Home movie of Belmar from the Summer of ‘59 Surfaces on YouTube

Last fall, someone uploaded to YouTube a rare peak back into the Belmar of 1959 — a digitized home movie that is bound to bring back some memories for an entire generation of Belmar beachgoers. A little less than three-and-a-half minutes long, the movie’s scenes center largely around D’Jais and the beach at 18th Avenue. The building in the video looks a lot different than the D’Jais of today, but even back then it was called D’Jais and it was a busy bar (you can see that on a sunny afternoon there was a cop posted at the front door!) In the thumbnail of the video below, and beginning at at 1:37 into the video, the view is in the back of D’Jais looking toward Nineteenth Avenue. The sand and beach grass lot in the background is where the current D’Jais parking lot is located. If you look carefully, you can see the original Sidoroff’s in the distance (the structure that now stands at Nineteenth and Ocean was a replacement building that was built after a fire in the late 1970’s).

According to Frank Sementa, who is one of the owners of the current D’Jais, the bar got its name from the owner Dominick Joseph Desalvo, whose childhood nickname was DJ. Hence D’Jais. A post on YouTube reports that the woman seen waving in front of the bar at 0:37 is Desalvo’s wife.

At 0:58 in the video, there is a quick pan of the boardwalk that shows one of Belmar’s beach badge booths from that era. The beach scenes that begin at 1:57 haven’t changed much over the past 50 years, except of course for the bathing suits. Enjoy.

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