"It's a place where we start our day, where we make excuses to go to lunch," Mayor Tim Kriebel said at the ribbon-cutting on April 29. "It's a place where we try to end our day."
He was talking about the boardwalk, and specifically about the stretch from Suffolk Avenue to Cambridge Avenue that had just reopened after months behind construction fencing. It was the kind of line a mayor says at a ribbon-cutting, and it was also true, which is rarer. But stand at that ribbon a few weeks later, on a Wednesday night in August, and you'll notice something the speech didn't mention: the new boards end at Cambridge. Twenty blocks away, on the bay side, Ventnor Heights is still working with what it had.
What Actually Reopened
The math on this project is public and worth sitting with for a second. Ventnor's boardwalk reconstruction ran $12 million, with $7.1 million of that coming from the New Jersey Boardwalk Preservation Fund, a $100 million pool that former Governor Phil Murphy's administration split across 18 coastal municipalities. Put Ventnor's grant next to what its neighbors got and the number starts to mean something: North Wildwood pulled $10.3 million, Ocean City got $4.9 million, Sea Isle City received $2 million. Ventnor's $7.1 million sits closer to the top of that list than the bottom, which tells you the state considered this a priority repair, not a cosmetic one.
Commissioner Lance Landgraf called it the first major rebuild of that stretch since the aftermath of the 1962 storm, the one old-timers still call the time the ocean met the bay. He said the new construction should hold for 75 to 80 years. The contractor, Fred Schiavone Construction, got it done through a winter of weather delays and had it ready in time for summer visitors and the people who never left.
Here's the part that gets lost in the ribbon-cutting coverage: this was Phase 1. The boardwalk had been closed from Surrey Avenue to the fishing pier access ramp since early November, and only the Suffolk-to-Cambridge section came back this spring.
| Phase 1 | Phase 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Stretch | Suffolk Ave to Cambridge Ave | Suffolk Ave to Jackson Ave |
| Timeline | Fall 2025 to spring 2026 | Fall 2026 to winter 2026 |
| Status as of August 2026 | Open, ribbon-cut April 29 | Not yet started |
The Half That's Still Waiting
Phase 2 doesn't start until after this tourist season wraps, which means the second stretch spends its second full year as a construction zone before anyone gets to walk it. If you live near Ventnor Heights and use the boardwalk the way Kriebel described, to start the day or end it, you're using a different, older version of it than the one that just made the news.
That timing lines up with something else this town has been doing for years without much comment: running two separate concert series on two separate nights, twenty blocks apart, that never quite overlap.
Two Concerts, Twenty Blocks Apart
The season opened Memorial Day weekend, Saturday, May 23, with a Kick Off to Summer party built around the Party Wave Band, held at Ski Beach on Dorset and Burk Avenues in Ventnor Heights. From there the calendar splits by geography and by night, running under what the city's own promotional materials call two banners:
- Summer Beach Jam, at the boardwalk stage on S. Newport Avenue. Ocean at your back, tribute acts and party bands built for a crowd too big to sit still.
- Sunset at Ski Beach, Wednesdays, at Dorset and Burk Avenues in Ventnor Heights. Bay side, grass lawn instead of sand, the sun going down over the water during the set instead of behind you. The Wednesday slate was already running by July 8, when Don't Call Me Francis played the second show of the summer there.
Both are free. Both start vendors and sound check at 5:30 p.m. with music at 6:30, according to the city's own 2026 concert calendar. Ventnor has been named Best of the Press Concert Venue Gold Medal Winner three years running, 2023 through 2025, so this isn't a new draw. What's easy to miss is that the two nights serve two different versions of the same town. The boardwalk show pulls cars in from every side street between Newport and Suffolk. The Ski Beach show pulls from the quieter bayside blocks around Dorset, where residents are protective of driveway space on a narrow street.
If you're building a Wednesday around Ski Beach, Sapore Restaurant & Wood Fire Pizza on Ventnor Avenue and The Red Room Café on North Dorset are close enough to eat a real sit-down meal and still make the sound check. On the boardwalk side, Stella Restaurant, run by the father-son team of Nicholas and Vincent LoBianco and named to a national Top 100 list in 2023, and The Queen Bean Bistro, the only restaurant on the boardwalk with panoramic ocean seating, both work the same way for a Newport Avenue night. Earlier this August, Ski Beach's Wednesday slate included a free Grateful Dead tribute night on the 5th, the kind of booking that tells you the bayside series has its own following, not just an overflow crowd from the ocean side.
Beach badges went up to $20 this season, effective June 1, which is a small enough number on its own but adds a few more dollars to whichever side of town you're already choosing to spend your evening on.
Why This Particular Summer Splits The Town
None of this is new in the sense that Ventnor has always had an ocean side and a bay side with different rhythms. What's new is that this year, the two halves are on visibly different infrastructure clocks. The ocean-adjacent blocks got fresh boards in April and keep the marquee Saturday series that's won gold medals three years straight. Ventnor Heights got a Wednesday concert calendar as its main civic event of the summer while its stretch of boardwalk waits for a fall start date that hasn't been confirmed beyond "after tourist season."
That's not a complaint about the town's priorities. Phase 1 needed to happen before Memorial Day, and it did. But if you live near Dorset and Burk, this is the summer where you're getting the consolation version of two different investments: a concert series instead of new boards, at least until the crews come back in the fall. If you live near Suffolk and Cambridge, you got both.
For anyone who's spent a few summers here, that's worth knowing going into the fall, because Phase 2 will bring the exact same disruption, closures, and detours to the bay side that the ocean side just finished living through. The blocks that feel quiet this August won't stay that way once construction starts.
If you're curious how these two halves of town show up in the housing itself, from the boardwalk-close blocks to the quieter streets around Ventnor Heights, our Ventnor City neighborhood guide breaks down what each side actually offers day to day.
Whichever side of Ventnor you call home, the Cheryl Huber Team has spent decades getting to know both halves of this town, boardwalk and bay alike, and we're always glad to talk through what either one might mean for you. Find Your Perfect Shore Home.
