By Jackson Betz

Preservation is often an inherently uphill battle. The vast majority of preservationists’ struggles involve buildings under private ownership, and there is no legal mechanism to encourage building owners to preserve, rather than replace, these historic properties. Even governmental initiatives, like the National Register of Historic Places and its state-level equivalents, cannot make building owners preserve historic structures. (Instead, the National Register provides incentives, like tax breaks, for historic property owners who preserve their buildings or renovate them in a historically authentic manner.) And even for historic structures under government ownership, short-sighted decisions often take precedence depending on budgetary or political concerns. 

Preservationists’ primary recourse is, in effect, to lean on building owners to “do the right thing” for history and posterity. That method of preservation is, at best, inconsistent. Many building owners don’t understand how their property contributes to the character of a town and cannot be easily swayed by glorified peer pressure. (This common failure of preservation efforts caused the Wildwoods lose a large chunk of its Doo Wop motel population between 2002 and 2007.) How have successful preservation movements managed to get things done? Most share three key factors: Consistent branding, community participation, and engagement with local politics. 

Branding is crucial to attract community support. A preservation movement should adhere to the principles of good advertising, like arresting visuals, memorable keywords that are repeated, and balanced appeals to reason and logic. The Miami Design Preservation League, an organization formed in 1976 to save South Beach Miami’s streamlined 1930s and 1940s hotels from demolition, marketed their movement around a single phrase: “Art Deco.” Throughout the late 1970s and the early 1980s, they held conferences named after Art Deco, contributed breathtaking color photos of Art Deco hotels to magazine stories, and pushed for a Miami Art Deco District. By hammering home the phrase “Art Deco” and accompanying it with colorful and eye-catching photos, the MDPL re-introduced Art Deco as a household term, which it hadn’t been since the 1940s. They also brought public attention to the plight of Miami’s architecture and “sold” their cause to ordinary citizens, just as Volkswagen had sold Beetles with the slogan “think small.” Even if several historic Miami hotels were demolished (most notably the Senator in 1988), the MDPL’s advertising efforts spread awareness of historic architecture and inspired similar preservation movements around the country (including in the Wildwoods). 

Once the preservation organization has drawn in participants, the second step is to put them to work. San Francisco has a critical mass of historical Victorian and Edwardian houses built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the 1960s, preservationists began to worry about these buildings, many of which had been renovated with ugly new facades, or, even worse, demolished. In 1978, Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen published Painted Ladies: San Francisco's Resplendent Victorians, a picture book that lauded the efforts of house owners who painted their historic buildings in colorful Victorian color schemes. The book also created a memorable term (Painted Ladies) to represent the preservation movement. Inspired by Painted Ladies, thousands of house owners in San Francisco contacted the preservationists, asking how they could make their houses part of San Francisco’s architectural legacy. In response, San Francisco’s preservationists leapt into overdrive. Artists around the city like Butch Kardum worked with house owners to paint their houses in colorful schemes pro bono, transforming entire blocks in the process. The authors of Painted Ladies compiled some three sequels to the book, spotlighting members of the “colorist movement” who had colorfully repainted their houses, incentivizing even more house owners to do so. By creating a community of people who wanted to do their part, the San Francisco colorists successfully preserved a valuable trove of Victorian architecture. 

Even when the movement has been advertised and the community has been engaged, preservationists’ effect is still limited. When advertising and local participation don’t have the desired effect, many preservationists have brought pressure to bear on local politicians. Case in point: The covered bridges of Rush County, Indiana. County and state governments have jurisdiction over covered bridges, since bridges are part of government-owned road systems. However, many county and state officials favor replacing historic covered bridges, whose height, width, and load limit restrictions obstruct traffic. The state of Indiana began to embrace covered bridges as a tourist attraction in the 1960s, when, thanks to preservationists’ efforts, tourist organizations began to heavily feature the state’s covered bridges on brochures and postcards. Several areas of Indiana, like Parke County, launched covered bridge festivals, which invited the community to enjoy covered bridges and participate in their preservation. 

In the 1980s, contrary to public opinion, county commissioners in Rush County, a rural area southeast of Indianapolis, unveiled a plan to replace all six of the county’s covered bridges with moden bridges, which they claimed would be more efficient and require less maintenance. Covered bridge enthusiasts, bolstered by covered bridge-centric advertising and the success of tourist events, began a grassroots campaign to vote out the anti-covered bridge commissioners, and in 1986, a new county government was elected that had campaigned on a promise to preserve the bridges. Today, Rush County retains all six bridges, and when one was destroyed by a tornado in 2010, the county reconstructed it. Covered bridges are something of an outlier, since they are government property and local governments can regulate their preservation (unlike the Art Deco hotels of Miami or the painted ladies of San Francisco). Still, the way political organizers in Rush County weaponized preservation, assisted by prominent advertising and community engagement, can serve as an example for other preservationists all over the country. 

How can the Wildwoods employ these three key elements of preservation movements? In fact, twenty years ago, the Wildwoods nearly succeeded. In the 1990s, the Doo Wop Preservation League was formed to raise awareness of the island’s cache of 1950s and 1960s motels, all of which featured classic mid-century neon signs and asymmetrical, wacky shapes. The DWPL did an admirable job of advertising the preservation movement, publicizing the memorable term “doo wop” to link the motels to their 1950s context. Newspapers and magazines all over the country ran stories about the Wildwoods’ endangered motels, many including vivid color photos. Inspired by this publicity blast, tourists and architectural aficionados visited the Wildwoods and raised their voices in support of the motels, helping launch a community devoted to the motels’ preservation. The DWPL and other interested groups embraced this community, holding conferences and other events to raise awareness of the Wildwoods’ historic architecture. While the doo wop preservation movement had several success stories, namely the preservation of the Surfside Restaurant and its reuse as the Doo Wop Experience museum, over 100 motels were demolished during a condo boom that lasted from about 2002 until the 2007 economic crisis. At the end of the day, the Wildwoods’ preservationists held little sway over motels’ aging owners, many of whom were enticed by attractive offers to sell out. 

Preserving the Wildwoods hopes to go the crucial last step to ensure that the Wildwoods’ historic architecture of all styles and eras survives to inspire future generations: We’d like to help integrate preservation with local government. We’ve encountered a lot of resistance to preservation around town: Many building owners say that they don’t want to list their buildings on the National Historic Register, for instance, because they believe that a listing on the National Historic Register will prohibit them from making changes to their building, when in reality, a listing would provide them incentives to make changes in a historically sympathetic way. We’d also like to make local government officials more aware of the valuable architecture that still remains standing in the Wildwoods and the benefits of preserving it, rather than allowing it to be replaced with cookie-cutter condominiums. All great preservation movements require some combination of eye-catching branding, community engagement, and the support of local politics. Previous preservation movements in the Wildwoods have managed to capture the first two of these; Preserving the Wildwoods wants to give the third our best shot!

This story is from our newsletter, Participate in Preservation. Read more by clicking here.

To join to our FREE email notification list, click here.