Vintage Postcard – Ortley House
Ortley House
On the Beach at Second Avenue
Ortley Beach, N.J. Tel: 201-793-8466
Efficiency Apartments and Cottages
OPEN ALL YEAR
A “Superchrome” Color Product by Bill Bard Associates Inc., Monticello, N.Y.
92953
(c) 1966 by Bill Bard Associates
This lovely vintage postcard is unused. And when I say “lovely” I mean…well. It is an odd little card, isn’t it? The pool is right smack next to the parking lot. You’ve got some plaid old man swim trunks. A girl with bad posture on the diving board. The hotel is nothing special to look at, and the sign on the top…nice effort? I don’t know. The color of the sky and the color of the pool are nice, with the umbrellas adding a nice bit of color repetition as well.
Here’s a facebook page for you to check out. Ortley House was hit by Superstorm Sandy one year ago. Here it is on 9/20/2010 (Google Earth):
And here it is on 11/3/2012 (Google Earth):
September 17, 2020
Hey! I stumbled upon your post on the Ortley House! I’m from New Jersey and my friends (family) owned the Ortley House.
I have to tell you how awesome this place was. My mom worked there as a teenager (her best friend’s parents owned the motel), and we stayed there when I was a baby up until the late 70s in and out of season. The original owners sold it in the 80s and it became the condos you see in the aerial shot pre-Sandy.
This card was a perfect representation of the shore (in NJ we refer to the beach as the shore) vacation in the 1960s. The motel is right on the beach on 2nd Avenue. The pool was a perfect place to spend the day if the ocean wasn’t your thing. The oceanfront had a patio for grilling and eating outside. The ocean beach was wide white sand with purple wampum shells (currency for the Lenni Lenape Indians of the area) and there were rafts and tubes to rent and use. There were some pretty good waves for surfing, rafting (pre-boogie boarding), and body surfing and great sandbars/pools during low tide. There was a little grill for lunch with hotdogs, hamburgers, and pork roll and cheese (it’s a Jersey thing). They also had a state of the art ice cream and bottle coke vending machines. The cottages were cute 2 bedroom 1 bath where there always seemed to be an abundance of sand on the floor, almost everybody walked barefoot. The Hotel rooms were in the building facing the ocean, they had huge balconies, two separate sleeping areas. In either the cottage or the room there were no TVs, we had radios and games to play. We always got in our pjs after the beach, pool, and shower right after dinner. Playing all day really wore you out and the sound of the ocean lulled us to sleep. For special occasions we went to Barnacle Bills for miniature golf/arcade games, when we got older we could go to the boardwalk in Seaside Heights (yes, the same one as in The Jersey Shore – Ugh, we’re not really fond of that show). Many of the same families came each summer and the parents would catch up on the year while the kids had friends to play with again.
I’m sure I’ve carried on too long and probably gave you more info than you needed. It was really a lovely place to go for the summer. Just wanted to give you some backstory on the place in the postcard.
Thanks for posting this and bringing back some fond memories!