Will the Wildwoods, as a place, become a better version of itself or yet another theme park - packaged, processed and performed like a play? Is there a difference? About how nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s is being used as an advertisement, a way to take a commercial 'feel' that developed organically and augment it with the artificially conceived.

This is a tale about place and what it means. Make the 1950s the official theme of the place and go with it - call it 'doo-wop architecture.' So the town's entrepreneurs, with help from architecture students from three universities, have come up with a plan: Pump up the volume. Still others think it has become a bit too wild for family fun. Many of the island's bread-and-butter vacationers from Philadelphia have found more upscale towns others simply perceive Wildwood as a day's diversion rather than a place to stay. Today in the Wildwoods, a barrier island on the South Jersey shore, the feel of the 1950s endures in architecture if not in spirit. Then come the beach-goers, seeking their annual few days in an exotic place that echoes other, even more exotic places.

Aquarius and Ala Moana and Grecian Gardens.

Each season the moteliers of the Wildwoods switch on their iridescent marquees and the signs over 13,000 rooms come wildly alive: Caribbean and Lollipop. On warm summer nights, the edge of the land glows with a neon exuberance that seems oddly out of time - beacons of an America full of families with money in their pockets, tail-fin cars in their driveways and their best days just down the road.

Echoes north wildwood