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When Wildwood boomed in the 1950's and 1960's, exhuberant motels
blossomed on its main strip
(Photo by Wildwood Studio, 1997-98)
| A graduate school studio takes a close look at a Jersey Shore
resort, and finds inspiration in its exuberant architecture. by Julie Caniglia Thirty years ago, while the counter-culture was wreaking havoc, Steven Izenour and some fellow graduate students were constructing a monumental tribute to popular culture, via Robert Venturi's "Learning from Las Vegas" studio. Now a partner at Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Izenour led a team of his own students to a lesser-known landmark of leisure last fall, the Wildwoods on the South Jersey shore. There they encountered what Izenour sums up as "the classic Vegas story, writ small." It's an apt description, as the Wildwoods--comprising Wildwood, North Wildwood, and Wildwood Crest--were known in their heyday in the 1950s and 1960s as "Little Vegas." Thanks to Dick Clark's American Bandstand, which was broadcast from nearby Philadelphia, the Wildwoods had a huge pop music scene, with more than 100 nightclubs at its peak. Izenour also compares the town's anything-goes atmosphere to Big Vegas. "There was this sense that if you knew where to go, you might just see something you wouldn't get back home," he recalls. "Maybe it wasn't rated R, but it would at least be PG13." And the Wildwoods were notoriously competitive, both economically and visually. Motel owners sought to lure vacationing families into their parking lots with outsize neon signs, groves of plastic palm trees, and novelty details tacked onto otherwise unassuming commercial buildings. There's the Satellite, which looks simultaneously suburban and space-age, whereas the Singapore and the Tahiti betray another craze of the early Sixties--for the South Seas. The Flame Inn features a 15-foot candle sign that beckons travelers with a neon flame. But it is the Caribbean, with its sweeping, circular ramp leading to a second-floor game room, that is almost universally seen as the architectural gem among the 200-odd motels built between the early 1950s and the 1970s. But what about the late 1990s? The Wildwoods are still crammed with visitors all summer long, but its salad days--when a bur-geoning working class suddenly found itself prosperous enough to enjoy a couple of weeks at the beach each summer--are long gone. The town is not so much stuck in another era as out of step with fundamental changes in the business of leisure, such as the trend toward shorter and more frequent vacations. Moreover, many of the motels look a little worse for wear these days, with their kitschy flourishes frayed or destroyed. They could use a little more "makeup," as Jack Morey, a Wildwood businessman, likes to say. Morey was recently forced to take a long, hard look at the town he grew up in; his family, which owns Wildwood's three amusement piers, just invested some $11 million in two new roller coasters. He's also unabashedly sentimental about the town's motels, since his father designed and built about 30 of them before buying the first of the piers in 1969. So it was Morey who initially contacted Venturi, Scott Brown about updating two his family still owns. Instead of makeup for the motels, though, Izenour suggested a makeover for the entire resort. The first half of the "Learning from the Wildwoods" research studio, carried out by U Penn last fall, was funded by the Morey Organization; a grant from the Wildwood Convention and Business Bureau brought Yale students to the Wildwoods in the spring. Meanwhile, Kent State's ongoing study of the motels, through its architectural preservation program, was also folded into the project. The treasure trove of tacky architecture that has put the Wildwoods on the maps of design types and retro fans is one part of the study's three-point plan for revitalization; the town is more famous among the mainstream for its beach and boardwalk. Each component is a complex mix of blessings and curses--if ever there was a community plagued by its potential, it's the Wildwoods. For instance, Morey had already been trying to make the motels, originally strictly utilitarian, into an attraction themselves. No doubt influenced by the Wildwoods' neighboring resort, Cape May, which achieved huge success by promoting its Victorian architecture, Morey founded the nonprofit Doo-Wop Preservation League, borrowing the Fifties musical term "doo-wop" and applying it to the motels' silly-yet-stylish aesthetic. The League's storefront space serves as a resource center/mini-museum, with many of the materials from Izenour's studio on display; architectural tours have been discontinued for now, though, due to lack of interest. The Wildwoods studio concluded that the kind of freeze-dried preservation used on older buildings wouldn't work for most of these midcentury artifacts. Taking a cue from Las Vegas, its approach is to capitalize on the original spirit of the motels--their ad hoc, over-the-top vernacular style, their entrepreneurial exuberance. "Resort architecture is always changing stylistically," notes Izenour, "so in that sense, we don't care whether it's Fifties or not, but we do care if there's a prohibition on big signs, or a color palette. This kind of competitive environment will do just fine if you don't put too many controls on it." If the idea is to go whole hog in revamping the motels, the beach and the boardwalk needed to be brought under more control, so to speak. While the Jersey Shore's other resorts are faced with shrinking slices of sand, a jetty south of Wildwood makes its beach grow some 15 to 70 feet each year. But now that the sand stretches for almost a half-mile in some parts, a trip to the water is turned into a desert pilgrimage, especially at the extremes of summer, making New Jersey's biggest beach a target of jokes. To provide beachgoers with food, drink, and rest rooms, the students suggested customized concession stands and portable toilets; they also proposed filling up the expanse of sand with dune parks, bike paths, a temporary stadium, and an outdoor movie theater. Then there's the boardwalk--so highly regarded that Disney sent some imagineers in for a reconnaissance. Like the beach, however, it may be too much of a good thing: its amusements tend to draw teens and young people, which in turn tends to discourage families, who spend more money. So while the study recommends tarting up the motels with gaudy embellishments, bigger signs, and whole groves of plastic palm trees, the amenities along the boardwalk (rest rooms, railings, light-posts, benches, and trash cans) could become a little more reserved. "That creates a nice juxtaposition to the tackiness that surrounds it on the boardwalk," says Izenour. "And you need that contrast--the two work together better in a place like that." The counterpoint between a reserved public face and an unrepentant, free-for-all garishness exemplifies the Wildwoods' perpetual ambivalence about what kind of resort it wants to be. Even recently, civic leaders seemed to look longingly south toward Cape May when they built the Wildwoods' new visitors' center in a neo-Victorian style. Izenour acknowledges that identity is an enduring problem: "It seems like Wildwood has always oscillated with respect to its wilder side, taking an alternating approach/avoid stance." But promoting the Wildwoods is more complicated than courting families or catering to the party crowd. These days, it means appealing to an even more diversified audience--playing up the motels for kitsch lovers, for instance, as well as the area's largely untapped natural attractions like bird-watching and fishing. It's a tricky proposition. Attracting eco-tourists and bringing back nostalgic boomers along with monster truck enthusiasts goes against the historical (though rarely discussed) class lines drawn along the South Jersey shore. There's the new money in Stone Harbor; middle-class families in Ocean City; and in Cape May (with its heritage of U.S. presidents and bluebloods), upscale empty-nesters. The Wildwoods are the raucous, working-class cousins to those towns; even Morey, very much the prosperous boomer, acknowledges that "this is the place to let your hair down." Hordes of people are doing just that this month, in the middle of the resort's honky-tonk high season. All the academic analyses are completed; the presentations and proposals were made to Wildwood business owners and residents months ago. But as with any big-vision plan, the question remains: How much of it, if any, will come to fruition? Journalist Joe Sharkey is one who isn't holding his breath. As a teen in the early 1960s, he spent summers in the Wildwoods; in recent years, he occasionally covered the town in his former column for the New York Times. Nothing if not blunt, he asserts that "Wildwood's businesspeople are the biggest bunch of idiots on the Jersey Shore, and you can quote me on that--just don't include Jack Morey." For his part, Morey is more optimistic, if cautious: "Our goal now is to get major stakeholders together that have a responsibility to the future," he says. "This place has been very good to a lot of people; some have reinvested, and some have just taken--it's that way in every community." Finally, there's a slim but ever-present chance that outsiders could transform the Wildwoods into a chic hot spot: a Tri-State version of Miami Beach in the early Nineties, perhaps. According to Sharkey, some seeds have already been quietly planted in North Wildwood, by gays and other stylish, relatively affluent property owners. And Izenour took calls from "a surprising number" of design and fashion types after a piece on the Wildwoods' motels ran in the New York Times early this year. But only time will tell whether the Wildwoods slowly roll into obsolescence, or--like Big Vegas--get revved up for another golden era. |
Keywords:
Wildwoods, New Jersey, resort, students
