Workman’s Paradise

It was 1957, the year of Sputnik and the one before “The Purple People Eater,” and Will Morey was looking for a summertime business. He had spent most of the winter in Fort Lauderdale and loved the designs of the new motels in that burgeoning Florida resort.

He lived summers at the Jersey Shore, though, and figured there was a place for one of those motels here. Just onto this barrier island where the causeway from the mainland becomes Rio Grande Avenue, Morey built the Fantasy Motel. Nothing fancy, just a couple of stories of rooms around a parking lot, with a few futuristic designs on the railings and walls.

“It was the heyday of the working man’s vacation,” said Jack Morey, Will’s son. “And Wildwood was the working man’s resort. You wanted to drive your car to the door, have a comfortable room and go to the beach for a week.”

Jack Morey is sitting on a 40-year-old orange wing chair, which he bought for $5, in the Starlux Motel, which he built as a homage to his dad and compatriots of that era. He is the head of the Morey Organization, which owns several amusement piers on the Wildwood Boardwalk. He is, as well, the moving force of the Doo-Wop Preservation League, which strives to keep alive the spirit of his father and dozens of others who built the motels and businesses that have made this island the repository of what may be the densest concentration of 1950s and 1960s commercial architecture in the country.

“Some call it Googie or Populuxe or Space Age or Roadside Americana. The mayor here likes Jetsonian. I like Doo-Wop because it brings in the music, another part of the culture of the times,” said Morey.

The resort has come under academic microscopes for the last several years. Steven Izenour, a partner in Venturi Scott Brown, the Philadelphia architecture firm famed for the study of the everyday (including the book “Learning From Las Vegas”), has led studios from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University architecture schools here. Undergrads from Kent State University’s architecture program regularly have seminars with motel owners to see how they can best and most economically re-Doo-Wop their places.

“For the last 30 years, my partners and I have made a hobby of learning from places everyone else ignores,” said Izenour. “You want to look at these places not just in some esoteric design context, but put it in a larger social and economic one. We’re not just architects, but historians and sociologists.

“And a place like Wildwood is ripe for just that,” he said. “You have this wonderful ad-hoc do-it-yourself 1950s resort architecture. These guys who built the motels didn’t hire fancy architects. They were a bunch of builders who were looking to profit in a classic post-World War II blue-collar resort.”

Names That Conjure a Culture of the Past

Motels, mostly two-or three-story reinforced concrete beauties of the postwar era, abound here, all with evocative names of the era. There is the Satellite, with its elongated, “futuristic” angled roof-line arch and neon sign with “Satellite” in script next to a Sputnik-like object in orbit. Nearby is the Ala Moana, with its Polynesian-chieftain-with-Tiki-lamps welcoming sign. And there are all sorts of thatch and plastic palms and the like at places such as the Kona Kai and the Waikiki. The Martinique, the Pink Champagne, the Lollipop, the La Vita, the Sea Star, the Bel Air and, not too distant, the Bel Aire--you might think that Wildwood is frozen in an Eisenhowerian aura.

Wildwood (population in the off-season: 5,400) actually had a relatively prosperous carriage-trade era early in the 20th century. There is a beautiful white house on the southern part of this 5-mile-long island that was built as a summer residence for the only U.S. president from New Jersey--Woodrow Wilson--though he never used it, and several dozen large Victorian structures are in use as offices, rooming houses and residences.

But Wildwood’s boom times started in the 1950s as the affordable resort for Philadelphians, cooped up in row homes 80 miles away. They came and played and blasted their music loudly. There is a street named in honor of Doo-Wop era rocker Bobby Rydell, whose grandmother had a house here, and he paid the town back by recording “Wildwood Days” (“Every day is a holiday and every night is Saturday night,” went the chorus), which reached No. 17 on the Billboard charts in June 1963.

The island filled up with more than 100 motels. What is surprising and therefore interesting to Izenour is that when other resorts, particularly Atlantic City 30 miles to the north and Asbury Park another 60 miles toward New York, deteriorated rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, Wildwood was able to hold onto its admittedly downscale market.

“I think the reason it never declined badly is that the buildings were owner-owned, if you will,” said Izenour. “It was their livelihood--maybe they had another one in Florida for the winter--and they wanted to keep their steady clientele. It also never became a gigundo success, so no chains came in. It was one of those few places that walked that thin line between coming undone and becoming an outrageous moneymaker.”

Still, by the late 1980s, a lot of those 1950s dream themes of Hawaii and space flight and pink champagne were of a bygone generation, and the buildings themselves were getting a little worn too. Down the road a few miles, people had rediscovered the Victorian elegance of Cape May, where presidents from Grant to McKinley had summered 100 years before, and that town had gussied up its old buildings, turning them into scores of bed and breakfasts.

“We saw that and wondered if we could do the same thing in a different way here,” said Morey. And so he started the Doo-Wop Preservation League in 1991. Most of the motel owners are now members.

“Motel owners realize there is money to be made in this. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot to keep up what we have,” said Dan MacElverey, president of Ocean Property Management, which manages about a dozen motels in Wildwood.

Over the last three years, the Kent State group has advised motel owners how to enhance the Doo-Wopiness of their properties. “It’s like a design jam session,” said Dan Vieyra, a professor of architecture who directs the historic preservation program at Kent State. “What’s great for the students is that these people don’t have big budgets, so they have to be pragmatic, too. It’s not just drawing the fantastic.”

The Cara Mara Motel, which MacElverey manages, is in the midst of implementing one of those low-budget suggestions from the Kent State students. The Cara Mara was merely a glassy rectangular box with a nice pool. Now it has a new ‘50s-font-style sign, neon bands of blue and rose around its upper facade, and a white-and-blue-checkerboard pattern is planned for its fire tower.

“Here we had a liability, an ugly fire tower, and it’s going to be a design feature,” said MacElverey. “They suggested making a garage area into a game room with a few ‘50s design touches. I was able to do it with maintenance staff, so everything stayed within budget.”

The Penn and Yale students were more theoretical in their approach to Wildwood, studying its significance and then designing what they hoped could be, instead of merely touching up what is. Penn student Andrew Pasonick attacked the Wildwood beach, which in some places is a vast 1,500 feet from boardwalk to ocean. “Right now, it’s like crossing a desert, so I wanted to bring that Doo-Wop life to the beach,” said Pasonick.

He designed lifeguard chairs with oversized tires on them for transport and put huge, curvy, pastel ‘50s umbrellas on top. To move them, you’d tip them and pull them like a wagon by the umbrella top. “This was my best course at Penn,” said Pasonick, who now does architectural work for his family’s firm in land-locked Wilkes-Barre, Pa. “It broke the mold of architecture. It was trying to think like working guys in the 1950s, seeing what their life was all about and doing a resort for them.”

The city of Wildwood is now looking to issue bonds for a $40-million upgrade of the town itself, hopefully incorporating Doo-Wop features, possibly some designed by the Penn and Yale students. There is a new convention center being built, but the state agency that oversees it couldn’t be swayed to adorn the front with a huge neon sea dragon, as suggested by the students. Mayor Duane Sloan, though, hopes one of the fantastical designs can be used, funding permitting, for an archway at the city’s main motor entrance.

Izenour said that parts of Fort Lauderdale and places dotting Southern California from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara do display some concentrations of architecture similar to Wildwood’s. But none of them, he posited, can rival the volume and density of motels and neon-encrusted bars and shops here.

Family Atmosphere, Low Prices Still Draw Business

Business has been good to Wildwood in recent years. The motels mostly charge less than $80 for a moderate-sized room, so the grandchildren of those 1950s families can stay with their kids in the same places their grandparents did. Teenagers flock to the resolutely non-Disneyfied boardwalk. There are both scary and kiddie rides and water parks and T-shirt shops and piercing parlors, all loud and just a little bit tacky.But the architecture buffs come for the Doo-Wop. Particularly striking is the Caribbean, with its script neon sign with a star instead of a dot over the “i.” The Caribbean has a long spiral ramp down from the second to the first floor and onto the pool deck, which is dotted with large plastic palm trees and umbrella stands.

“The Caribbean, in a way, had a double meaning,” said Vieyra. “It evoked a place that the working class couldn’t otherwise get to. But it was also across the street from the Bel Air, which was the Chevy station wagon, and the Caribbean was the Pontiac one.”

The familiar combined with the exotic with some oddball confusion is evident all over Wildwood. The Rio Motel, for instance, is adorned with the figure of a man in a sombrero leading a burro. Brazilian? Mexican? Who cared? Either was exotic in the ‘50s.

The problem Wildwood now faces, according to Izenour, is that as it preserves its Doo-Wop past, it may be destroying some of the reasons it was successful.

“In Cape May, I think they have freeze-dried an era. Everything is Victorian, even if it was put up yesterday,” said Izenour. “This place grew up because everyone was an individual doing business and not really designing in some well-thought-out fashion. I happen to think the only way you preserve a place like this, or like Las Vegas, is through photographs. If it’s the time today to build six-story condos, then do it. My inclination is to preserve the attitude, the lack of control, the wilder-the-better-plastic-palms idea.”