Wildwood’s landmark pizza slice house saved from demolition, moved out of town

WILDWOOD, N.J. — First, they took a huge but clean bite off the top of the pizza slice house, a tasty triangle. Or maybe it was more like a piece of candy corn, where you carefully eat the upper third.

For a weird Wildwood minute on Tuesday, the top triangle hovered in the air, suspended by a crane, as the bottom part of the landmark A-frame house was placed on a flatbed.

And then the red angular structure that dates to the 1960s, when it was assembled out of a Sears kit by a bottle collector — a landmark that was either beloved or unnoticed depending on whom you asked — was on its way to a horse farm in Steelmantown in Upper Township, where a cemetery owner who had saved it from being reduced to dust was waiting.

It was a short but memorable parade out of Wildwood, up Park Boulevard to make the left onto Rio Grande and out over the Causeway, with a police escort. People stood outside their homes to say goodbye.

“People are either, ‘That’s a landmark. When I see it, I know we’re almost to Grandmom’s house!’ or, `I’ve never seen it before,’” said Taylor Henry, of the Preserving the Wildwoods group, which advocated for someone to save the building, and who watched Tuesday morning as the building was rescued.

“It is definitely an oddity of a little building.”

Too odd perhaps for Wildwood officials, who declined to take on the task of finding it a new home in their town.

Across from the CVS on Park Boulevard, on a lot next to new construction, the little red building hung on longer than you might have expected in the overheated Jersey Shore economy.

It was originally built by Glenn Dye in the early 1960s using a Sears, Roebuck kit and used mostly as a clubhouse for bottle and stamp collectors.

The lot was purchased by Mark Daley, a contractor, for $175,000. He plans to build a duplex that will front Bennett Avenue. His girlfriend, Pam Clark, a Wildwood native, said they realized early on that the fate of the pizza building would matter to people.

Daley, who also watched Tuesday, said that he was glad the building was saved and that he would not become the villain of another demolished old Shore landmark.

Ed Bixby, owner of Destination Destiny, a network of natural-setting burial grounds, including one in Steelmantown, stepped in and agreed to finance most of the $18,000 moving costs and store the A-frame at his Upper Township horse farm about 20 miles north of Wildwood.

Both Bixby and Taylor think the building, with its roofline that goes all the way to the ground and distinctive shape and color, belongs in Wildwood, but right now the city, focused more on development than its historic quirks, has demurred.

Bixby said he would be open to returning the structure to a place in Wildwood in the future, should Wildwood change its mind.

Steve Hauck, of SJ Hauck House Movers, said the company moves about 20 to 25 houses a year, and could do double that. “We’re technically one of the biggest recyclers,” he said. “We’re saving 20 to 25 houses. That’s 50- to 80,000 pounds apiece.”

He said the A-frame house poses a challenge because of its shape. It’s too tall to move past electrical wires, so they had to literally cut it in half and put it back together in Upper Township.

Hauck lamented that so many houses at the Shore are demolished before anyone has the chance to claim them for a new location.

“Typically we get houses that are scheduled for demolition,” he said. “A three-bedroom ranch home doesn’t make it on a million-dollar lot. We move them into towns where that does work. They become houses again.”