The Area · Issue Lead
The man rebuilding the Shore’s hidden century.
Anthony Setaro went looking for one murder in his own family — and cracked open a Jersey Shore that was built for the mob, and is now being rebuilt in 3D.
Anthony Setaro went looking for one murder in his own family — and cracked open a Jersey Shore that was built for the mob, and is now being rebuilt in 3D.
Fifteen minutes from Asbury Park and a hundred years away — a Methodist camp town that froze the Jersey Shore in 1869: Tent City, the Great Auditorium, and a sidewalk full of strangers singing.
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Eric Kane built Above the Hook from zero in nine months — and the Highlands started treating him like its historian.
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Its students are on Broadway in Stranger Things, in Adam Sandler’s next movie, and on SVU — all trained in the same Freehold studio, twenty minutes from Fort Monmouth.
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The $1B Netflix campus at Fort Monmouth. Twelve soundstages. Five hundred thousand square feet. The first phase opens in 2027 — and the brands and agents who position themselves now will own the next decade of the tri-state.
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The actor from Orange Is the New Black, Power Book II, and Dutton Ranch lives twelve minutes from Fort Monmouth — and chose to raise his daughters here.
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A father’s letter to his daughter on her graduation from Middletown South — who she became while I wasn’t always paying attention, and the women who raised her.
Read the letter →The first dispatch from The Work is in production — behind the lens on real client films. Coming soon.
Fort Monmouth in real time. The Netflix build, the spillover, the towns that are about to change. Reporting and reflection on what's happening here — for the people deciding whether to plant a flag.
Behind the lens on real client work. What a cinematic identity is, what it costs to skip it, and the agents and brands who are using film to build a body of work that compounds.
The agents, restaurateurs, hoteliers, and founders building the next decade of the Shore. Long-form portraits of the people behind the rooms, the listings, and the brands that are quietly shaping Hollywood East.
"There's a difference between a place becoming valuable and a place getting noticed. The Jersey Shore has always been valuable. It's about to get noticed. The Slate is the record of that turn."