“I wasn’t one of those kids who went to the shore every summer as a child,” said the author of “4th of July, Asbury Park” (Bloomsbury), Daniel Wolff, when speaking at Barnes & Noble Astor Place on Thursday. He said he didn’t get to Asbury Park until age 30, when he accompanied his wife, who had family on the Jersey shore. The book traces the city’s rise in the late 19th century as a resort on the Atlantic shore of Monmouth County, its decline during the latter half of 20th century, and its more recent gentrification.

Mr. Wolff said that in the early 1980s, he was struck by the city’s ruins, the holes in the boardwalk, and the empty lots. “I wanted to know what had happened.” It looked like the secret life of American cities, he said. Mr. Wolff said he has visited Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, and all of these cities had areas that looked like Asbury Park in the 1980s.

He talked about the city’s connection to well-known figures such as writer Stephen Crane and musician Bruce Springsteen. “If we’ve heard about the city at all,” Mr. Wolff read from the book’s introduction, “it’s as the beat-up shore town where Springsteen came of age. From his first album (which he called ‘Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.’) to his breakthrough record, ‘Born to Run,’ Springsteen’s jangly, almost ragtime rock ‘n’ roll kept evoking the vision of a collapsing seaside amusement park.” As Mr. Springsteen’s music evolved, the town “became a ‘town full of losers,’ the ultimate backwater, the exhausted remains of the American dream.”

Mr. Wolff told an amusing anecdote. He was once driving with Mr. Springsteen in Asbury Park when they saw a sign for a new development complex to be named “The Rising,” after one of Mr. Springsteen’s albums. Mr. Springsteen turned to Mr. Wolff and said, “I don’t think so.” He said Mr. Springsteen wrote the developer a letter asking that they not use his songs.

Mr. Wolff described how the town was named for Bishop Francis Asbury, the pioneer of American Methodism. The founder was a brush manufacturer, James Bradley, who grew up Catholic and converted to Methodism, and had vacationed in Ocean Grove, N.J., a Methodist retreat just to the south of Asbury Park. Bradley purchased 500 acres of sand dunes and scrub oaks and began leveling the land in 1871, envisioning the place as a kind of religious amusement park. Mr. Wolff told how one historian described it: “Bradley viewed landscape as theology.”

During the question-and-answer session, one person asked about Morro Castle, an ocean liner that caught fire at sea in 1934 and killed 134 people. Mr. Wolff said the government in Asbury Park was quick to charge admission to see the death ship.

Buying two copies of Mr. Wolff’s book was audience member Jeff Wanca, who came in from New Jersey for the event. He grew up in Garwood, N.J., about 25 miles southwest of New York City. The Knickerbocker asked him for interesting facts about Garwood, and Mr. Wanca said Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon had each traveled through the town.

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WORLDS OF WIZARDRY

The Society of American Magicians concluded its annual convention on Saturday at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers. The venerable organization was founded 104 years ago in Manhattan in the back room of Martinka & Co, Inc., a magic shop formerly located in Chelsea and owned at one point by Houdini.

Outgoing national president John Apperson announced the selection of Brooklyn resident George Schindler as the society’s new “dean of American magicians” – its highest honor. Mr. Schindler fills the vacancy resulting from the recent death of Jay Marshall, who once lived in Brooklyn. Mr. Schindler is author of several texts on magic and was featured as Chandu the Great in Woody Allen’s segment of “New York Stories.”

Mr. Schindler told the Knickerbocker that his predecessor Marshall “was the dean of the whole world of magic, not just our S.A.M., so I’m humbled by being selected to succeed him.” Among his plans, he said, “I hope to further develop our younger members’ activities,” he said, recalling his own teenage mentoring in magic by the late Abraham Hurwitz, the Yeshiva University educator whom Mayor La Guardia named “official magician” of New York City and who was father of the puppeteer Shari Lewis. “Our National Council just made Dr. Hurwitz a posthumous member of the society’s Hall of Fame,” Mr. Schindler said.

Attending the convention were members of a contingent of the Magic Circle of London, the premier magic association in the United Kingdom.

During a reception, the Knickerbocker spoke with Magic Circle vice president Henry Lewis, wearing the emblem of their society with its motto “indocilis privata loqui,” which means “not apt to disclose secrets.” He talked of learning of the terrorist attacks back home in London. Mr. Lewis participated in World War II in the British military entertainers unit “Stars in Battle Dress,” which he called a counterpart to the U.S.O. He said, “We Londoners are quite tough,” and added with grit that they are a people who withstand duress.

Mr. Lewis is also curator emeritus of London’s Magic Circle Museum, having helped establish it a quarter-century ago. It includes the first model of Robert Harbin’s famous “Zig Zag” lady, a stage and cabaret illusion wherein the subject’s midsection is shifted magically out of alignment with the rest of her body to audience amazement.

Later this month, the Magic Circle will hold its centenary celebration. A New York member of the Society of American Magicians, Richard Cohn, has been asked to present his lecture on the magic of Coney Island. “I will relate the fascinating and picturesque heritage of the contributions of magicians to the lore and lure of Coney Island history.”

The Society of American Magicians, founded in 1902, is the oldest society of magicians. The Magic Circle in London, begun in 1905 is second-oldest.