Oram H. Tonge, a well-known architect from Long Beach Island, has designed more than 4,000 structures at the New Jersey shore over the last 35 years. When The Beachcomber met up with him at his office in Ship Bottom to discuss his distinguished career, he remarked that he knew he wanted to design buildings ever since the time he was 5 years old.
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| Photo by Kristin Blair |
“I don’t know why, but I always wanted to be an architect,” he said. “I can’t remember a time I ever wanted to do anything else.”
Tonge grew up on the bayside of Leeward Avenue in Beach Haven. His parents, Oram and Marie Tonge, built a summer home there after tying the knot on the Island. The family, including Oram’s younger sister, Sandra, often traveled back and forth from Beach Haven to their primary residence in Burholme in northeast Philadelphia, his parents’ home town.
Tonge attended Kennedy C. Crossan Elementary School and Woodrow Wilson Junior High in Philadelphia. His fifth-grade teacher, who watched him incessantly draw up floor plans day after day in class, told his mother that Tonge had a knack for sketching and would make a fine architect someday. But his mother already knew that.
“I was always drawing floor plans. I would designate the rooms: Bedroom, bedroom, bath. I would put a deck on it, and that would be a house,” he said, while depicting a brief floor plan that resembled the work of his childhood years. “They were all different, but the big thing was to show the bricks; every patio had shaded bricks. I don’t know why, but it was important,” he said, laughing at the memory.
His family always visited Beach Haven on the weekends and throughout the summer months in July and August. In the early ‘50s, as a 9- and 10-year-old, he spent those summers working on rental boats at Mordecai Boat Basin. As a teenager, he worked at Morrison’s Seafood Restaurant as a cook and at Beach Haven Bakery.
Other than that, he horsed around and went to the beach.
His high school education was split between Southern Regional in Manahawkin and Northeast High School in Philadelphia. It was at Northeast High where his guidance counselor told him he wouldn’t amount to anything – that he’d be lucky to find a job at a factory.
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| Photo by Kristin Blair |
But Tonge wasn’t a dummy. He graduated number one in his class from Temple University, with a bachelor of science degree in architecture. He went on to work in the design department at the headquarters of Acme Markets in Center City, Philadelphia. During that time, he also attended Drexel University, where he graduated first in class and obtained a professional degree in architecture.
After passing the Pennsylvania state architecture exam on his first try, Tonge landed the position of chief architect for the School District of Philadelphia, located in Center City. Meanwhile, his esteemed reputation was also catching on at the shore. He even designed a house right next door to his childhood home in Beach Haven, where he and his father lived together after his mother died.
Tonge designed his own home on Beacon Drive in Loveladies. During the building process, he often brought his young nephews, Bill and Rich Tagland, to inspect the procedure. (Years later, his nephews opened their own architectural firm on Long Beach Island.)
The first design contract Tonge undertook as an independent architect was for his father’s co-worker at the Institute for Cancer Research (now the Fox Chase Cancer Center) in Philadelphia. He was asked to design an addition for the man’s home in Beach Haven Gardens.
Eventually Tonge opened an office of his own in Surf City. He began designing homes and buildings all over the Island. He was appointed as chairman of the Long Beach Township Zoning Board. He even coined the coastal scheme, which reflects the native design elements of the East Coast: an over-hanging roof, lots of windows and a porch. An oceanfront home he designed on Nebraska Avenue in Haven Beach received national recognition for this type of design.
“Oram Tonge was the most sought-after architect in the ‘80s,” said Regina Pasquariello, a real estate agent at Re/Max of Long Beach Island. “Homeowners took pride in having him design their houses. His work now is still sought after,” she emphasized.
Some of Tonge’s most famous designs include Fantasy Island Amusement Park, Surflight Theatre (opened in 1987), Schooner’s Wharf, Township of Long Beach Municipal Complex, The Island Shop, Brant Beach Yacht Club, Freedom Surf and Spa, Harvey Cedars Borough Hall and Mancini Realty.
As work picked up, Tonge began investing in real estate on the Island. He later met and married Julie Helmer, a real estate agent at Zacharie Realty in Surf City. After the birth of their first daughter, Lauren, they sold their home on Long Beach Island and moved to Naples, Florida. They had another daughter, Nicole, and decided to raise their children there.
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| Photo by Kristin Blair |
Tonge now breaks up his time by visiting family in Florida every couple of weeks, and heading back to the Island to design more homes and buildings. He works from an office in Ship Bottom that he shares with Re/Max of Long Beach Island and Island Chiropractic. He is currently working on five home designs in the area and one commercial building in Florida.
“He is an incredible asset to a real estate agency because you can get answers to (design) questions right away,” explained Joseph Mayo III, broker and owner of Re/Max of Long Beach Island. “There’s usually a delay when it comes to those sorts of things. In an ideal world, every real estate agency would have an architect, an engineer, a decorator and a builder. I call him ‘the godfather of architects,’ because many architects on the Island worked for him at one time or another.”
This article was published in The Beachcomber.
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