In Wildwood - happily stuck in the 1950s - glory days are back on the Jersey shore
Travel Holiday
Spring 2000
The sights along Ocean Avenue in Wildwood, New Jersey are meant to be seen from behind a dashboard. As the sun fades, the boulevard comes to life in neon. A vast tableau of elves stirring cauldrons of fudge wraps around Laura's Fudge like Times Square in miniature. An electric blue jay appears bigger than the tiny motel it announces. Tall loopy script identifies still other places to stay: "Pink Chanpagne," "Swan," and "Casa Nova."
The signs are so impressive here that this small resort draws the likes of Fedele Musso and Len Davidson, two "neon historians" and sign makers who've come expressly to see what they called "five continuous miles of neon." At the dawn of the 21st century, Wildwood finds itself in a time warp, a Technicolor postcard come to life. There are, on this barrier island just north of Cape may, more than 250 freeze-dried motels from the 1950s and 1960s. It looks like the Las Vegas strip used to look. In fact, Wildwood was long called, among other things, "Little Las Vegas."
But unlike Big Las Vegas, which traded its low-end spectacles for high-end spectacles, Wildwood, after a slide into seediness in the '70s and '80s, now revels in its kitsch. With the help of prominent architects and designers -- some shrewd marketing -- American culture presently infatuated with all things retro, has found its way back to the Jersey shore. To be here now, at the outset of its revitalization, is to glimpse what Wildwood was in its heyday and what it still might become.
Exit into Fantasyland
The signature of the Caribbean Motel is not the sign, starred and glowing red, but the carport which is directly beneath it. The roof spirals up, a ramp that goes to the game room on the second floor.
The Caribbean was built in 1958, four years after the Garden State Parkway opened the region to thousands of families that for the first time owned an automobile. Working people from Philadelphia had already been vacationing in Wildwood for generations -- they'd come for the expansive white-sand beaches and the boardwalk amusement piers, where roller coasters and Skee-ball arcades have entertained vacationers since 1895, and still do. Now, though, families could travel in their own car door-to-door to one of the gleaming new motels. Everything was built with the car in mind. A newfangled convenience -- the parking lot -- paved the perimiter of each motel like an asphalt moat. All of this seemed to grow organically on either side of Ocean Avenue, which became known as the Autostrip.
The fads that intoxicated America manifested itself in motel replica in Wildwood. Here, those who couldn't afford an airplane ticket could still feel like part of the burgeoning jet set. They simply booked a room at a motel that resembled, say, a Tahitian outrigger or a pagoda or even a Swiss chalet. Soon after Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state, the Waikiki Oceanfront Inn and the Kona Kai Motel sprang up on the Atlantic coast. When the country was mesmerized by the space race, vacationers to Wildwood could choose from the Galaxie and the Satellite, the Apallo and the Astronaut. Whatever the mood -- and the mood was always optimistic -- you could find it in Wildwood.
"It was the best time of my life," gushes Natalie Carfango, the platinum-blond front-desk manager at ehe Waikiki Oceanfront Inn, whose family has been coming here since 1944. "There were great clubs. We would get all dressed up and go nightclubbing. And you had real nice stars like Sammy Davis, Jr., the Platters, and Johnny Mathis."
Back then, Little Las Vegas supported dozens of nightclubs. Carfango pauses to chat with Nick the neon repairman who'd just fixed the "W" on the sing outside the motel. Then she turns and adds as an afterthought, "You even had to look good on the beach."
In the lobby of the Caribbean, I found owner Gary Montalbano kissing guests hello and taking reservations a year in advance. Montalbano, who like to be called "Unlce Gary," could easily pass for a member of the Rat Pack. ("I have tables reserved for me all over the county.") He pauses and hands me red wine in a polystyrene cup, a gesture that basically sums up Wildwood.
My room at the Caribbean has the requisite "ocean view," but more importantly, it overlooks the C-shaped swimming pool, the center of activity at this and nearly every motel in town. While their children perform cannonballs, motel guests eat sandwiches from their coolers on the Astroturf deck, under plastic palm trees.
Wildwood takes its name from the dense forest of stunted pine that once covered the island, but lately the plastic palm has become the town's icon -- what the pink flamingo is to Fort Lauderdale. Nearly every plan, model, sign and proposed entrance gate for the renovated Wildwood has at least one plastic palm on it -- this is, in fact, an unspoken requirement. One local "motelier" once tried to cultivate the real thing, but the trees couldn't survive a Northeastern winter. "Around here, palm trees grow naturally in concrete," says amusement pier owner and motel developer Jack Morey. Fortunately for Morey, Wildwood has cultivated a sense of humor about itself. The plastic species, it turns out, comes from a factory in Pennsylvania, so they're practically local.
University of Doo-Wop
Some signs along Ocean Avenue remain dark -- they cling to buildings like dead vines. But Morey is banking in the town's architecture to revitalize the town a la Miami Beach, without the Prada -- at least not yet. He's rechristened Wildwood "Doo-wop-o-lis," taking his cue from doo-wop of the '50s. He's the head of the Doo-Wop Preservation League, a small museum and resource center that holds lecture, creates public awareness of so-called "Doo-Wop" architecture, and helps mom-and-pop business owners in their efforts to spruce up old motels and repair signs. And in a particularly clever stroke, he's brought in pop culture aficionado Steve Izenour, co-author of the seminal book Learning From Las Vegas and an architecture professor at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, as the town's main consultant. Izenour began teaching a course on Wildwood which has been offered at Yale, Penn, and Kent State for the past three years. So now there's a new brand of tourist at Wildwood: architecture student.
One of Izenour's suggestions for revitalizing Wildwood is to "tunr up the volume," meaning bigger plastic palms, louder neon signs, and more kitsche, and his acolytes have eagerly heeded the call. When I visited, Kent State professor Dan Vierya was teaching a summer architecture class in a makeshift studio in an abandoned. Local motel owners are able to take advantage of free architectural and historic preservation advice -- something that might normally be prohibitively expensive -- and it's up to them to spend the money and take the ideas to a professional architect to implement the suggestions.
One morning I tagged along with the students as they made their rounds, sketches for renovations in hand. First we visited the 27-unit Ebb Tide Motel, a stamp-sized building that the architects called "a classic Doo-wop motor court within a sea of concrete." Each of the three stories slant in and out (the receding and encroaching tides, perhaps?). New owners has just taken title to the place, and it was not yet open for business, wo we climbed upstairs to the third story (carpeted in Astroturf, of course) and took in the building and the lot. The main problem with the Ebb Tide, the students remarked, was that it lacked a swimming pool. If only they could turn the parking lot into a swimming pool. But then where would the guests park?
From there, we made our way over to the Casa Nova, a sprawling hull of a building that is shaggy and run-down and ready for rehabilitation. "The Casa Nova needs a re-theming," said Vierya. "Re-themeing is a polite way of saying face-lift. "Maybe we can get you some professional help," Vierya joked to the owner, who occasionally plays piano at a couple of local restaurants.
"Maybe we can call it 'Casablanca'?" Vierya suggested to him, with a smile. "No," a student countered," the neon is too good."
Later, the students and the owner agreed to Vierys name change and a piano theme, though a fire and a change in ownership has put the students' plans on hold. Still, another generation is again taking on Wildwood, with limited means but big imaginations. Izenour calls it "door-to-door architecture." He knows that these renovations may change Wildwood, and not necessarily for the better. "It's a dilemma," he says. "On some level, you hope nothing happens, because the very funky, down-at-the-heels charm that appeals to most of us will disappear. On the other hand, you have to be realistic. the most you can hope for is that it doesn't become like every place else."
Thrills! Chills!
In the end, though, Wildwood's fabulous motels have always become an extension of the original attraction, the boardwalk amusement piers, with their creaky rides and open-air stalls offering curly fries, saltwater taffy, and orangeade. On my last night in town I ventured onto the Ferris wheel at Morey's Piers. As we ascended the 150-foot-tall loop, a display of fireworks erupted from the beach below, illuminating the sky with yet more artificial light. The ride operator brought the wheel to a halt, letting us gaze out over the boardwalk, the strip, and the vast expanse of ocean.
At that moment it could have been 1950. It could have been 2010. It didn't really matter. We were swaying high above town in a very open basket, and we experienced the same "Laughs! Fun! Thrills! and Chills!" that first made Wildwood famous a century ago. And will, hopefully, keep them coming back a century from now.
© 2001 Melissa Milgrom
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