Did-Wop

This article from the Star-Ledger outlines one of the primary reasons I left Wildwood - I simply could not stand the demolition anymore.

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-5/114226590560630.xml&coll=1

It sickened me. By the time I moved, I was avoiding the Crest all together except for the library. How could ANYONE stand to live there? How could anyone live in a place where forty historic buildings are going to be empty lots? Where you live with the constant threat of the possible demolition of your home over your head, even if your landlady and the owner of the hotel next-door says they have no desire to sell? How can you trust them NOT to sell when everyone else is?

I SAW them demolish the Shore Theater. I passed by that on my way home just a few days before I moved. I was so mad when I found out the Nile nightclub down the street from me was demolished to build condos, I threw my DVD player's remote control against the wall of my old place and broke it. Ok, that was stupid, but you see how this angers me.

Hey, Wildwood, wanna get young people and young families and people my age back? Leave our damn hotels ALONE! Build nice, normal, small-sized hotels that resonate with Wildwood's history. You're not Disneyland and you're not the Rivera, so stop trying to be that. You're a family resort in New Jersey on an island that can only stand so much building. Condos are NOT the way to go to bring the young people and their children back. Most people my age can barely afford the basics of living, much less some fancy-shmancy piece of Victorian-esque junk. Build simpler, smaller hotels. Build houses. Nice, normal houses for nice, normal families. Blend them in with the island's architecture. Yeah, it's tacky, but it's OUR tacky. It's the tacky that made Wildwood what it is, and you wouldn't be having a Reneissance without it.

The jerks in charge of Wildwood have no appreciation of it's history or the importance of those hotels. Eliminate them completely, and you'll just have another boring little resort with an oversized beach and a collection of dull, meaningless condos where a bunch of decrepid, snot-nosed matrons from the cities live for a week in June. What will happen when all those snots die? Do you think their children will want to come to an overpriced, meaningless collection of crappy condos?

I hope you like living in ghosts towns...because in a few years, that's all Wildwood's gonna be.