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Written by Anthony Stoeckert   
Monday, 26 May 2008
Where the Fun Went
‘Greetings From Asbury Park’ shows what happens when home gets in the way of developers.
Friday, May 23, 2008 5:42 PM EDT
By Anthony Stoeckert
 

IT was about 10 years ago when Christina Eliopoulos was walking around Asbury Park with her daughter — then about 2 or 3 — and telling the child what the city used to be like.

”We’d be walking down the boardwalk and I would explain to her, ‘This is where we’d go on the rides and this is where the horsies were,’” she says. “And she once asked me where all the fun went. ‘Mommy, where did all the fun go,’ or something like that. That’s not a press quote, that’s real.”

Shortly after that, Ms. Eliopoulos, who lives in Eatontown, decided to make a film about her family and Asbury Park, where she grew up. As she worked on the film, she realized it was becoming about the women in her life — her daughter, her mother, her grandmother, and particularly her Great Aunt Angela Hampilos. What was unexpected was that her documentary would become about her “Auntie’s” fight to prevent being kicked out of the home she’s lived in for more than 50 years.

Greetings From Asbury Park, which will premiere during the opening weekend of this summer’s New Jersey International Film Festival in New Brunswick, follows 91-year-old Ms. Hampilos through the threat of eminent domain. The money offered for her house — based on an assessment paid for by the developer — isn’t enough to buy one of the townhouses being built in Asbury Park. She can get her own assessment done, her lawyer advises her, but that won’t stop her from being forced out of her house by the time the trial starts in about a year. We see her poring over the newspaper, searching for a home she can afford. The developer and city officials are, in effect, telling her to move into an apartment, the lawyer says.

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Last Updated ( Monday, 26 May 2008 )
 
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