Somers Point's Two Summer Clocks: The Concerts Are Ending, Bay Avenue Isn't

Friday night at William Morrow Beach still smells like sunscreen and someone's charcoal grill three blocks over. Down at the water, folding chairs are already staked out two hours before the band plugs in. A quarter mile up Bay Avenue, past the crowd, a nail gun is still going at a construction site that wasn't a construction site a year ago. Both of those things are happening on the same stretch of road, in the same week, and only one of them is going to be here in October.

That's the thing worth sitting with this particular August. Somers Point runs on a concert clock every summer, and everybody who's lived here more than one season knows how it goes: free Friday shows from June through the second week of September, then the beach empties out and the town exhales. This year, though, that clock is winding down against a second one that doesn't reset when the music stops. A stretch of Bay Avenue between Higbee and the Maryland Avenue corner looks almost nothing like it did twelve months ago, and most of what's new there isn't going anywhere when Labor Day passes.

The Concert Clock, Down to Three

The Legacy Concerts on the Beach series, presented by Tony Mart Cares, is in its final stretch. Thirteen free Friday night shows ran from June 12 through September 11 this year at the William Morrow Beach and Municipal Beach Park, the stretch of sand between Higbee and New Jersey avenues on Bay Avenue. Gates open at 7 p.m., and the arrangement has been simple for years: bring a chair, the show is free, and if the weather turns the whole thing moves indoors.

As of this week, three Fridays are left:

None of that will surprise a longtime resident. The series has picked up USA Today's 10Best "Best in Nation" title twice in the last three years, and it's the reason half the town treats Friday nights in summer as spoken for. What's less obvious, unless you've been walking Bay Avenue instead of just driving through it, is what's filling in around those three remaining shows.

The Corner That Didn't Used to Have Anything On It

A year ago, this stretch of Bay Avenue was mostly a memory of Bubba Mac's Shack, long since closed, and a vacant lot next to Motel 6. Walk it today and here's what's actually there:

• Caroline's By The Bay, at 450 Bay Avenue, is finishing its 25th-plus year as a family-owned, women-led restaurant in the city's Bay Front Historic District. Chef Rufino, who joined from Las Olas Taqueria in late 2023, still runs the Cali-Mexican and American menu, and the entertainment calendar hasn't slowed down: trivia Mondays, music bingo Tuesdays, open mic Wednesdays, karaoke Thursdays, live bands on weekends.
• Directly across the street, steel has been going up for Bay Ave Brewery, a project from local cousins Brian Murphy and Tom Dooner, who both hold graduate-level brewing science certificates. The plan is roughly ten beers on tap in a taproom with no full kitchen, food trucks parked out front instead, and a covered patio wrapping the building. They're aiming for a late summer or fall opening.
• A few doors down at 520 Bay Avenue sits the new Somers Point Paddle Club, built on the old boatyard site as part of a four-acre redevelopment that also includes Salt House, a 24-home single-family community. The club has two saltwater pools, two spas, cabanas, and a 125-seat restaurant, running seasonally from May through September. Membership filled past 70% of quota within months of opening.

Sean Scarborough, the developer behind the Paddle Club and Salt House, put it plainly when the project broke ground: "Bay Avenue is the address at the Jersey Shore now." That's a developer talking his own book, but the corner backs him up. Four businesses that didn't exist a year ago now share a single intersection with a restaurant that's been there for a generation.

What Closed, What Didn't

Not everything on Bay Avenue is new construction. Some of it is turnover, and the turnover tells its own story about what kind of place this is becoming.

Right next door to the brewery site, Mexiquila, which had gone through a multimillion-dollar renovation as recently as 2022, gave way this spring to Pablo, a new concept from the Cape May-based Zest Restaurant Group. And at 910 Bay Avenue, Smitty's Clam Bar reopened for its 2026 season on May 7, the same waterfront landmark it's always been, complete with the hour-long waits regulars have come to expect on a summer Saturday.

What survives the turnover is worth noticing too. Caroline's is closing in on three decades. The Anchorage Tavern, at 823 Bay Avenue, is open seven days a week from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., kitchen open until 10 p.m. on weeknights and 11:30 on weekends, which is closer to a year-round fixture than a seasonal draw. Those two places are the reason Bay Avenue has never gone completely dark in the off season, even in years when nothing else was happening.

Why This September Reads Differently

Most years, when the last concert clears out in mid-September, Bay Avenue's noise level drops by half almost overnight. The Clam Bar's outdoor deck empties. The Paddle Club, seasonal by design, shuts its pools until spring. What's usually left carrying the block through October is Caroline's and the Anchorage, doing what they've always done.

This year there's a third piece in that lineup for the first time. Bay Ave Brewery is timing its opening for exactly the moment the beach goes quiet, not before it. A taproom with a wraparound patio and no kitchen to speak of isn't built for peak tourist season the way Smitty's or the Paddle Club are. It's built to be the place people go once the folding chairs are back in the garage and the concert lineup is a memory until next June. That's a small shift, but it's the kind of shift that changes what a Tuesday night in October looks like on a street that used to just wait for summer to come back around.

Somers Point still runs on that concert clock, and it probably always will. But for the first time in a while, something on Bay Avenue is set up to keep going after it stops.

If you're already living near this corner of the city, you've probably felt the difference just walking past it this summer. And if you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood by what's opening on its main strip rather than what a listing sheet says about it, Liz Hildebrand Homes keeps a close eye on exactly this kind of change across Somers Point and the rest of Atlantic County. Curious what a home near Bay Avenue is worth with all of this happening around it? Get your instant home valuation and find out where things stand.