"Joe, that's perfect reef material."
Chuck Casagrande said this to Monmouth County Engineer Joe Ettore in the middle of a routine planning board meeting in 2022, while Ettore was giving an update on Bridge Project S-32, the county's plan to tear down the old Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge and put up a new one in its place. Casagrande, who chairs the county planning board and has fished New Jersey's coastal waters his whole life, wasn't thinking about traffic patterns. He was thinking about what happens to seventy years of concrete once a bridge comes down, and whether it had to end up as fill somewhere inland.
It didn't. Over the following few years, that same concrete has been loaded onto barges and sunk off Sandy Hook, where the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection approved it as the foundation for a new artificial fishing reef.
The bridge you're used to seeing missing
If you've driven Rumson Road toward Ocean Avenue at any point this past year, you've likely watched the old span disappear piece by piece. Richard E. Pierson Construction Co. of Pilesgrove has spent months working through a demolition county officials originally targeted for completion by spring 2026, with fender removal and final cleanup meant to follow soon after. As of this past summer, the work was described as nearly finished, though the county hadn't announced a formal completion date. The bridge being taken apart was built in 1950, a double-leaf bascule structure 661 feet long that required repairs in both 2002 and 2013 before the county concluded it had reached the end of what repair could fix.
This is not the first bridge on this stretch of the Shrewsbury River, and it won't be the last time the crossing gets rebuilt. The full run, going back to 1870, looks like this:
- 1870 – The Jumping Point Draw Bridge, a 340-foot wooden span connecting Ocean Avenue to Rumson Road, built after Milfin Paul acquired 100 acres between the two waterways.
- 1881 – An iron replacement costing $36,700, with tolls set at a penny for a walker, a nickel for a one-horse coach, and a dime for two horses.
- 1900 – A temporary wooden bridge while a permanent replacement was designed.
- 1901 – A 660-foot steel swing bridge, built for $65,000 and in service for fifty years.
- 1950 – The bascule bridge now being dismantled.
- 2025 – The new span, which had a soft opening in July 2025 and is now carrying full vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle traffic.
Six bridges in 155 years works out to a new crossing roughly every 26 years on average, though the 1950 bridge nearly tripled that pace on its own, lasting 75 years before the county finally stepped in.
What's actually happening in the water right now
The reef work is separate from the bridge project on paper but tied to it in practice. County officials have said the concrete has to meet specific criteria before it's accepted for reef use: no asphalt, no oil, no plastic, no rubber, no foam. Once a load clears that bar, it goes on a barge, gets routed around Sandy Hook, and is placed at a designated reef site.
The pace has been incremental. One barge load went down in January 2026, and county officials said at the time that two or three more would follow by summer. That's a small contribution against New Jersey's broader artificial reef program, which has placed more than 4,371 deployments across 17 reef sites since 1984. But officials have also flagged what's coming next: the Oceanic Bridge, which carries Rumson-area traffic across the Navesink River to Middletown, is expected to contribute roughly four times as much material as the Sea Bright span once its own replacement work reaches the demolition stage. The Sea Bright bridge, in other words, is functioning as a pilot for how the county handles bridge material going forward, not a one-off.
The county has also structured the arrangement so that Pierson receives a tax credit for donating the material to the reef program rather than trucking it to a landfill, and officials have said future demolition contracts can include the same option. If that holds, the fishing reef quietly becoming permanent off Sandy Hook this year may end up as one seed of a pattern rather than a single project's footnote.
What changed for the people who actually use the bridge
The new bridge carries improvements the old one never had. Two wide shoulders now run its length, something drivers and cyclists on the old span went without. The design also added a beach access ramp near the Route 36 intersection, pedestrian beacons and striped crosswalks at Ward Avenue, and upgrades to Sea Bright's own waterfront park near the bridge approach. None of that existed on the 1950 structure, which predated most of the safety features now standard on river crossings serving as coastal evacuation routes.
Getting there wasn't cheap, and the total cost depends on which tally you're reading. Some coverage of the project puts the figure at $113 million. Other reporting, including a more recent accounting that folds in the demolition and reef work, puts the full project closer to $138 million, with nearly all of it covered by federal funds. Separately, the county secured a $31 million federal grant toward the replacement back in 2020, one piece of the larger funding picture rather than the whole of it. The range reflects how differently outlets have scoped what counts as "the project," but the throughline is consistent: this was funded almost entirely through federal dollars rather than county tax revenue, and it was Monmouth County's most expensive infrastructure undertaking to date.
For anyone checking the Sea Bright neighborhood page, the practical takeaway is that beach access at the bridge end of town now runs through a different set of crossings and a new ramp than it did through last year, and the borough's own small waterfront park near the approach was part of the same construction scope.
The other half of the project, on the Rumson side
While the bridge itself sits in Sea Bright, its footprint reaches into Rumson, where West Park, also known as Jumping Point Park, flanks Rumson Road on both sides of the bridge entrance. The borough pursued a Monmouth County Open Space Grant to help fund a $900,000 overhaul of the 5.72-acre space, seeking $500,000 toward the total. Construction on the south side was slated to begin in spring 2026, timed to when the bridge project's construction yard and remaining demolition debris finally cleared the site. The plan calls for new playground equipment, swings, walkways, benches, picnic tables, and new tree plantings to replace some of the mature trees the borough had to relocate elsewhere in town during construction.
The north side of the park won't move forward until the old bridge is fully gone. That makes the reef timeline and the park timeline more connected than they might first appear. Until the barges finish their runs to Sandy Hook, the north half of West Park stays on hold.
What this actually adds up to
The old bridge under everyone's feet for 75 years is becoming underwater structure for winter flounder, striped bass, blackfish, and the rest of the species that have always moved through this stretch of the Shrewsbury River, just relocated a few hundred yards north and several feet down. The instinct that got it there wasn't a county mandate. It was one fisherman on a planning board noticing an opportunity in the middle of a routine engineering update, and a county willing to build a tax incentive around acting on it.
If you've been watching the barges from a dock this fall, or you remember what the old bridge looked like before the construction fencing went up, we'd like to hear it. The Suzanne Veninata Team keeps close tabs on what's changing along Sea Bright's waterfront, and we're always glad to talk through what a shifting shoreline means for the people who call this stretch of the peninsula home.
