By Amy S. Rosenberg, Philadelphia Inquirer
AVALON, N.J. — Marc Ziss is hanging on to the old Avalon. At 56, he’s still in a summer share house, a fading subculture he’s come back to every summer since the ’90s. There are not many left.
Ziss may not have moved on from the Avalon of the past — the laid-back beach town of bungalows, a party vibe buzzing from bar to bar — but the town sure has.
And that shift has never been clearer, after the Union League of Philadelphia paid $23 million to buy the sprawling, boozy Whitebrier on 21st Street and two adjacent properties, making them members-only.
Their launch on Memorial Day weekend included the cheeky “Please Shower Happy Hour.”
“It’s really kind of depressing these days,” said Ziss, who keeps tabs on what remains of Avalon’s live music scene for a Facebook page, Bands in Avalon and Beyond.
“What we knew was going on has now been engraved in stone,” he said.
He mused about Avalon’s expanding layers of exclusivity. “You ever buy tickets to an event, like a festival, and you bought the gold ticket, and you get there and it’s like, oh, the gold ticket is very much a regular ticket, and the platinum is what you really want?” Ziss said. “And then there’s a super platinum on top of that.”
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