The Lonely Grandeur of Beachfront Motels

Driving along the Garden State Parkway a few years ago, Mark Havens raced to pull ahead of vans or trucks with ladders on them—anything that could convey a construction crew. He’d push to beat them to Wildwood, a barrier island on the coast of New Jersey. “I was convinced they were going down there to demolish a motel,” he says.

He realized that the hamlet’s mid-century motels could disappear without much notice, giving way to a rubble-strewn lot or retooled as unrecognizable condos, clad in vinyl siding and a shingled roof. So Havens spent a decade crafting a photographic eulogy for the beach town’s mid-century structures—often, two squat floors arranged in an L-shape and hiked up on stilts. More than 100 of those images have been compiled into a book, Out of Season: The Vanishing Architecture of the Wildwoods (Booth-Clibborn, $55).