Wildwood Crest Beach

Wildwood Crest owes its existence to the Baker brothers, merchants from Vineland who saw a fortune in the empty sand dunes and thickets at the south end of Five Mile Beach. They formed a beach improvement company in the 1890s, dredged and platted streets, and incorporated the borough in 1910, with Philip Pontius Baker as its first mayor. The first house went up in 1906, and the first baby born in the new town, given the fitting name Baker Crest, was handed the deed to a lot.

Their promotional materials leaned hard on the beach and the air, promising a healthful place of ocean and bay breezes especially good for children, and they built out fast: within a few years the Crest had hundreds of homes, big hotels, a boardwalk, and trolley lines. A thirty-foot Roman arch once marked the entrance to town, lit up every night. The DNA of that founding vision, a wide beach and a family resort, still runs through the place today.

The signature of Wildwood Crest is simply space. Where a crowded shore town might give you a narrow strip of towels, the Crest gives you a broad, flat field of pale, hard-packed sand, wide enough for a proper walk, a full-size kite, a game of catch, and a nap all at once. The trade-off is the hike: on the widest blocks the trek from the boardwalk edge to the waterline is a real journey across open sand, so a wagon and a hat earn their keep.

The reason the beach is so wide, and still widening, is a quirk of how sand moves along this particular island. The natural drift of sand down the coast, along with the shape of the inlet at the island's tip, has been depositing more sand at the Wildwoods than the sea carries away, decade after decade. It is close to the only stretch of the New Jersey shore where erosion runs backward, which is why the Crest never needs the emergency beach replenishment that so many other shore towns depend on.

Wildwood Crest is the calm counterpart to the flashing lights and amusement piers of Wildwood just to the north. There is no giant boardwalk of rides here; instead you get a mellow oceanfront, blocks of preserved mid-century motels with their neon and boomerang shapes, and a family pace. The Wildwoods together hold the largest concentration of 1950s and 1960s roadside motel architecture in the country, the so-called Doo Wop style, and much of the best of it lines the Crest.

The friendly old sightseeing tramcar, running since the late 1940s with its beloved recorded call to watch the tramcar please, trundles the boardwalk up in Wildwood if you want the classic ride, then you can retreat back down to the Crest for the quiet. On the bay side, Sunset Lake lives up to its name in the evening, and the back bays and nearby wildlife areas give the island a wilder, marshy edge beyond the sand.

The beach runs the full ocean side of Wildwood Crest, reached from any of the numbered streets crossing Ocean Avenue, and there is no tag or fee to walk on. Lifeguards patrol during posted daytime hours in the summer season; swim near a guarded flag and mind the surf. Because the sand is so broad, budget extra time and energy for the walk down, and bring water and shade, since the middle of that wide beach offers none.

Give a Crest day the slow treatment it invites: stake out a spot with all the room in the world, walk the long shoreline, and stay for the light softening over the water. Remember the town is dry, so pack your own non-alcoholic drinks, and street parking goes early on hot weekends. It is one of the last genuinely free, genuinely huge beaches on the Jersey Shore, and that combination is exactly what keeps families coming back.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.