If you don’t know what you’re looking at (and it’s likely you don’t) I’ll have to tell you a story so that you understand that what you’re seeing is a place of pure magic.
What you’re looking at is a legendary place, mythic even, and a highly-specific magical spot.
In that exact spot, by those brass bars, nearly 25 years ago, at least one life was changed forever.
It was in that exact spot, on the 26th day of the month of April (or was it the 27th?), in the year of our Lord 2001, that my best friend and love of my life was revealed to me by the Universe.
The picture is a little fuzzy (it is a screenshot from YouTube after all), as are the memories (it was closing time on dollar pitcher night after all), but I am certain that this was the spot.
It’s the spot where I saw her standing there, where I’d just seen a face, where a quarter of my life had almost passed, but where I’d come to see myself at last.
I never had a chance to hope that she didn’t fall in love with me, I never had a chance at all.
I never believed in love at first sight, never thought about it really, but it’s real. I can tell you it’s real because it happened to me. It’s still happening to me.
I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t ready for it. But there it was. There she was.
We think of that date now as our “real” anniversary, because the wedding a few years later only made it cool in the eyes of the state (maybe). The wedding just meant a mashed potato bar, a chocolate fountain and a vodka luge. We were truly wedded right there and then in that spot that night.
I’m sorry to say that the magic of that spot will never be available for you to experience in person. That brass service bar could be from any bar in any town, but this particular magical location was inside The Shamrock in Wildwood, New Jersey, and now it’s all gone.
For our 20th anniversary of that night, back in 2021, we took a little trip to Virginia to celebrate, but we made sure to race back to Wildwood. We wanted to mark that milestone in the place where it all started. We didn’t know it, but The Shamrock had been shut down only days before.
Just our luck, we thought. The place had been there for 80 years and just before we came to celebrate, they got closed down. Sounds about par for the course for us.
At the time, it was thought it was just a temporary shut down. We’ll be back, we thought.
We thought wrong.
The Shamrock was established in 1937, it graced us with its powers in 2001, and now it is no more.
Now I’m not sure anyone, even us, with our origin story, could with a straight face call The Shamrock paradise, but it without question put us on the path to find ours.
I’m not usually prone to sentimentality, especially when it comes to places or things, but when I heard it was going away, it made me wonder. How many others had stories like ours? How many other lives changed direction as dramatically from that very spot, or at least from inside those walls?
I don’t know what path my life would have taken if it weren’t for that spot, but I can say with all certainty that it would have been a worse one.
I met a truly wonderful person that night, a kindred spirit, a good soul – one that would become my everything – my best friend, someone I look up to, someone I look to for guidance, someone I live for, someone I couldn’t live without.
That night in that spot is the division line – before it, there was just me, after, it was us – from that point on and for now and all times that’s the way it will be, and it all started there in a place that doesn’t exist anymore. I also know of three pretty cool new humans who owe their very existence to the existence of that spot.
Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe it all would have happened anyway. Maybe it was destiny. If the Shamrock wasn’t there, maybe we would have met across the street while ordering too much food at the Dragon House. She doesn’t believe me, but a few days after we met when I saw her black Pontiac Sunbird with the Tool and Dave Matthews Band stickers, I realized that I had taken notice of her heading south on the parkway – thinking, “who’s the hot redhead with the confusing taste in music?” just a couple days prior to that magical Shamrock night, so who’s to say?
But thank you Shamrock for being there as a place for us to start this romance and for those dollar pitchers. We were sorry to see you go.
And Danielle, thank you for quite literally everything else. The place where it all started may have gone away, but the love never will.
The best is (still) yet to come.
That bar, it should be noted, has actually been preserved by the Wildwood Historical Society and currently resides in their George F. Boyer Museum on Pacific Avenue in Wildwood, just down the street from where the Shamrock once stood. It’s nice to know that we can still visit the spot where everything started whenever we’d like!
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been updated numerous times. It was initially written as a love letter to both The Shamrock and the love of my life I found inside its hallowed walls and posted to Facebook back in 2021, after we learned the Shamrock’s closure was to be permanent. Around that time, the Cape May County Herald used portions of it in their coverage of the Shamrock’s closure, and what it meant to former patrons. Later still, in 2024, The editor of the Wildwood Sun By The Sea magazine was gracious enough to run the story in her publication. Now that we have a newspaper of our own, and we’re writing about our love of the Jersey shore and our memories of it, we knew we had to publish it ourselves as well, especially since this newspaper is yet another example of something that would never have existed if it weren’t for that spot by the Shamrock’s service bar.