during] their trip. They’re cutting out Atlantic City. They are cutting out Atlantic City and they’re coming here.”
He poses for photos. He offers directions to other “Jersey Shore” hotspots. And he sells a ton of T-shirts.
“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Danny says. “I’ve worked in this store since I was about 14 years old. And this [Memorial Day weekend] was the busiest I’ve ever seen it.”
He finds it amusing, comparing the hoopla to the scene outside Carlo’s Bakery (“Cake Boss”) in Hoboken or inside Cheers in Boston. “Everything has its time frame,” he says.
But until that expiration date, he is enjoying the extra foot traffic.
“Everyone thought it was going to bring a bad element to Seaside,” Danny says. “It’s brought nothing but a good element. Mothers, fathers, kids that are 13 to 17. I’ve got to say they may have brought the best, best crowd to Seaside Heights. It was not the drunken, party animal you might have thought. It’s the teeny boppers.”
Those fans who are not teeny boppers go looking for a bar.
4:33 p.m., The Beachcomber Bar Grill
The chair has eyes – blue eyes – and purple eye shadow. A 23-year-old woman who grew up in Pompton Plains is sitting in it. Half an hour earlier, she was drinking at the Aztec with some friends. Then she made her way down the boardwalk to the Beachcomber Bar Grill.
“As soon as I walked in,” says Taralyn Lamont, “I was like, ‘Oh my God! This is the place where Snooki got punched in the face. This is terrible.’ “
But she did not walk out. Most people do not. Many visit the scene of the crime. Michael Carbone, the owner, does not discourage this. He seems to enjoy telling the story of that crazy night when a young man named Brad Ferro clocked Snooki with his right fist.
“He was standing with a bunch of friends,” Carbone says. “I didn’t even think he knew what he was doing. He just kind of reached out. I mean, there were security guards standing all around. There was no warning, no nothing. It just happened.”
So do people come in and ask about the punch?
“I see people all the time fake it at the bar,” Carbone says. “They’ll be taking pictures of them getting punched.”
He was the one who had blue eyes painted on the back of that barstool, labeling it “Snooki’s Chair.” Even after the punch, he said, the cast members continued coming here about three times a week.
“They’re here in town 24-7,” Carbone says. “So, you know, you only see a few hours on TV, but us people in the town, we see them every day.”
Even on vacation, Carbone cannot get away.
“I went to Belgium last year,” Carbone says, “and ‘Jersey Shore’ was on TV in Belgium in the hotel. That and National Geographic were the only two shows I could watch in English.”
Over in Snooki’s seat, Lamont mulls the price of the “Jersey Shore” house. She heard it costs $2,500 a night to rent.
“Dude, I would totally do it,” she says.
Lamont tries to line up investors. She turns to her two friends at the bar.
“Want to do it with me?”
They roll their eyes.
5:16 p.m., Rivoli’s
It’s a nine-minute cab ride from the beach to the restaurant on Fischer Avenue. One turn off Route 37 is a two-story building with a maroon façade and matching awning. There is a digital sign with red light bulbs out front.
Yup. This is it. Come on in.
The owner is wearing a white designer T-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Tony Rivoli likes to have fun with that sign out front. When the show first aired, he used it as a campaign to lure cast members into Rivoli’s.
Hey Paulie. Stop here. Have dinner.
He is convinced it was the sign that changed everything. One day producers showed up with waivers to sign. Then the cast came in for dinner. A few months later, the episode aired on a Thursday night.
On Friday afternoon …
“The phones didn’t stop ringing,” Rivoli says. “Didn’t stop ringing.”
On Friday night …
“We ran out of food,” he says.
Business boomed. He hired eight more full-time employees. On the digital sign, he took a tongue-in-cheek jab at the president.
Jersey Shore created eight more jobs than Obama
“When I was growing up down here, I would always go to the Stone Pony on Sunday nights,” Rivoli says, “because most of the time Springsteen was going to be there playing with Cats on a Smooth Surface. It’s the same phenomenon with the ‘Jersey Shore.’ These kids come here thinking that the ‘Jersey Shore’ is going to be here. A lot of times, they do stop in.”
He said that “Jersey Shore” fans now account for almost 40 percent of his business here. Fans have come from Australia, Arizona, Illinois…
“On our Facebook, people from Somalia wanted me to mail them food,” Rivoli says. “I didn’t know they had Facebook in Somalia.”
On days when the cast members decide to pop in, he usually gets a half-hour notice. If they’re coming in on a Saturday, it gets tricky. Rivoli rearranges tables, shuffles seats around. So far, they have stopped in four different times with the cameras. Twice they sat in the front room, twice in the back room.
Rivoli has their usual orders committed to memory. JWoww likes grilled calamari with plum tomato sauce on the side. Vinny orders chicken stuffed with sausage. Ronnie gets “chicken paradise” (chicken stuffed with crabmeat). And Paulie orders chicken alfredo – a dish that Rivoli occasionally puts on the specials menu as “Paulie’s Chicken Alfredo.”
But ever since Vinny uttered that two-line poem – “Rivoli’s, Rivoli’s, where you can get cannolis” – fans have been clamoring for that dessert.
“I can go through eight dozen in two days,” says Lorraine Trippanera, the restaurant’s manager.
“That’s a lot of cannolis,” Rivoli says. “Especially [because] have you seen the size of the portions we have? I don’t even know how people can eat dessert here.”
His customers make room. Then they take a nap.
And then they go clubbing.
9:41 p.m., Karma
An older gentleman in a baseball cap walks out to the truck parked in front of the club. On the bed of the truck are four spotlights. He turns them on. They rotate clockwise, casting four beams of light into the sky.
At 9:59, a group of girls pull up across the street. They do not put any change in the six-quarters-per-hour parking meter. Instead, they hop out of the van and snap a quick photo. Seconds later, they’re gone, their van turning left on Webster Avenue, vanishing into the night.
Four minutes later, it’s a kid in a green shirt. His friends cross the street, but he lingers behind with his camera. He takes a photo, and then rejoins his friends.
Everyone wants a shot from the opposite sidewalk. Bathed in blue, the five letters on the front of this building have become iconic.
“This Karma sign is probably the second-most photographed [thing in Seaside Heights],” says Karma owner John Saaddy, “besides the MTV house.”
He is wearing a black track suit, holding a cigar in one hand, a few days removed from one of the hottest Memorial Day weekends since the club opened four years ago. On Saturday, 4,700 fist-pumping fans walked through the door.
This is where the cast members go – and in one memorable episode, this is where they go. One scene showed JWoww ducking behind an empty bar to relieve herself.
“All the bathrooms and everything else and you’re gonna go by the bar?” says Tim Anderson, a 42-year-old bartender who was working that night.
He laughs. He is tending bar with two women outside, but three bartenders might be overkill tonight. The place is empty. One of the other bartenders says that Memorial Day is a classic fake-out – the crowds that weekend are huge, but there’s a lull before the club picks up steam a few weeks later.
Even so, people are still taking photos. A few days earlier, Anderson says, there was a car accident in front of the club. A fan tried taking a photo while driving.
“Smashed into the back of another car,” Anderson says. “I’m like, ‘Dude, stop and take the picture.’”
So get your camera ready. Seaside Heights is ready for another close-up.
“It’s now the center of the Jersey Shore,” Saaddy says. “Before ‘Jersey Shore’ it was Point Pleasant, Long Beach Island. Now it’s Seaside Heights.”
E-mail: kerwick@northjersey.com
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