Doo wop by the sea: architects and preservationists have turned a gaudy strip of New Jersey shore into a monument to mid-century architecture. But can they keep the bulldozers at bay?

"We call this the Pupu Platter style of architecture," says Joan Husband, pointing to the Waikiki motel on Ocean Avenue in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey. As our sight-seeing trolley rolls along on a steamy summer evening, local preservationist Husband, 56, keeps up a running patter at the microphone: "It has the thatched roof over the canopy, the Diamond Head mural on the side and lava rocks built into the walls." We swivel in our seats for a better view. The motel-packed strip before us suggests an exotic, if confused, paradise far, far from New Jersey: we pass the jutting Polynesian roofline of the Tahiti; the angled glass walls and levitating ramp of the Caribbean; and ...