Has Avalon become too exclusive for the people who live there?

AVALON, N.J. — Marc Ziss is hanging on to the old Avalon. At 56, he’s still in a summer share house, a fading subculture he’s come back to every summer since the ’90s. There are not many left.

Ziss may not have moved on from the Avalon of the past — the laid-back beach town of bungalows, a party vibe buzzing from bar to bar — but the town sure has.

And that shift has never been clearer, after the Union League of Philadelphia paid $23 million to buy the sprawling, boozy Whitebrier on 21st Street and two adjacent properties, making them members-only.

Their launch on Memorial Day weekend included the cheeky “Please Shower Happy Hour.”

“It’s really kind of depressing these days,” said Ziss, who keeps tabs on what remains of Avalon’s live music scene for a Facebook page, Bands in Avalon and Beyond.

“What we knew was going on has now been engraved in stone,” he said.

He mused about Avalon’s expanding layers of exclusivity. “You ever buy tickets to an event, like a festival, and you bought the gold ticket, and you get there and it’s like, oh the gold ticket is very much a regular ticket, and the platinum is what you really want?” Ziss said. “And then there’s a super platinum on top of that.”

Can an ever-more-expensive Shore town like Avalon go too far, becoming so exclusive that parts of it are now off-limits to the majority of people who live or own second homes there?

You can’t blame the Union League, said Whitebrier general manager John Tracy, grandson of former owner Anthony Zurawski. (And at that sale price, with a Union League membership thrown in, who can blame his grandfather).

The Philadelphia-based club says that of its about 4,000 members, as many as 2,500 have second homes in Shore towns from Ocean City to Cape May, with as many as 1,500 in Avalon and Stone Harbor alone. They’re following their own crowd.

The Union League kept Tracy on as general manager, along with any employee who wanted to stay, Tracy said last Saturday afternoon in an impromptu interview on the umbrella-shaded front deck of the Whitebrier overlooking 21st Street.

“I’ve been here for 15 years, so it’s definitely a change for me,” Tracy said. “It’s not good or bad. It’s just, hey this is a different clientele, and you know, they tend to be older.”

Union League dues are about $6,000 a year, after an initiation fee of $7,500.

Elsewhere, private clubs are trending, turning cities and even entire islands into little bastions of exclusivity.

With house prices ranging from $2 million to $2.5 million for single-family homes, $5 million for the beach block, and as much as $13 million for the big beach mansions, Avalon had already mostly yanked the welcome mat for all but the wealthy.

The Union League had already bought the Bungalow, formerly the Back Yard, a small BYOB restaurant just over the Stone Harbor border in 2014 and turned it into a private dining room. The Union League also owns a golf course on Route 9 in Cape May Court House.

Some locals still miss being able to eat at the Back Yard.

Longtime realtor Ann Delaney said, “I was bummed when they bought that.”

But Delaney, who sees a slight leveling off home prices, said Avalon and Stone Harbor have always cultivated an exclusive vibe dating to the century-old Stone Harbor Yacht Club, which still requires applicants to submit two letters from current members.

“It’s a part of the culture,” she said. “The Stone Harbor Yacht club was private, and neighbors two doors down can’t join.”

Delaney thinks the Union League purchase will help to settle things down along 21st Street.

“I’m sure it’s going to clean up 21st street, make it more attractive,” she said. “It was getting to be like a bar street between the Princeton, the Whitebrier, the Circle Tavern.”

Over at the Whitebrier, where a handful of tables were filled early on Saturday evening, and the dress code was “relaxed yet refined,” Tracy said that dinners are brisk but that things drop off after 9 p.m.

“I just think they don’t go out in the same way as like the 22 year olds and 25 year olds did,” he said. “And you don’t have as many locals, although I’m surprised by the number of people that I already knew that turned out they were Union League members.”

A few nonmembers have slipped in and had dinner, Tracy said. (They were at the time able to pay by credit card, while members get meals billed to their accounts.) And he has turned away others. Nonmembers can come as guests — nonfamily guests are limited to three visits a year — but he said the Union League has no plans to open the Whitebrier to the general public.

“Some people might think of the Union League as the big bad wolf, like, oh it’s all these rich guys coming down here, ruining everything,” he said. “It’s not really like that. These are people that were already here, mostly.”

Avalon Mayor John McCorristin, who lives a few blocks away on 25th and has been in Avalon since the 1950s, was invited to a ribbon cutting and was there for its soft opening but does not have membership.

He said the town’s sky-high property values are pushing out restaurants in favor of housing.

“We’re losing lots of our restaurants that are open to the public,” he said.

At the soft opening, he said, “probably half the people there were the same people that utilized it before. The membership that’s on the island is pretty strong.”

He said the Union League is considering plans for the vacant land around the Whitebrier complex, including possibly a wedding venue. “I wish them the best,” he said. “I’m just glad something will be there that will serve the people, whether it’s the general public or not.”

Linda Taylor, 62, a healthcare consultant from Aston, Delaware County, is also a veteran of the shore house scene, dating to the 1980s.

But Taylor leveled up and bought a house on 25th Street in 1999 for $260,000, eventually tearing it down and rebuilding a duplex. Now, she says, she could probably sell it for $2.9 million, and rents out on peak weeks for $12,500 a week.

But her days of walking over to the Whitebrier for a limoncello martini and sushi are over.

“I am not a Union League member, no,” she said. “There’s often this perception that we’re all rich, well-heeled private university, travel the world. … We’ve worked for everything.”

She and Ziss said the town is losing places that defined it, like Jack’s, or late-night pizza places like Tonio’s. The Windrift is now Icona Windrift, having been purchased by Icona Resorts.

“One of my neighbors was like, ‘Tell them to bring back our dive bar,’” she said, while acknowledging that with limoncello martinis and sushi as signature items, the Whitebrier might only in Avalon have qualified as a dive bar.

“It’s definitely not the same town,” she said. “There’s both good and bad with the change. It is a town of wealth and privilege.”

Over at 7 Mile Shenanigans, the Facebook page devoted to Avalon and Stone Harbor, the debate has raged. Those expressing annoyance over the Whitebrier’s new status are themselves called out for being wealthy enough to own a home in Avalon at all.

“Nothing says ‘welcome to entitlement island’ like the Union League,” wrote one poster to the page, which is private.

“Little do people realize that the ‘elites’ being talked about ‘taking over the Whitebrier’ are your longtime neighbors, realtors, store owners, working college grads … who are now members of the UL,” said another.

The question hovers: How much of the town is too much to cede to private spaces, especially a town where the dunes themselves are dotted with mansions?

Will the whole place drift more toward a private island model like Seabrook Island in South Carolina or Fisher Island in Florida?

“You now need a membership to get into two restaurants that were public before,” wrote Marty Victor, administrator of 7 Mile Shenanigans. ”What’s an acceptable amount of establishments for them to own on the island?

As for Ziss, he’s consoling himself with a Slack Tide hazy IPA on draft at the bar at the Rock n’ Chair, which he said is stepping up to fill Avalon’s music and vibe vacuum.

“A lot of people are considering moving to Wildwood,” he said.