It's a Wild World

New Jersey's Doo Wop Motels Turn Off the Lights.

By Carole Moore | Online Only | Aug. 4, 2006

In May, the National Trust named Doo Wop Hotels to its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Places.

Credit: Adrian Fine, NTHP

Lining the South Jersey shore like colorful plastic Monopoly game pieces, the legendary Doo Wop motels range from slightly kitschy to totally over-the-top. They were built a half-century ago in three towns known collectively as The Wildwoods: Wildwood, Wildwood Crest, and North Wildwood.

"I remember garish, oversized plastic flamingos, pirate figures, Hawaiian tiki gods, and big artificial palm trees," says lifelong New Jersey resident Cindy Walker of her childhood vacation at one of Wildwood’s motels. "The colors were bright—lots of pinks and pastels—and lots of neon."

Despite increasing incentives to keep the 50-year-old motels operational, 3,000 of the Wildwoods' 11,000 Doo Wop motel rooms have been recently lost—last year, three were been demolished. In May, the National Trust named Doo Wop Hotels to its list of America's 11 Most Endangered Places.

"It's market pressure," says Dan MacElrevey, chairman of the Wildwoods' nonprofit organization, the Doo Wop Preservation League. "The land values along the Jersey shore have exploded."

Modern condos now occupy sites of Doo Wops. Many motel owners are aging, and the chance to sell at a tidy profit has proven too tempting. As Doo Wop owners sell out and their properties are bulldozed, more than simply the buildings are lost. Those who love Doo Wop say that not only is the world's most extensive collection of Doo Wop architecture disappearing, so is the essence of what made the Wildwoods different from other sand and surf vacation destinations.

Wildwood's Casa Bahama Hotel

Credit: Adrian Fine

Built mostly in the 1950s and early 1960s, the motels targeted vacationing families during the height of Doo Wop music's popularity. Characterized by close vocal harmonies, doo wop songs like "Rainy Day Bells" or "Goodnight Sweetheart" sent teens rushing to the gym to shed their saddle shoes or penny loafers and dance in their socks. But when school was out, they hit the beach, checking into family hotels with outer space, Caribbean, or Hawaiian themes. Delighted Eisenhower-era vacationers enjoyed places like the Pink Champagne Motel, a sprawling complex the hue of an Easter egg, or the Lollipop Motel, dotted with splashes of bright primary colors and a giant lollipop sign.

Then came the large chain hotels. As the chains extended their operations, business for the tantalizingly tacky, family-owned and operated Doo Wop motels began to decline. Efforts to slow the erosion of Doo Wop architectural style have yielded mixed results.

New Jersey architect Richard Stokes can't keep the melancholy from creeping into his voice when he talks about the Wildwoods. Stokes, a principal in the Stokes Architecture firm, has championed Doo Wop preservation and served as the architect on renovation projects. "You see these motels around the country, but in a grouping like Wildwood, the effect's much more powerful," Stokes says. "Ocean Avenue was nothing but Doo Wops, and each had its sign bigger and better than the next one. They managed to create something special and unique."

The Wildwoods' new look

Credit: Adrian Fine

Some feel the Wildwoods are living on borrowed time. Renovating an old motel is an expensive and complicated endeavor that makes "as is" purchase offers in the millions of dollars very attractive. Preservationists suggest that government could have played an earlier role in saving the motels. Changes to zoning regulations and tax incentives, while now coming into play, were slow to surface. In the meantime, developers began razing some of the landmark structures along the boardwalk. The Swan, Satellite, and Rio fell in 2005; the Carousel in 2004.

Stokes and others fear the wild tangle of neon signs, massive glass walls, and boomerang rooflines that characterize the Wildwoods will soon pass into extinction. "The mom-and-pop aspect is gone," Stokes says. "It's not the same place it was even five years ago."

Stokes spearheaded the renovation of the old StarLux as a demonstration project, hoping others would follow suit. But the rising value of real estate in beach towns worked against the idea. Jack Morey, a partner in Morey's Piers and Hospitality, which remodeled the StarLux, blames the threat to the world's largest collection of mid-20th-century hotels in part to government inaction and lack of vision. Is this the end of Doo Wop? Morey hopes not. He suggests creating an historic district.

"That would clearly help motels stay in business," Morey asserts.

MacElrevey, Stokes, and Morey are trying to keep that classic Wildwood "feel" from becoming a memory. But, like salmon swimming upstream, there's always the lurking fear that a hungry bear of the real estate market is waiting to gobble them up.

Caribbean Hotel

Credit: Adrian Fine

"Time was when Doo Wop was the best thing that ever happened," Morey says. "Then when real estate boomed, it pulled the 60s shag carpet right out from under us."

The Wildwoods will probably never regain its glory days, but the proprietors of the gaudy, neon-punctuated Doo Wop motels that remain don't really want to live in the past. They simply want a future.

Carole Moore is a journalist living in North Carolina.

This story was originally published on Nov. 18, 2005.

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