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On the Jersey Shore, Las Vegas Meets Coney Island

On the Jersey Shore, Las Vegas Meets Coney Island

Credit Mark Havens

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View Slide Show21 Photographs

On the Jersey Shore, Las Vegas Meets Coney Island

On the Jersey Shore, Las Vegas Meets Coney Island

Credit Mark Havens

On the Jersey Shore, Las Vegas Meets Coney Island

If Marty McFly could do a “Back to the Future” reboot on the Jersey Shore, he might have found Wildwood strangely familiar. To see it for ourselves, there’s no need for a DeLorean or plutonium. Your sedan will do the trick. Just set your GPS to Ocean Avenue, and marvel at an anomaly of space and time called the 1950s.

Wildwood, listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places, has one of the highest concentrations of midcentury modern hospitality architecture in the United States. During Wildwood’s peak as a beach resort, more than 200 kitschy motels dotted the sleepy avenues, consisting mostly of low-rise L-shaped structures with flashy neon signs, bold colors and the occasional plastic palm tree.

Think Las Vegas meets Coney Island.

Mark Havens’s project “Out of Season” began as a decade-long elegy to this landscape, which first emerged during the postwar economic boom. Mr. Havens grew up in suburban New Jersey and had been traveling through this time warp since 1971 — a tradition passed down to him from his parents and grandparents — when this monument to all things doo-wop, a subdivision of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the space age and the atomic age, was at its zenith.

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Bel Air Motel. Morning Glory and Ocean.Credit Mark Havens

But on a weekend trip in 2000, he realized that many of the motels — which he once thought were as permanent as mountain ranges — were being demolished or turned into condos.

“As soon as they started falling, that made me take notice and I thought, ‘Wow, it feels like a piece of me is falling each time one of these places get demolished,’ ” he said. “I should somehow capture some of it before it all goes away.”

Flashy and vernacular, the motels and surrounding boardwalk attractions catered to a distinctly working-class clientele. They were built after World War II when the muscle of American industry pivoted to produce widespread economic prosperity. Young families, with baby boom kids in tow, wanted a playground that reflected their aspirations.

“He or she could never afford to go to Polynesia, but they could afford a couple of days on the AstroTurf around the pool at the Kona Kai,” Mr. Havens said. “They couldn’t afford to go to the Caribbean, but that’s why there’s a motel called the Caribbean in Wildwood, because you could go there, sit under the plastic palm trees and have your vacation.”

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Kona Kai Motel, Astronaut Motel and HiLili Motel. Orchid and Ocean.Credit Mark Havens

But time marched on. Apollo 11 reached the moon and the Cold War ended. The aesthetic fell out of fashion, and Jersey Shore resort towns were left flailing outside of the peak summer season. Cape May cashed in on its Victorian heritage, while Atlantic City placed big bets on the casino industry. Nestled between the two, Wildwood was left largely untouched.

“It didn’t really pay for anyone to come and knock down motels to build condos, so for about 50 years everything was encased in amber,” Mr. Havens said.

Fueled by sentiment, Mr. Havens set about trying to document the buildings. But there was one small snag. “I didn’t know anything about photography,” he confessed. Mr. Havens, an assistant professor of industrial design, taught himself how to make photographs, starting with a used 35-millimeter film camera before making respective jumps to medium format and then digital technology. As he mastered the process, he lost many would-be subjects to the wrecking ball.

“It was like trying to learn how to be a doctor while running the emergency room,” Mr. Havens lamented. “I didn’t get a second chance for a lot of these places. Sometimes I’d shoot, go to the lab and have nothing usable, and then return to the motel and it would have been just a dirt lot because they knocked it down.”

He tried shooting during peak season when lights were on, plastic palm trees were out, and water was in the pool, but even a single car would obscure what he wanted to show. So he shifted to late September and early October, capturing a certain solitude.

“I started out incidentally looking to clarify the architectural forms but, in the end, something I really wanted in the pictures, and was emblematic of the structures, was how we’ve moved on and the ways that we are and what we expect from vacation, our expectations of luxury and community, and all those things that change,” Mr. Havens said.

For preservationists and enthusiasts alike, the housing bubble that ushered in the recession was a welcome slowdown to the area’s transformation. But as the market revives, many motel owners are again selling to developers building conventional hotels or converting the structures into condominiums that provide year-round revenue.

Others have found a road to a less hazy future. Instead of going the way of no-tell motels, some, like the Starlux motel, see cachet in kitsch as they lure clients year-round. With a convention center nearby, families can reunite and cheerleaders can bring it on, even in the winter months.

For Mr. Havens, “Out of Season” is more a personal ode to what was than it is a clear reflection of what will be. The hope is that the remaining motels maintain their retro charm.

“These buildings will never be built again,” he said. “Recognizing and celebrating what they are while thoughtfully adding 21st century amenities in key areas has been proven as a viable way forward.”


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