The Doo-Wop Motels

By day, I am an architect that restores historic buildings. To most people this means quaint Victorians, civic monuments and places where famous people once worked or slept. In reality, the spectrum of historic architecture is broad and very subjective, and includes properties that are surprisingly recent. For example, if you grew up in a 1950s post war ranch house and that subdivision is intact, it may be eligible for landmark status. It is the recent past that interests me as much or more than the Queen Anne mansions. We've got thousands of fine examples historic homes and important civic buildings, but how many 1940s white ceramic Texaco gas stations are left? What was once a symbol of American progress and the freedom of the open road has vanished.

In the New Jersey Wildwoods, a stretch of distinctive 1950s era motels is threatened by encroaching beachfront development. The land has simply become too valuable for the independent motel operators to resist selling. Now I'll be the first to say that the Doo-Wop Motels are not as important to our cultural heritage as our civil war battlefields (some of which are threatened by big box retail and cookie cutter residential sprawl), but they do represent an era of bustling post-war euphoria and a distinctive period in graphic and architectural design. And the few that are left appear to be remarkably well-preserved. Similar to the Googie Style of 1950's California coffee shop architecture, Doo-Wop is represented by zoomy shapes, space-age imagery, bold colors and graphics that symbolize the exuberance of the post war period. It was an era when buildings in commercial districts and vacation spots looked like the finned, chrome laden automobiles that ruled the roads. To many people, it's a garish, dated look that should be erased from our landscape. But unlike the doo-wop classics forever preserved on record, once these buildings are gone, they're gone. You can't walk into a photograph. There is no reason why a meaningful grouping of these buildings can't be saved, like the Art Deco District in Miami, for example. The area can remain economically vibrant without resorting to non-descript condo development.

Got Googie in your neighborhood? Take a photo, because it may not be long for this world. Send me the pic and I'll post it. And if you are near the Wildwoods, go check out the Doo-Wop motels.

Link: Asbury Park Press 7/8/06

Link: DooWop Usa

Music: I Only Have Eyes For You - The Flamingos

Buy: Ultimate Doo-Wop Collection

More Posts About Buildings and Food

First and Foremost, a snippet about what the Who is up to, courtesy of Billboard...

The Who is eyeing a June release for a mini-opera, "The Glass Household," which is based on Pete Townshend's online novella "The Boy Who Heard Music." According to Townshend's Web site, the 11-minute Polydor release will precede a "conventional CD" in September and fulfills the artist's promise not to tour with the Who this summer unless new music was in the pipeline. Link to full article: The Who Moves Into the Glass Household


And now for something completely different....

I tend to notice little things in the built environment that are most likely overlooked by everyone else. I also like old roadside architecture, particularly the quirky stuff. These buildings tend to stand out like sentinels to me, amidst the corporate branding and generic designs of today's commercial architecture. Case in point, this restaurant in DeKalb, Illinois:

These buildings just catch my eye. You just don't see this everyday. There might have been a KFC right across the street for all I know. Of course, my mind then wanders to music, and the songs that include chicken in the lyrics. I could only think of a few. Can you name these songs and the original artist?

A. "Chicken in the pot, chicken in the pot."

B. "The sun's not yellow it's chicken."

C. "I eats more chicken any man's seen."

D. "Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken?"

E. "If you'll be my Dixie chicken I'll be your Tennesee lamb."

I'll post one of these songs tomorrow.

South Michigan Avenue Blues

I'm back, faithful readers (or reader, as the case may be). For the first time, life has derailed my blog. Not to worry, though, as plenty of thoughts are racing through my head.

First off, thanks to Chris at localvertical, my new top referring link. Check it out.

A few weeks ago I pondered the transition of Millennium Park in Chicago from industrial railyard to urban oasis. The swift development of residential property in the Loop is a positive by-product. This trend towards downtown living does not end at Adams Street however. South Michigan Avenue is quickly becoming a canyon of newly constructed modern condominiums and loft conversions, and the impact on the urban fabric is significant. An infusion of residents into a blighted area is a good thing, but the number of smaller scale older buildings yielding to contemporary high-rises is alarming. If you haven't seen South Michigan Avenue in a while, you may not recognize it.

From the north, the parade of new condos is evident, as the streetscape is dotted with construction cranes and newly cleared lots. From the south, the massive expansion of McCormick Place is surely to spawn additional development. The result is a number of low-rise vintage buildings uncomfortably sandwiched by their new neighbors. The condos require off-street parking, resulting in several floors of bland parking garage architecture flanking the more pedestrian friendly low-rise commercial structures. How long these old buildings will survive is anyone's guess.


Stuck in the middle of this crush from north and south is the Chess Records Office and Studio, 2120 S. Michigan Avenue. This modest structure is of monumental significance in the history of music. The building served as a landing for the great African-American blues singers and a launching pad for a few scruffy English rockers in the mid 1960's. The building just may be at the crossroads of rock music as we know it. The building is landmarked and is probably protected from demolition (I say probably only because anything can happen in the Windy City). The context however, is in danger of irreversible change.

Change is good, but let's not cast a shadow over our past.

Listen: Hidden Charms by Howlin' Wolf, written by Willie Dixon

Buy it: Howlin' Wolf: His Best

Millennium Park circa 1950

One of my favorite web sites is Found Magazine, a site that collects random objects found by people; photographs, grocery lists, handwritten notes, whatever. It really gets your imagination working to think about the people in the photos, or what on earth was going through a person’s mind when they wrote that cryptic note (some of the items are downright bizarre). I don’t have a collection of such objects of my own (yet), but I do have a few items I've found that are worth sharing:

This photograph comes from a handful of slides found in my mother-in-law’s personal belongings and was probably taken in the early 1950’s, judging from the railroad cars in the photo. The view is looking south towards Michigan Avenue in Chicago at what is now Millennium Park. My guess is the shot was taken from the Randolph Street Bridge near the old Prudential Building. The Art Institute is in the background. As a kid, I remember looking at the trains from my father's office in the tall building in the photo (with the pyramid and beehive beacon on top). This is the equivalent of looking at Central Park from a high rise in New York and seeing locomotive and cattle cars.

It’s hard to believe that for many years Chicago’s “front yard” was a tangled web of freight cars and railroad lines. Visitors and new residents are probably unaware of the industrial history of this site. The railroads were a huge contributor to the growth of Chicago, but this is a case where obscuring our history is probably a good thing. Today, the site contains the newly completed Millennium Park, complete with a Frank Gehry designed bandshell, landscaped promenades, ice rinks and a giant mirror polished kidney bean (see the Cloud Gate photo below). A few rails lines still run below, and a huge parking garage is constructed below the park, but the up on top, the transformation is remarkable. Millennium Park is directly responsible for the recent boom in residential property in the Loop. Here's what the site looks like today:

Polishing the Cloud Gate, 2-21-06. What a difference half a century makes. By the way, my father's office building went condo last year.