Nicknamed the “Queen of Religious Resorts”, Ocean Grove is a seaside village on New Jersey’s Atlantic Ocean coast. It was founded as a Methodist summer camp in 1869 and hosts Sunday worship services at the Great Auditorium.
Spend an afternoon strolling through Ocean Grove’s charming village centre, which is clustered with Victorian residences, cafes and ice creameries. At its heart is the wooden Great Auditorium, an acoustically impressive house of worship that can host up to 6,000 people. Ocean Grove’s founder, Reverend Ellwood H. Stokes, is immortalised in a statue out the front of the building and one of the world’s largest pipe organs is housed within.
If you’re visiting in the summer months, you can cool off with a swim at Ocean Grove Beach, a family-friendly stretch of sand backed by a breezy boardwalk. At the southern end of the beach is Ocean Grove Park, a lakefront recreational area with a children’s playground and a shuffleboard court.
Getting there
Ocean Grove is around 1.5 hours’ drive from Philadelphia and an hour from Newark Liberty International Airport. Regular trains connect from New York City to the nearby Asbury Park railway station, from where buses continue to Ocean Grove.