DRIVE down the main drag of New Jersey’s motel-choked Wildwoods at the start of spring and the palm trees scattered everywhere are a strange sight.
Their trunks still point skyward, but each of the stumps has been beheaded of leaves and sits covered in polythene to protect against wind and rain. That’s because every poolside palm is plastic, their leafy fronds made and maintained by a specialist firm, Four Sons Custom Palm trees in Pennsylvania. And they’re available for purchase, take one home for around $400 each. The ersatz greenery is such a distinctly local oddity that the city’s street signs are now made out of painted metal palms, planted on each corner.
But even plastic plants, apparently, can be threatened by extinction. While there were once 300 motels here, each sprouting a fistful of plastic fronds from their poolside or balconies, now there are less than 100. That’s because the Wildwoods — the collective name from three sound-alike, adjacent towns on the same sandbar, Wildwood, Wildwood Crest and North Wildwood — is slowly losing the very thing that defines its distinctive identity: a stash of mid-century architecture that rivals Miami Beach or Palm Springs.
The bustling, blue-collar Wildwoods thrived at the same time as these two resorts. It was the place where celebrity performers (everyone but Elvis and Sinatra, locals obligingly explain) would summer in the 1950s when the AC-free auditoria of Miami, Palm Springs or even Vegas became too stifling. “Rock Around the Clock” was first performed here (leading Wildwoods into a dubious but endearing counterclaim to Cleveland as the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll) while Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” (née “Philadelphia Bandstand”) often auditioned talent here.
Home away from home for “American Graffiti” “Grease” “Happy Days” or even “Hairspray,” it was a star-spangled, banner resort for all-American seaside fun.
Wildwoods had more kinship with Miami than just its place on the performance circuit, though. Many of the locals would jet to Florida in the winter and take sketches of the buildings they’d seen, only to return home and recreate them — albeit with a twist — a practice so widespread it was called Wildwoodsing. The resulting architectural aesthetic became known as “Doo Wop.”
Brothers Lou and Will Morey built much of the town this way and their descendants still dominate the local scene. Will’s son Jack Morey owns five motels as well as the gaudy, glorious Boardwalk. Unexpectedly, he’s also one of the area’s most ardent preservationists.
“My dad? Every single thing was inspired by somewhere else,” he chuckles, sitting in the huge penthouse of the Pan American Hotel, where he lived as a child with his father and mother. Morey has a deep seaside tan, the charm of a lifetime spent playing host, and a refreshingly BS-free attitude. A founding member of the local Doo Wop Preservation League, he stresses the business as well as sentimental reasons for protecting Wildwoods’ heritage.
“People don’t flock to condos for the sake of the square footage,” he says. “It’s all about the emotions.”
It was Morey who helped applied the term Doo Wop to the area’s local mid-century architecture and who strong-armed the local authorities into erecting the brash Hollywood-sign-like Wildwoods marker in huge letters at the edge of the beach.
“That Wildwoods sign was a stake in the ground. I wanted to use public space to inspire.”
Clearly, the problem with Wildwoods isn’t lack of inspiration or perspiration on Morey and Co.’s part. Yet nothing seems to be stopping the development and demolition of Wildwoods’ precious hoard of architecture.
In most preservation battles, a single significant building is usually felled by the wrecking ball and becomes a mortar martyr so the rest can stand. In Wildwoods’ southern sibling, Miami, for example, it was the Senator Hotel whose destruction shocked officials into designating South Beach a historic district.
Here, though, that hasn’t happened. While there are tax and code incentives to encourage renovation rather than demolition, no binding prohibitions staunch the loss. The landmark Ebb Tide, one of the first motels the Moreys built, vanished in December 2003. The Sputnik-referencing Satellite in October 2004. In late 2005 it was the end for the snapshot-ready Casa Bahama, a schizophrenic masterpiece that displayed the 1950s’ skill for cultural blurring (Swiss chalet-style, A-frame architecture, a Spanish theme and an English colonial name). Having been bought for bargain-basement prices, often from their original owners, they were all leveled to make way for modern condos.
That shouldn’t be happening. The area’s decades-old motels should be able to profit from local advantages without selling up. The Wildwoods sandbar has some of the widest, most glorious beaches in New Jersey (while others risk erosion, the spit here widens each year). This region enjoys the balmier weather system of Baltimore-DC, rather than the tri-state area’s hit-and-miss sunny days.
While adjacent Cape May has undergone such aggressive renovation that its Victoriana now seems more Imagineered than authentic — less a touch of architectural Botox, more Joan Rivers with sash windows — Wildwoods retains a heady whiff of its authentic heyday. The Boardwalk has killer water parks and rides, while the entire set-up is close enough for Philly natives or New Yorkers to weekend there.
The problems, here, though are a strange combination of social, geographical and economic. Despite that weather pattern, the season is short — capacity at most motels hovers around 90 percent from Memorial to Labor Days, but drops precipitously outside those dates — which makes profits tight. Locals are proud that the motels here haven’t been swamped by corporate chains (the only one, a Days Inn, is one of the least appealing places in town) but it’s with good reason. Built as mom-and-pop operations, most maxed out at around two-dozen rooms. Without combining three or more together, big chain franchises can’t make a profit (especially at Wildwoods’ bargain rates) thanks to economies of scale.
There’s another architectural hiccup that’s often overlooked: According to Jack Morey, there’s a state law in New Jersey that requires that hotels be built perpendicular, not parallel, to the beach. The result is that even oceanfront properties have only ocean-view rooms, running down each side, instead of oceanfront rooms gazing over the water.
The oddest, but most solvable, problem is unique to Wildwood Crest, where many of the most important motels still sit. Thanks to neighboring Wildwood’s Lohan-esque rep as a teen party town (its 23-hour liquor licenses allowing one hour of floor mopping), the NIMBY-minded wealthy holed up in the tonier Crest slapped a liquor-free law on their slab of the sandbar to stop the spread of bars.
You still can’t drink in the Crest, at restaurants or, more crucially, at any hotels, even the sprawling 70-plus-room Pan American run by Jack Morey. Much of the profit in any hospitality business derives from the margins on guzzled martinis or Miller Lites, but the already-struggling motels here aren’t afforded that standard profit center. (Successive mayors of the town haven’t indicated interest in changing the status quo, though one local chuckled that “The current one seems least interested in re-election, so maybe there’s a chance with him.”)
Liquor or otherwise, there is hope. Wildwoods might well be one of the few places to benefit from the property slump: Many of those could-be-anywhere condos that replaced the Casa Bahama and company sit unsold, which means fresh development’s unlikely in the near future.
“The economy being crappy is a help to us,” explains preservationist Chuck Schumann, noting that nostalgia is also comforting in a credit-crunch-pressed world. “Everywhere I turn there are new problems and the 1950s were a safer time. Is it real? No, but it’s real while you’re here.”
Morey, Schumann and the Doo Wop Preservation League rescued the spiky, circular Surfside diner building, and moved it down the waterfront to be repurposed as the landmark Doo Wop Experience, a soda shop-cum-museum outside which sits a cheery cemetery of signs rescued from now-demolished motels, including the Satellite.
Then there’s the happy case of the Caribbean Motel. Arguably, the single best remaining example of Doo Wop, the mint-green and yellow Caribbean motel was built in 1957 by the Morey family.
There isn’t a right angle on the property, from its swirling ramp to the semi-circular pool complete with a palm-tree dotted island in its center. It was sold in 2004, free of preservation orders, and priced for development at $2.15m.
Fortunately, though, it wasn’t developers but do-gooders who managed to snap up the place: George Miller and Carolyn Emigh, lawyers from Washington DC with connections (they handle charitable compliance for Clinton Foundation, among others) and cash (they’ve renovated and now run the motel as a labor of love). Miller just celebrated his 70th birthday with a Kentucky Derby-themed BBQ around the Caribbean pool. He came to nearby Cape May as a kid, but remembers the day’s excursion to Wildwoods’ boardwalk.
“It was like candy,” he chuckles, “But when I looked at Wildwoods recently, it was like someone had forgotten it.”
He and Emigh resolved to change that, first scouting for properties to renovate and preserve earlier this decade.
“We had contracts in on four or five, but at that period we were competing with developers. In every case, they held the upper hand and could pay a premium” (The couple lost a bid for the much-mourned Satellite).
Fortunately, they finally snapped up the Caribbean in the summer of 2004 and have spent the last three years renovating it, from décor to plumbing. As contemporary motels were torn down, the Caribbean team scavenged the building sites, organ donor-style, especially for the Day-Glo-colored bathroom suites typical of Wildwoods’ heyday. They’ve safeguarded the building’s future by snagging it a standalone spot on the National Register of Historic Places four years ago and are now angling to be the first motel to be added to the National Trust’s guide to historic hotels. Emigh and Miller have even started a group Web site for a clutch of nearby properties (motelfun.com) to help them market more successfully.
“Architecturally, it’s the best representative structure, a ’50s kitschy beach motel,” Miller says, “But we haven’t made a profit so far — we’re preservationists at heart.”
It’s vital to preserve the Caribbean for another, all-too-Wildwoodsian reason, too. Because it was here, in 1957, that the Rossi family, the motel’s original owners, planted the first-ever plastic palm trees in town. They soon mushroomed around like, well, weeds.
THE BEST MOTELS IN TOWN
It’s hard to select standouts from the remaining 100 or so Doo Wop gems, but these are all worth a visit — or at least a photograph. If you’re planning on staying, the Caribbean, Shalimar and Starlux are the three spiffed-up options.
1) The Caribbean (1957)
George Miller and Carolyn Emigh’s labor of love is a throwbackish delight. Stay in room 229 if there’s a group of six or less, as it includes ocean views, a mod dinner table and a leopard-print sofa.
2) The Chateau Bleu (1959)
Oddly sited far from the beach, this motel was the first whose owners voluntarily placed it on the State Register of Historic Places. The porte cochere is “Jetsons”-esque; its heart-shaped pool a Valentine to the 1950s.
3) The Doo Wop Experience
(formerly the Surfside Restaurant; 1963)
Moved from its Wildwood Crest berth to a handy spot in front of the Wildwoods Convention Center, this diner now houses a retro soda fountain as well as providing a home for discarded neon signs.
4) The Imperial 500
(1964)
Aggressively cherished by its longtime owner, Joe Salerno, who’s said “I’m not against progress. I’m against poor planning.” Note the Imperial’s wavy, bulging balcony rails — a Doo Wop staple.
5) The Lollipop Motel
(1959)
Notable mostly for its jokey fiberglass-faced sign and jaunty, Day-Glo palette on its door so typical of classic Doo Wop.
6) The Pan American
(1964)
Morey’s large oceanfront hotel has two original circular pools joined by a channel like a cufflink, as well as one of only two rotating signs on the beach — the spiky globe was a riff on then-newsy Sputnik.
7) The Shalimar
(1964)
Recently renovated by Doo Wop-loving architect Rich Stokes, the Shalimar’s exterior now boasts hand-cut lilac and blue tiles that duplicate the ’60s aesthetic admirably. The renovated rooms are ideal for families, with suites that sleep up to 8.
8) The Singapore
(1964)
A nod to the James Michener-induced fascination with Asia in this era, the temple-like, four-story main building resembles a pagoda. Signs are still in faux-Asian typefaces but the oriental garden once planted here is, sadly, gone.
9) The Starlux
(1953/1999)
Another Morey property, this is actually a neo-Doo Wop building, renovated in 1999 from the nondescript and decrepit Wingate motel by Rich Stokes. Now it boasts a soaring lobby, spruced up rooms and a kidney-shaped pool.
10) The Waikiki Motor Inn
(1969)
Along with the Royal Hawaiian nearby, this is the gaudiest, kitschiest example of the Polynesian fad of the 1960s (think “Hawaii 5-0”). It still has thatched awnings, veneered lava sidings and Tiki-style thatched umbrellas around the pool. All that’s missing is a pupu platter.