Restoring Homes, Rebuilding a City
Coaster Photo
Dan DiBenedettos home on Sunset Avenue in Asbury Park was built by the Barbara Walters family around the turn of the last century.
By JOANNE L. PAPAIANNI
Planning Board President Dan DiBenedetto favors substance and style when it comes to the redevelopment of his adopted city, Asbury Park.
DiBenedetto is also a member of the Urban Enterprise Zone committee and having lived here since 2000, has seen first hand and been personally involved in the major changes that have taken place in the past three or four years.
DiBenedetto’s day job is as an attorney with offices in Manhattan and Roseland.
He left his mother’s home in Spring Lake to purchase a home on Sunset Avenue.
She was quite surprised I left Spring Lake on the ocean to live in Asbury Park on a lake, he said.
Explaining the move he says, “Spring Lake was very suburban. This is a city this is fabulous this is diversity, there are a ton of things to do.”
After thinking for a moment about his new hometown he mused, “Everybody who lives here is special….but also a little odd.”
DiBenedetto has refurbished his home thus far in the true spirit of restoration verses demolition and rebuilding.
He found copper gutters in the garage of his new home and restored them to their original look.
“It’s restoration with a little upgrade,” he says.
His home, at 515 Sunset Avenue, has quite a history, beginning with the fact that the Walters family, as in the Barbara Walters family, originally built the home around 1900.
His basement with its bar, very low ceilings and sliding walls, depictis the exact look of the old speakeasies built during prohibition.
DiBenedetto said he met the journalist once and asked her about the speakeasy she firmly denied any such thing existed.
“But,” says DiBenedetto with certainty, “it was a speakeasy.”
In 1959 the house was sold to a woman from Brooklyn, Mrs. Gelb and her children.
According to DiBenedetto, Mrs. Gelb was a friend of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and was one of the founders of the March of Dimes.
“She moved from a big 17-room house in Brooklyn,” he said.
DiBenedetto has friends in high places, including Anthony Perrotta, a designer who works for one of Martha Stewart’s companies who has helped him with the interior design of his home.
“He has been along for the whole ride.”
The exterior of the home is stucco, painted a muted pink with green loden trim. It has a brick porch with several steps leading up to the furnished front porch, which is decorated in dark colors and accessories made of materials including wicker, copper and wood.
“I’ve been here from the beginning of the redevelopment. It’s incredibly exciting: it’s the rebirth of a city. That is the beauty, the bones of this city.”
-Dan DiBenedetto
On the walls are two large photographs of the tall ships in New York Harbor, one from 1986.
The floor of the entrance foyer is made of large marble tile in shades of black and brown with a beautiful life-sized urn set against one wall.
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