Good Luck Point Almost Unrecognizable 20 Months After Sandy

by Patricia A. Miller

Sometimes the only way to tell where a house once stood in Good Luck Point is to look for the mailbox.

This small spit of tidal marshland land that juts out into Barnegat Bay is a collage of empty lots, bigger houses going up on pilings and rotting ranches at the mercy of bay winds and waves. No children play in the streets.

If you stood on Good Luck Drive on Tuesday afternoon, you'd have a very small inkling of what it must have been like on October 29, 2012, the day and night Sandy roared into Bayville.

The bay was whipped into whitecaps. Waves smashed against bulkheads, sending geysers of water into the air. Power and phone wires literally hummed in the strong south winds, a precursor of Tropical Storm Arthur heading north.

Maybe no one should have ever built here, in such a vulnerable spot. But it was home for decades to middle-class families. Now the small homes are slowly being replaced by larger homes, high up on pilings.

And the battered, Sandy-struck homes that remain are the saddest.

The front door of one is wide open. A faded orange sticker warns that the house is an unsafe structure. Peek inside and you can still see coffee cups stacked in a cabinet in what once must have been a kitchen. You can see right into the house from the back and side.

Head farther down the street and stop at 2 Good Luck Drive. A rusty horseshoe is still nailed to the front of the house. Another section of the house on the side of the lot still sits topsy-turvy, where Sandy left it. The family room in the back of the house has vanished. Sandy tore it away, leaving only the fireplace.

Back on Bayview Avenue, the tidal marshes glow cobalt in the late afternoon sun. An osprey tends to its nest high atop a phone pole.