Future Still Uncertain For One Motel In Wildwood Crest, NJ

It's always great when another place to stay gets erected in any one of South Jersey's busy beach towns. Sometimes, it feels like there aren't enough places to house all the summer shoobies as it is.

Unfortunately for Wildwood Crest, the future of one oceanfront motel still hangs in the balance.

For a while there, it looked like the plans to renovate the Ocean Holiday Motor Inn on Ocean Avenue were going to be pressing on. Now, it seems the plans may be rejected by the municipality's powers-that-be for a multitude of reasons.

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According to the folks over at Wildwood Video Archive, when the people from ICONA Resorts acquired the property, they had planned to renovate it, attach an addition to it, and call it Mahalo Wildwood Crest. If you search the former address of Ocean Holiday, you'll see it now listed as the Mahalo.

They faced some legal issues which caused the project to be put on hold for a bit, but ICONA was able to resubmit plans as of 2023. Now, though, they want to add another building that would completely take away the "view corridors" from a bunch of other motels, basically eliminating their guests' views of the ocean.

Wildwood Video Archive explains that there's been this, sort of, mutual understanding between all the the local motel owners that dates back to the 1950s that it's not fair to build out so far that other property owners' places lose their ocean views completely.

Many people have said that these new plans proposed by ICONA completely disregard that understanding and have chosen to fight. They spoke at the recent zoning and planning meeting, and now a final decision has to be made. That won't happen, however, until June 7th.

Only time will tell the fate of the old Ocean Holiday Motor Inn.

Check out the blueprints for what would be the new Mahalo Wildwood Crest HERE.

Source: Wildwood Video Archive