Drive down Front Street in Sea Bright this month and you will pass a stretch of fencing that has become part of the scenery for so long that most residents stopped registering it as construction. Behind the barricades, though, something has changed. The boardwalk that's supposed to run along the Shrewsbury River, the one people have been reading about in borough newsletters for years, is largely done. Framing complete. Piles set. What's missing is railings and lighting, which is why the borough's own construction updates still say the same thing they've said for months: finished enough to look real, not finished enough to open.
That gap between built and open is the whole story right now, and it points to something residents haven't fully priced in yet. Sea Bright is not just getting new houses on its west side. It's getting a second public waterfront, on a peninsula narrow enough that most people assume there's only room for one.
What's actually sitting there right now
The project has a name most people have heard, Haven at Sea Bright, and a footprint most people haven't traced: 2.97 acres running from Front Street to River Street, the old Shrewsbury River Properties Redevelopment Area that the borough designated back in 2019. What's easy to miss is that it isn't one project with one builder. Toll Brothers announced in August 2026 that its sales center in Red Bank had opened for the single-family homes and townhomes on the site, homes running from roughly 2,467 to over 3,000 square feet. That's only part of the acreage. A separate 15-unit condominium parcel within the same master development was still being shopped to a buyer as of an August 2025 listing, fully approved but unbuilt. So the patchwork look of the site right now, some buildings framed and roofed, others still just graded dirt, isn't a delay. It's two different developers on two different clocks, sharing one address.
What ties both halves together is the part that isn't for sale: an acre of public green space between the borough's kayak launch on Front Street and River Street, built around a boardwalk running roughly 810 feet atop 840 feet of steel bulkhead. Toll Brothers' own materials call it the future Shrewsbury Riverfront Park, and the plan has always included a dog park, a fishing pier, and a cleaning station alongside the boardwalk itself.
The fence has been there longer than the fix
It's worth sitting with how long this stretch sat untouched before any of this started moving. Heather Gorman, a planning board member who later joined the borough council, put it plainly in a 2022 interview with the Two River Times, describing what she saw every day from 200 feet away:
"Ever since I've lived here, we've looked at the river through a chain fence that has been abandoned, empty for over 12 years."
That's not a complaint about slow bureaucracy. It's a description of what Sandy actually took from this side of town. The ocean side rebuilt loud and fast, restaurants, bars, a beach pavilion. The river side sat behind a fence for over a decade because bulkheads here are split between borough and private ownership, and repairing one without the other creates exactly the kind of tangled permitting that keeps a waterfront closed long after the storm itself is old news.
Two waterfronts, a few blocks apart
Here's the part that changes how residents should think about the map. Sea Bright's identity has always run in one direction: Ocean Avenue, the beach, the bars that face the Atlantic. The river side of town has never been a place you went. It was a place you drove past. Once the boardwalk opens, that stops being true, and the two sides of a very narrow town start pulling different weight.
| Ocean Avenue side | Shrewsbury River side | |
|---|---|---|
| What's there | Beach, cabana clubs, restaurant row | New boardwalk, dog park, fishing pier, kayak launch |
| Access today | Open, seasonal badges required for the beach | Boardwalk built, not yet open to the public |
| Flood exposure | Protected by seawall reconstruction completed in 2020 | Rebuilt bulkhead, part of it tied to a proposed $2.5M bond |
| What it's used for | Swimming, dining, drinking, live music | Fishing, walking, dogs, kayaking |
That bottom-left flood note matters more than it looks. Sea Bright's riverside has flooded at moderate tide levels for generations, and the borough is still actively spending on it. In August 2026, the council proposed a $2.5 million bond for a separate stretch of bulkhead between Peninsula Avenue and Osborne Place, across from the public beach, and held a public meeting to walk residents through it. The Haven development's own 840 feet of steel bulkhead is designed at 9 feet tall, and the homes going up behind it have entrances built roughly five feet above what the borough's flood code actually requires. None of that is decoration. It's the reason a boardwalk that looks finished still can't open. Everything on this side of town gets built to survive water first and to look nice second.
Meanwhile, the ocean side keeps moving too
While the river side has been quietly finishing a boardwalk nobody can walk on yet, the restaurant scene on Ocean Avenue hasn't slowed down waiting for it. Brothers Daley opened as a European-inspired dining room with a menu that changes with the season, right in the heart of town. A few blocks south, 2nd Jetty Seafood built its identity around dishes its owners describe as pulled from years of travel tied to global surf culture. Numa arrived as a steakhouse paired with a sushi bar, enough of a splash that NJ.com flagged it among the state's notable new openings this year.
The older institutions haven't gone anywhere either, and one of them runs on a seasonal rhythm that catches people off guard. Driftwood Tiki Bar, at the Driftwood Cabana Club the Stavola family has owned since 1957, actually flips the pattern most shore towns follow. It's open to the public from October through May, then closes to everyone but cabana club members for the summer season. So the weeks right now, just past Labor Day, are exactly when it opens back up to residents who don't hold a membership. Down the street, Donovan's Reef has been serving drinks in the sand since 1976, rebuilt after Sandy pushed the original structure thirty feet off its foundation, and it's still one of the only places in the state where you can legally do that.
What this actually means if you live here
None of this is really a story about new construction. It's a story about a town whose entire public life has run along one edge finally getting a second one, on a river side that spent over a decade fenced off after Sandy. The restaurants on Ocean Avenue aren't going anywhere, and the boardwalk isn't going to replace them. What changes is that a Saturday morning in Sea Bright stops being only a beach morning. It becomes a choice between a swim and a walk along the water in the other direction, a fishing pier that didn't exist five years ago, a dog park on a stretch of Front Street that used to be six vacant buildings.
The borough hasn't posted a public opening date for the boardwalk yet. What's left, by their own account, is railings and lighting, which is a short list compared to what's already been poured, framed, and set into the ground. Keep an eye on the borough's own construction updates if you want to know before most people do. Everything else on that side of town, the dog park, the kayak launch, the fishing pier, is close enough to finished that the wait is mostly about lighting fixtures and inspections at this point.
Sea Bright doesn't get more room very often. It's a narrow strip of land between an ocean and a river, and for the first time in a long time, both edges are actually going to be places people go.
If you're thinking about what a home on either side of Sea Bright is really worth once this kind of change lands next door, Joe DeVizio knows this stretch of Monmouth County block by block. What's My Home Worth?
