Post by darkrideguy on Aug 3, 2006 12:15:42 GMT -5
from July 20th issue
The Doo-Wop Dilemma
Preservationists shudder at the rebuilding of Wildwood
by Marjorie Preston
Wildwood's kitschy motels, chrome-clad diners, pink flamingos and plastic palm trees simply scream 1950s. An out-of-towner last week called it “like a trip in the Way-Back machine” — back to the era of Elvis and Ike, poodle skirts and Playboy magazine, Bandstand, bomb shelters and truly bombastic style. Unlike its decorous neighbor Cape May, gaudy, neon-lit Wildwood is not quite a destination for history lovers. Or is it?
This year, none other than the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Wildwood “the largest collection of mid-20th century resort architecture in the nation,” and “an ode to '50s optimism.”
It also added the city's so-called “Doo-Wop motels” to its 2006 list of 11 Most Endangered Places in the country (along with the neighborhoods of New Orleans, Fort Snelling in Minnesota, a 17th century California mission, and the wreckage of the Vesey Street staircase of the World Trade Center, among others).
Committed preservationists and businesspeople are trying, against a rising tide of development, to save Wildwood's uniquely wacky “Doo-Wop” character.
Among them is historian-author Elan Zingman-Leith, who finds historic significance as well as humor in Wildwood's distinctive motels — the Starlux, the Satellite, the Eden Roc, the Shalimar, the Kona Kai, the Lollipop, and dozens more.
“In every era there's tasteful and there's extreme,” says Zingman-Leith of the motels' spaceship windows, Jetson ramps, sawtooth or “woggle” roofs, and a palette of pastels — turquoise, Pepto-Bismol pink — seldom found in nature. “When you look back at what was tasteful, it's so boring. The '50s stuff is fun ... Mies van der Rohe said, ‘Less is more.' In Doo-Wop, more is more.”
In recent years, many Doo-Wop motels have been replaced by charmless, big box condos that resemble nothing more than oversized concrete blocks. Zingman-Leith and others believe Wildwood should not only preserve what remains of its oddball look, but exploit it.
“Twice before, I was in a shore town that used its architectural heritage to market the town: South Beach in Miami, and Cape May,” says Zingman-Leith. He says South Beach went from “so poor, so undesirable” to “prosperous and fashionable” when it began to restore its old Art Deco structures. As soon as Gloria Estefan bought a restored 1920s house, the rich and acquisitive fell in like dominoes. The place began to breathe, then to boom. Cape May, of course, has long leaned on its Victorian roots to draw the tourist trade.
“To me, Cape May is stuffy — pretty, but stuffy,” says Chuck Schumann, founding board member of the Wildwood Doo-Wop Preservation League. “The '50s stuff, on the other hand, is funny. Buildings weren't square anymore. There were no 90-degree angles. Everything was thirty-three and a third.”
Fake palm trees - a unique facet of the Doo-Wop style.
Both Schumann and Zingman-Leith own large collections of '50s-style furniture and artifacts, many now on display at an exhibit called “Back to the '50s: The Life and Times of Doo-Wop Design” at the Carriage House Gallery, 1048 Washington St. in, of all places, stuffy Cape May.
The 1950s and early '60s are popularly considered America's age of innocence and postwar prosperity. Life was good. Jobs were plentiful. The average Joe could suddenly afford a nice tract house, a shiny new car, even a summer jaunt to the Jersey Shore. Thanks to TV, mass media, mass marketing, and consumerism were born.
So was planned obsolescence. “After everyone went out and bought a new car and a new washing machine, demand for those items plummeted,” says Zingman-Leith.
An advertising motto of the period went: “We can't sell more cars, so we have to sell more car,” he says. “So every year they changed the colors, changed the dials, and made last year's model look old. Cars had big fins, then little fins. The same with clothing. If fashion changed just enough from year to year, you could get people to buy new things before the old ones wore out. It was brilliant, and it worked.”
Lots of Schumann's stuff he found on trash day, or at construction sites when old buildings were torn down: there are Sputnik-style table lamps, molded plastic kitchen chairs in orange and gold and avocado, bleak but sleek Danish modern furniture, the kind of indestructible dishes that used to come free in detergent boxes. But his love for '50s camp is not universally shared, and that puzzles Schumann.
“Our movement is appreciated more outside Wildwood than in it, which is sad but true,” he says. “Some people can't see why anyone would like this. People who grew up here said [of the motels], ‘Tear them down, get rid of them, they're junk.'”
Of course, not everyone thinks Doo-Wop is disposable. A key group of residents, businesspeople and history buffs — including Schumann, Jack Morey of Morey's Piers, and Michael Zuckerman of the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts — saw potential in Wildwood's Doo-Wop history. Their efforts resulted in a '50s-themed trolley tour of the motel district. The tour, a big hit for several years, was scrapped as more and more motels met the wrecking ball.
The fight to save what remains goes on. Says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust, “The exuberant architecture of the Wildwood Doo-Wop motels makes them irreplaceable icons of popular culture. Instead of being demolished to make room for nondescript new development, the Doo-Wop motels should be preserved as the focus of an all-season resort and a vibrant, livable community for year-round residents.”
The Doo-Wop Preservation League can chalk up one extraordinary success: members raised $25,000 to dismantle the Surfside restaurant in Wildwood Crest. It will soon be reassembled near Wildwood Convention Hall as the Wildwood Doo-Wop Museum. The octagonal space will include an ice cream parlor and an outdoor performing arts arena (Wildwood is big on concerts with '50s stars like Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker, and '60s reunion acts like Herman's Hermits and the Monkees).
Meantime, a spike in interest rates may slow development, and preserve, for a moment, what's left of classic '50s architecture. Chuck Schumann hopes so. “[Doo-Wop preservationists] really don't have any control,” he says. “The economy has more control. We can't save these buildings, but maybe the owners can.”
He will not stop scouring tear-downs and trash heaps for neat '50s stuff. “I just got two great new chairs, bright yellow,” Schumann enthuses. “And at a motel in North Wildwood, I found five old toilets in very nice colors: turquoise, blue, yellow, pink and taupe. I'm going to call them ‘The Fifties Flushers.'”
Marjorie Preston is a weekly contributor to AC Weekly. She has been published in Ladies Home Journal, Fitness, and New Woman magazines
The Doo-Wop Dilemma
Preservationists shudder at the rebuilding of Wildwood
by Marjorie Preston
Wildwood's kitschy motels, chrome-clad diners, pink flamingos and plastic palm trees simply scream 1950s. An out-of-towner last week called it “like a trip in the Way-Back machine” — back to the era of Elvis and Ike, poodle skirts and Playboy magazine, Bandstand, bomb shelters and truly bombastic style. Unlike its decorous neighbor Cape May, gaudy, neon-lit Wildwood is not quite a destination for history lovers. Or is it?
This year, none other than the National Trust for Historic Preservation named Wildwood “the largest collection of mid-20th century resort architecture in the nation,” and “an ode to '50s optimism.”
It also added the city's so-called “Doo-Wop motels” to its 2006 list of 11 Most Endangered Places in the country (along with the neighborhoods of New Orleans, Fort Snelling in Minnesota, a 17th century California mission, and the wreckage of the Vesey Street staircase of the World Trade Center, among others).
Committed preservationists and businesspeople are trying, against a rising tide of development, to save Wildwood's uniquely wacky “Doo-Wop” character.
Among them is historian-author Elan Zingman-Leith, who finds historic significance as well as humor in Wildwood's distinctive motels — the Starlux, the Satellite, the Eden Roc, the Shalimar, the Kona Kai, the Lollipop, and dozens more.
“In every era there's tasteful and there's extreme,” says Zingman-Leith of the motels' spaceship windows, Jetson ramps, sawtooth or “woggle” roofs, and a palette of pastels — turquoise, Pepto-Bismol pink — seldom found in nature. “When you look back at what was tasteful, it's so boring. The '50s stuff is fun ... Mies van der Rohe said, ‘Less is more.' In Doo-Wop, more is more.”
In recent years, many Doo-Wop motels have been replaced by charmless, big box condos that resemble nothing more than oversized concrete blocks. Zingman-Leith and others believe Wildwood should not only preserve what remains of its oddball look, but exploit it.
“Twice before, I was in a shore town that used its architectural heritage to market the town: South Beach in Miami, and Cape May,” says Zingman-Leith. He says South Beach went from “so poor, so undesirable” to “prosperous and fashionable” when it began to restore its old Art Deco structures. As soon as Gloria Estefan bought a restored 1920s house, the rich and acquisitive fell in like dominoes. The place began to breathe, then to boom. Cape May, of course, has long leaned on its Victorian roots to draw the tourist trade.
“To me, Cape May is stuffy — pretty, but stuffy,” says Chuck Schumann, founding board member of the Wildwood Doo-Wop Preservation League. “The '50s stuff, on the other hand, is funny. Buildings weren't square anymore. There were no 90-degree angles. Everything was thirty-three and a third.”
Fake palm trees - a unique facet of the Doo-Wop style.
Both Schumann and Zingman-Leith own large collections of '50s-style furniture and artifacts, many now on display at an exhibit called “Back to the '50s: The Life and Times of Doo-Wop Design” at the Carriage House Gallery, 1048 Washington St. in, of all places, stuffy Cape May.
The 1950s and early '60s are popularly considered America's age of innocence and postwar prosperity. Life was good. Jobs were plentiful. The average Joe could suddenly afford a nice tract house, a shiny new car, even a summer jaunt to the Jersey Shore. Thanks to TV, mass media, mass marketing, and consumerism were born.
So was planned obsolescence. “After everyone went out and bought a new car and a new washing machine, demand for those items plummeted,” says Zingman-Leith.
An advertising motto of the period went: “We can't sell more cars, so we have to sell more car,” he says. “So every year they changed the colors, changed the dials, and made last year's model look old. Cars had big fins, then little fins. The same with clothing. If fashion changed just enough from year to year, you could get people to buy new things before the old ones wore out. It was brilliant, and it worked.”
Lots of Schumann's stuff he found on trash day, or at construction sites when old buildings were torn down: there are Sputnik-style table lamps, molded plastic kitchen chairs in orange and gold and avocado, bleak but sleek Danish modern furniture, the kind of indestructible dishes that used to come free in detergent boxes. But his love for '50s camp is not universally shared, and that puzzles Schumann.
“Our movement is appreciated more outside Wildwood than in it, which is sad but true,” he says. “Some people can't see why anyone would like this. People who grew up here said [of the motels], ‘Tear them down, get rid of them, they're junk.'”
Of course, not everyone thinks Doo-Wop is disposable. A key group of residents, businesspeople and history buffs — including Schumann, Jack Morey of Morey's Piers, and Michael Zuckerman of the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts — saw potential in Wildwood's Doo-Wop history. Their efforts resulted in a '50s-themed trolley tour of the motel district. The tour, a big hit for several years, was scrapped as more and more motels met the wrecking ball.
The fight to save what remains goes on. Says Richard Moe, president of the National Trust, “The exuberant architecture of the Wildwood Doo-Wop motels makes them irreplaceable icons of popular culture. Instead of being demolished to make room for nondescript new development, the Doo-Wop motels should be preserved as the focus of an all-season resort and a vibrant, livable community for year-round residents.”
The Doo-Wop Preservation League can chalk up one extraordinary success: members raised $25,000 to dismantle the Surfside restaurant in Wildwood Crest. It will soon be reassembled near Wildwood Convention Hall as the Wildwood Doo-Wop Museum. The octagonal space will include an ice cream parlor and an outdoor performing arts arena (Wildwood is big on concerts with '50s stars like Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker, and '60s reunion acts like Herman's Hermits and the Monkees).
Meantime, a spike in interest rates may slow development, and preserve, for a moment, what's left of classic '50s architecture. Chuck Schumann hopes so. “[Doo-Wop preservationists] really don't have any control,” he says. “The economy has more control. We can't save these buildings, but maybe the owners can.”
He will not stop scouring tear-downs and trash heaps for neat '50s stuff. “I just got two great new chairs, bright yellow,” Schumann enthuses. “And at a motel in North Wildwood, I found five old toilets in very nice colors: turquoise, blue, yellow, pink and taupe. I'm going to call them ‘The Fifties Flushers.'”
Marjorie Preston is a weekly contributor to AC Weekly. She has been published in Ladies Home Journal, Fitness, and New Woman magazines
