This local Jersey icon will live another day.
A unique-looking, triangle-shaped house that has long delighted the denizens of Wildwood, NJ, was fated for the wrecking ball — but a hero arrived just in time.
“We have found a future site for the A-Frame,” said Taylor Henry, vice president of the community alliance Preserving the Wildwoods, which championed the six decade-old property’s saving. Henry told The Post the good news on Monday, soon after the home’s owner announced it was free to anyone who could move it — and would be demolished to make way for condos if no one did.
In an unusual twist, given the home’s new lease on life, it will live nearby, among those who are no longer living.
“It will be taken to Upper Township, NJ, and be used as a caretaker’s cottage at Steelmantown Cemetery,” said Henry.
The parcel on which the home stands traded hands in the summer of 2021 — and local real estate agent William Macomber, who represents the new condo-developing owner — offered up the red-tone A-Frame structure for zero dollars and zero cents.
“We would love to give it away, to the person who can actually move legally and with insurance and properly,” Macomber told NBC last week.
Although a free house is an easy sell, the situation still posed a time and planning challenge.
“The building has been left unused and unkempt for many years and is now rather unsafe,” Macomber told The Post, adding that moving it will be “very difficult and expensive.”
Despite these issues, the preservation group says it has persevered.
“We all worked very intensely and very quickly to figure out a plan for this house within the two-week timeframe requested by the property owners. We are just waiting for the paperwork to be finalized,” Henry said, noting that a group called SJ Hauck Construction is set to move it at a “significantly discounted rate.”
The building, in addition to looking quirky, is also a “local landmark with a lot of history,” as well as one of only two structures built in the “rare architectural style” currently in the Wildwoods, Henry said. Constructed in 1961 by Wildwoods resident, veteran and hobbyist Glenn Dye as a headquarters for his many clubs, the home was bought as a Sears & Roebuck kit home and put together by Dye himself.
“People come from all over to see it, get their pictures taken. It’s part of Wildwood’s history,” Veronica Navazio, who lives next door, told NBC.
“The majority of people never went inside or knew it was never lived in, yet so many dreamed of fixing it up someday,” said Henry. “People of all generations and ages remember it and recognize it as one of the buildings that makes Wildwood unique, colorful and fun.”