On the night of July 17, Avalon police walked onto the patio at Gully's, found the band Three and One two hours into a set that was booked to run until 10 p.m., and told them to pack up. A neighbor had called in a noise complaint. The 8 p.m. cutoff written into Gully's liquor license was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Weeks later, the Avalon Borough Council spent an entire meeting arguing about that cutoff, and voted, at its August meeting, to move it to 9 p.m. for eight Saturday nights this season. Councilman Jamie McDermott called the extra hour "part of living within the two blocks of the commercial business district." Gully's had already hired a sound engineer and agreed to turn its stage to face the building instead of the neighborhood.
That's the version of the story you've probably already seen if you follow Avalon on Facebook. Here's the part that doesn't get said out loud at council meetings: a short walk up Dune Drive, a business with the exact same noise problem solved it a completely different way. It didn't ask the council for an hour. It stopped letting the public in at all.
The Fight Nobody Has To Have Anymore
The Whitebrier sat at 255 21st Street for over a century, most recently under the Zurawski family, who put it up for sale in late 2022 as part of a 3.1-acre package that also included the Princeton, the Circle Tavern, the Rock Room, and the already-closed Sea Grill. It was, by most accounts, the loudest corner of Avalon. One longtime observer described the block as getting to be "like a bar street."
In early 2025, the Union League of Philadelphia bought it. Not the whole block, just the Whitebrier and its adjacent parking lots. Cape May County tax records list the property at $4.7 million, though the actual sale price was never disclosed. By Memorial Day weekend, the doors that had been open to anyone who walked up were open only to people with a Union League membership card, checked digitally on arrival. The dress code went from Jersey Shore no-shower to "relaxed yet refined." A member covers the tab on their account. A walk-in without a member escorting them doesn't get seated at all.
Nobody had to hold a hearing about that. There was no noise complaint to adjudicate, no police visit, no sound engineer retained under pressure. When a restaurant's entire audience is dues-paying members who already agreed to the club's rules, the neighbor two doors down has no standing to complain to the council, because there's no public event happening that the council has jurisdiction over anymore.
Same Town, Two Ways To Stay Open Late
| Gully's | The Whitebrier | |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Open to anyone off Dune Drive | Union League members and their guests only |
| How the noise question got resolved | Public council vote, sound engineer, stage repositioned, still capped at 9 p.m. | No public process required after the 2025 sale |
| Liquor license type | Standard plenary license with special outdoor-music conditions | Club license (Avalon's second, added by ordinance in April 2026) |
| Who decides what happens next | Borough Council, subject to more complaints and more hearings | Union League board |
That second club license is its own small story. Avalon had exactly one for decades, held by the Avalon Yacht Club. In April 2026, the council voted 4-0 to authorize a second one, over public objections from residents including Tricia Wilson and Martha Wright, both of whom argued the move existed mainly to let a private establishment sidestep the cost of a full plenary license. Borough documents named no specific recipient. Nobody had to guess very hard.
What The Councilman Actually Said
The line that explains all of this came from Council President Greg "Chet" Johnson at that same August meeting, when he told residents pushing back on Gully's extra hour that people buying into Avalon now aren't the same crowd that used to bring their own groceries for the week:
"People that come down now, they're not bringing their groceries. They want to go to restaurants. They want entertainment."
Read that next to what the Whitebrier's general manager, John Tracy, told a reporter last summer when asked whether the Union League was an outside force taking over Avalon. "These are people that were already here, mostly," he said. The Union League's own CEO put a number on that: on any given night on Seven Mile Beach, he estimated, roughly one in five diners at a restaurant is already a Union League member. That's not an outside force buying up the town. That's a large share of the town's own regulars choosing membership over the public model, one restaurant at a time.
Put those two quotes together and the shape of what's happening gets clearer. It isn't that Avalon's public spaces are being pushed out by money from outside. It's that staying public has gotten expensive in a specific way: every noise complaint becomes a council agenda item, every band has to fight for its closing time, and the business bears the cost of proving it's a good neighbor over and over, every season. Going private removes that cost entirely. No public seating, no public noise, no public hearing.
Where That Leaves the Rest of Dune Drive
Gully's isn't going private. It took over the old Black Cactus space at 27th and Dune, which itself only lasted two summers after opening in 2024 with a liquor license inherited from the beloved Jack's Place and Gallagher's Pub. Gully's built its identity around being the opposite of exclusive, an old-school shore bar with cornhole, wing nights, and a menu that got written up for its hanging candied bacon over grits. Its whole appeal depends on staying open to whoever walks in off the street. That's precisely why it's the business that has to keep negotiating with the council, season after season, for the right to have a band play past 8 p.m.
If you live in Avalon and you want a loud Saturday night that's actually open to you, Gully's has Saturdays through Labor Day with the 9 p.m. cutoff now in writing. If you're looking for the old Whitebrier crowd, you'll need a Union League card or a member willing to bring you as a guest, and even then you're capped at three visits a year as a non-family guest before that door closes too.
Two businesses on the same stretch of Dune Drive solved the identical problem and ended up on opposite sides of a line that didn't used to exist in Avalon: who gets to be inside when the music's still playing after dark.
If you're curious how these shifts in Avalon's commercial blocks connect to the residential side of the island, our Avalon neighborhood guide breaks the town down block by block, and the history behind buildings like the century-old Whitebrier is part of the same story we cover in our piece on shore home styles in Avalon.
Sources for the details above include the Philadelphia Inquirer's coverage of the Gully's noise ordinance vote, its earlier reporting on the Whitebrier's shift to a private club, and the Cape May County Herald's account of the April 2026 club license ordinance.
Whichever side of Dune Drive you end up on this season, the Cheryl Huber Team knows this island block by block, from the businesses that define its summers to the homes that back up to them. If you're ready to talk about what's actually happening in Avalon's real estate market this year, Find Your Perfect Shore Home with a team that's watched this town change for decades.
