Introduction

I'm using this blog to combine two of my favorite things: old houses and Wildwood, NJ. There's tons of great blogs covering old homes and how to restore them and my reason for caring about them is probably a reaction to living in a state that has a lot of history but also is known for fucking things up royally. If you talk about charm, elegance, quality, quaint, and romantic - you're not thinking about New Jersey. More like trash, stank, strip malls, sprawl and turnpikes. It's a shame because New Jersey has enough history to work with but the state seems to go for unchecked development. I mean, the governor wanted to privatize Liberty State Park and put condos up right across the Statue of Liberty so no area is sacred.

Some towns in New Jersey get it and do things the right way. There's Cape May, Lambertville, Red Bank, and Haddonfield, but there's also a lot of Jersey that looks and smells like shit and is the poster child for crappy suburban sprawl.

Wildwood's beach at sunrise.

Wildwood, NJ is a town straddling the line between a celebrating its history and erasing it from developers tearing everything down and putting up condos. I'll go into more detail about Wildwood in my next post, but overall this blog will document my attempts to buy an old house in Wildwood and fix it up along with any thoughts I have about historic preservation, overdevelopment, and loss of history.