Post by fuzzyscorpio on Jul 23, 2006 13:13:31 GMT -5
This article from the New York Times travel section in June 2002--just after the fateful completion of the convention center--is poignant to me now. You may find it an interesting look back, especially if you're new here.
I wish the powers that be had paid more attention to the comment from Philadelphia architect Richard Stokes (see final paragraph).
JOURNEYS: Back to the Beach for a Blast of 50's Cool
By SARAH MILSTEIN
Published: June 28, 2002
IF you grew up in or around southern New Jersey in the early 1960's, there is a good chance that at least once, your parents piled you into their new Chevy Impala and headed to the city of Wildwood on the Jersey Shore. There, you would have relaxed on the wide, clean beaches, indulged in the rides, games and fast food on the lively boardwalk, and spent evenings in one of Wildwood's many mom-and-pop motels, like the Eden Roc and the Caribbean, frolicking in the kidney-shaped pool while your parents sipped mai tais on the deck.
The same ritual was performed by countless families in countless beach towns across the country. But as the 1960's progressed, the traditional family vacation became shorter, and destinations changed. Many of the motels and drive-in restaurants that symbolized the era of postwar automobile culture were abandoned, then demolished.
That didn't happen in Wildwood and its sister cities, North Wildwood and Wildwood Crest, where about 280 motels built from the late 1940's to the early 1960's survive. Today, many still stand shoulder to shoulder, bearing stylized neon signs with names like the Ala Moana, the Madrid and the Bel-Air and correspondingly decorative themes. For a tiny island community, it's an unusual collection of postwar American roadside architecture.
''It's a poor man's Miami,'' said Richard Stokes, a Philadelphia architect who has worked on a number of projects in the Wildwoods. ''A lot of the early owners would winter down there and come back with ideas.''
Vacationers who once shunned the Wildwoods' Jetsons-gone-Hawaiian style now thrill to the meeting of modernism and kitsch and are being drawn back.
''Basically any New Jersey town that has sand and ocean can be a seashore resort,'' said Jack Morey, 43, a supporter of local architectural preservation whose family business, Morey's Piers, runs three amusement park areas on the boardwalk. ''I hope residents can realize this is a place that can be more special.''
When postwar motels began rising, Americans were just gaining a sense of the world from television, and exoticism was in. To appeal to their customers' new sophistication, motel and restaurant owners named and decorated their businesses after distant locales. A typical motel in the commercial Modernist style was made from concrete slabs, with a flat roof and end walls, and exposed balconies. Lobbies were distinct.
In Miami, this style is called Mimo; in Southern California, it's called Populux. In the Wildwoods, it's been christened Doo Wop.
''One thing that separates Wildwood from other areas with concentrations of midcentury Modern is that most of the motels' 'theming' elements were conceived by the individual owners or the local sign company, not architects,'' Mr. Stokes said.
Dan Barsanti, 41, an interior designer in New York and Westport, Conn., visited the Wildwoods for the first time in May. He and his wife are returning in August with their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old twins. They are bringing four other Westport families with them.
''Because we're snobs, I thought, 'Oh, the Jersey Shore, yuck,' '' Mr. Barsanti said. ''But the beach was so beautiful and the boardwalk is heaven for our kids. We loved South Beach six years ago, but it's become a giant outdoor mall.''
The Wildwoods, he said, are much more comfortable than Miami, Nantucket or the Hamptons. ''The draw is that it's not pretentious Philippe Starck hotels. It's a bunch of old-timers who take care of their places. This is the real thing.''
Once defined by a sense of new possibilities and striving middle-class spirit, the Wildwoods began sliding into disrepair in the 1970's and 80's, and the area's exuberant tackiness turned into seediness.
''We stagnated,'' said Dan MacElrevey, 60, president of the Greater Wildwood Hotel and Motel Association. ''Resorts need to change or they die.'' But the cloud over the area had a neon lining. While other cities on the Jersey Shore, like Cape May and Atlantic City, reinvented themselves, the Wildwoods simply grew old, their distinctive buildings dilapidated but intact.
Preservation of the Wildwoods began in earnest in 1996, when Mr. Morey hired Steve Izenour, a principal with the Philadelphia architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, to work on the Port Royal hotel in Wildwood Crest. Mr. Izenour, who died this year, was delighted by the area's visual riot.
He led a group of professors and students of architecture and urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and Kent State University to study the Wildwoods. They suggested that visitors could be drawn to the area by emphasizing the giddy architecture, and they appropriated the term doo-wop, mostly associated with 1950's a cappella music, to describe the style. In 1997, Mr. Morey founded the Doo Wop Preservation League (www.doowopusa.org). Its name notwithstanding, the group's goal is not exactly preservation. Instead, the league advocates reinterpreting Doo Wop and making it bolder.
Take the StarLux motel, for example. With a soaring convex lounge, a kidney-shaped pool and pristine plastic palms, it's a showpiece for Doo Wop. But in fact, it's a drastic remodeling of the 1951 Wingate Motel.
While the new lobby has a nifty recreation room look and is stocked with vintage copies of Woman's Day, it also offers current copies of the slick design magazines I.D. and Modernism. The rooms are outfitted in a style that is more evocative than authentic, with furnishings like the late 1990's Karim Rashid Oh Chair and jazzy carpeting that might look at home in a movie theater lobby.
Mr. Morey says the space age presence of the new StarLux is inspiring renovation around town. A few blocks away, Mari Gluzinski is sprucing up the 1958 Eden Roc motel to a Doo Wop tune. Although it originally had a brown-and-gold color scheme (common at the time), Ms. Gluzinski has refreshed it with pink and teal accents. She is adding bright new decking and plastic palms around the pool.
Many of her customers come for the Doo Wop touches, she said. ''They're looking for Doo Wop hotels,'' she said. ''That's been true the two years I've had the Eden Roc. But this year is definitely better than last year. I'm almost full for July, the whole month. I'm turning people away now, and last year I wasn't.''
Ms. Gluzinski is not alone. ''From what we're hearing from the hotels and motels, occupancy the last three years has been up each year,'' said Andrew Cripps, executive director of the Greater Wildwood Chamber of Commerce. To cater to the Wildwoods' new guests, a handful of grown-up establishments have dropped anchor in town. Maureen Restaurant and Martini Bar features campy six-foot martini signs outside but serves international cuisine. Claude's, which serves French food, and Marie Nicole's, an Asian- and Caribbean-influenced restaurant, are both well regarded and provide respite from the corn dogs and curly fries peddled on the boardwalk.
Still, the economic revival of the Wildwoods is not complete. Many hotels appear run-down and many of the old downtown storefronts along Pacific Avenue sit empty. At Schellenger and Atlantic Avenues, one of Wildwood's main intersections, the Shore movie theater is boarded up. And, like most towns on the Jersey Shore, the Wildwoods are facing development pressure. Small properties are often worth more for their land than for the motels themselves.
''The Wildwood economy is good,'' Mr. Morey explained, ''so in the short term a developer can make more money buying a hotel, tearing it down and building a condo.''
Mr. Stokes, the architect, is concerned about the situation. ''Roadsides used to be covered by these buildings,'' he said. ''Most have been destroyed or remodeled beyond recognition. Palm Springs, Calif., and southern Los Angeles still have a lot of great buildings left, but they're rapidly disappearing.
''One of the great things about Wildwood is not the particular motels, it's the collection. Once you start to dilute that collection, you lose that feeling.''
(Copyright 2006, New York Times)
I wish the powers that be had paid more attention to the comment from Philadelphia architect Richard Stokes (see final paragraph).
JOURNEYS: Back to the Beach for a Blast of 50's Cool
By SARAH MILSTEIN
Published: June 28, 2002
IF you grew up in or around southern New Jersey in the early 1960's, there is a good chance that at least once, your parents piled you into their new Chevy Impala and headed to the city of Wildwood on the Jersey Shore. There, you would have relaxed on the wide, clean beaches, indulged in the rides, games and fast food on the lively boardwalk, and spent evenings in one of Wildwood's many mom-and-pop motels, like the Eden Roc and the Caribbean, frolicking in the kidney-shaped pool while your parents sipped mai tais on the deck.
The same ritual was performed by countless families in countless beach towns across the country. But as the 1960's progressed, the traditional family vacation became shorter, and destinations changed. Many of the motels and drive-in restaurants that symbolized the era of postwar automobile culture were abandoned, then demolished.
That didn't happen in Wildwood and its sister cities, North Wildwood and Wildwood Crest, where about 280 motels built from the late 1940's to the early 1960's survive. Today, many still stand shoulder to shoulder, bearing stylized neon signs with names like the Ala Moana, the Madrid and the Bel-Air and correspondingly decorative themes. For a tiny island community, it's an unusual collection of postwar American roadside architecture.
''It's a poor man's Miami,'' said Richard Stokes, a Philadelphia architect who has worked on a number of projects in the Wildwoods. ''A lot of the early owners would winter down there and come back with ideas.''
Vacationers who once shunned the Wildwoods' Jetsons-gone-Hawaiian style now thrill to the meeting of modernism and kitsch and are being drawn back.
''Basically any New Jersey town that has sand and ocean can be a seashore resort,'' said Jack Morey, 43, a supporter of local architectural preservation whose family business, Morey's Piers, runs three amusement park areas on the boardwalk. ''I hope residents can realize this is a place that can be more special.''
When postwar motels began rising, Americans were just gaining a sense of the world from television, and exoticism was in. To appeal to their customers' new sophistication, motel and restaurant owners named and decorated their businesses after distant locales. A typical motel in the commercial Modernist style was made from concrete slabs, with a flat roof and end walls, and exposed balconies. Lobbies were distinct.
In Miami, this style is called Mimo; in Southern California, it's called Populux. In the Wildwoods, it's been christened Doo Wop.
''One thing that separates Wildwood from other areas with concentrations of midcentury Modern is that most of the motels' 'theming' elements were conceived by the individual owners or the local sign company, not architects,'' Mr. Stokes said.
Dan Barsanti, 41, an interior designer in New York and Westport, Conn., visited the Wildwoods for the first time in May. He and his wife are returning in August with their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old twins. They are bringing four other Westport families with them.
''Because we're snobs, I thought, 'Oh, the Jersey Shore, yuck,' '' Mr. Barsanti said. ''But the beach was so beautiful and the boardwalk is heaven for our kids. We loved South Beach six years ago, but it's become a giant outdoor mall.''
The Wildwoods, he said, are much more comfortable than Miami, Nantucket or the Hamptons. ''The draw is that it's not pretentious Philippe Starck hotels. It's a bunch of old-timers who take care of their places. This is the real thing.''
Once defined by a sense of new possibilities and striving middle-class spirit, the Wildwoods began sliding into disrepair in the 1970's and 80's, and the area's exuberant tackiness turned into seediness.
''We stagnated,'' said Dan MacElrevey, 60, president of the Greater Wildwood Hotel and Motel Association. ''Resorts need to change or they die.'' But the cloud over the area had a neon lining. While other cities on the Jersey Shore, like Cape May and Atlantic City, reinvented themselves, the Wildwoods simply grew old, their distinctive buildings dilapidated but intact.
Preservation of the Wildwoods began in earnest in 1996, when Mr. Morey hired Steve Izenour, a principal with the Philadelphia architectural firm Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, to work on the Port Royal hotel in Wildwood Crest. Mr. Izenour, who died this year, was delighted by the area's visual riot.
He led a group of professors and students of architecture and urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and Kent State University to study the Wildwoods. They suggested that visitors could be drawn to the area by emphasizing the giddy architecture, and they appropriated the term doo-wop, mostly associated with 1950's a cappella music, to describe the style. In 1997, Mr. Morey founded the Doo Wop Preservation League (www.doowopusa.org). Its name notwithstanding, the group's goal is not exactly preservation. Instead, the league advocates reinterpreting Doo Wop and making it bolder.
Take the StarLux motel, for example. With a soaring convex lounge, a kidney-shaped pool and pristine plastic palms, it's a showpiece for Doo Wop. But in fact, it's a drastic remodeling of the 1951 Wingate Motel.
While the new lobby has a nifty recreation room look and is stocked with vintage copies of Woman's Day, it also offers current copies of the slick design magazines I.D. and Modernism. The rooms are outfitted in a style that is more evocative than authentic, with furnishings like the late 1990's Karim Rashid Oh Chair and jazzy carpeting that might look at home in a movie theater lobby.
Mr. Morey says the space age presence of the new StarLux is inspiring renovation around town. A few blocks away, Mari Gluzinski is sprucing up the 1958 Eden Roc motel to a Doo Wop tune. Although it originally had a brown-and-gold color scheme (common at the time), Ms. Gluzinski has refreshed it with pink and teal accents. She is adding bright new decking and plastic palms around the pool.
Many of her customers come for the Doo Wop touches, she said. ''They're looking for Doo Wop hotels,'' she said. ''That's been true the two years I've had the Eden Roc. But this year is definitely better than last year. I'm almost full for July, the whole month. I'm turning people away now, and last year I wasn't.''
Ms. Gluzinski is not alone. ''From what we're hearing from the hotels and motels, occupancy the last three years has been up each year,'' said Andrew Cripps, executive director of the Greater Wildwood Chamber of Commerce. To cater to the Wildwoods' new guests, a handful of grown-up establishments have dropped anchor in town. Maureen Restaurant and Martini Bar features campy six-foot martini signs outside but serves international cuisine. Claude's, which serves French food, and Marie Nicole's, an Asian- and Caribbean-influenced restaurant, are both well regarded and provide respite from the corn dogs and curly fries peddled on the boardwalk.
Still, the economic revival of the Wildwoods is not complete. Many hotels appear run-down and many of the old downtown storefronts along Pacific Avenue sit empty. At Schellenger and Atlantic Avenues, one of Wildwood's main intersections, the Shore movie theater is boarded up. And, like most towns on the Jersey Shore, the Wildwoods are facing development pressure. Small properties are often worth more for their land than for the motels themselves.
''The Wildwood economy is good,'' Mr. Morey explained, ''so in the short term a developer can make more money buying a hotel, tearing it down and building a condo.''
Mr. Stokes, the architect, is concerned about the situation. ''Roadsides used to be covered by these buildings,'' he said. ''Most have been destroyed or remodeled beyond recognition. Palm Springs, Calif., and southern Los Angeles still have a lot of great buildings left, but they're rapidly disappearing.
''One of the great things about Wildwood is not the particular motels, it's the collection. Once you start to dilute that collection, you lose that feeling.''
(Copyright 2006, New York Times)
