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The beach resort town of Wildwood, New Jersey was home to some of my sunniest childhood memories. Located about 100 miles south of our suburban Philly brick row home, Wildwood was our go-to summer vacation spot.

Wildwood’s boardwalk was like the Yellow Brick Road to me, a nearly two-mile stretch of glittering neon where every inch was packed with sense memories I still haven’t forgotten. If the two-mile walk got to be too much, a tram car called the Sightseer could take you further down to your desired destination.

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The beach was a quarter-mile trek from the boardwalk to the ocean, and if your feet weren’t swaddled in flip-flops, you’d burn them on the hot summer sand.

Extending along the boardwalk were souvenir shops where you could buy tacky little clocks nestled inside conch shells perched on wooden bases that said “Wildwood-by-the-Sea, NJ.” Next to the souvenir shops were boardwalk games such as the one where you’d compete to shoot water pistols into the clown’s mouth, forcing air pressure into a balloon over the clown’s head. If your balloon popped before everyone else’s, you’d win a stuffed animal of your choice.

The food was disgustingly but delectably unhealthy. You could choose from sweet Italian water ice that came in an array of neon colors, buy a slice of flat and greasy Philly-style pizza, or stand outside store windows to watch saltwater taffy being made. A seafood restaurant named Groff’s served up fresh fish caught from the ocean. They cooked it so well that long lines would form outside its doors until it opened for dinner late every afternoon.

Jutting out from the boardwalk toward the ocean were four separate amusement-park piers, each containing an array of thrill rides. I’ll never forget the Himalaya, the Golden Nugget mine, the Wild Mouse roller coaster, or especially the Hell Hole, Wildwood’s consensus most dangerous ride. You’d enter the Hell Hole under a giant winged demon, walk into a wooden cylinder about 15 feet in diameter, stand against the wall, and spin around until the centrifugal force was sufficient to keep you plastered against the wall when the floor to “hell” fell out from under your feet.

Wildwood was my personal Disneyland, so hearing that a state of emergency had been declared there last weekend felt as if someone had pissed all over my youth.

According to a press release issued Monday:

The City of Wildwood Police Department began to respond to an irrepressible number of calls for service in the City of Wildwood on the evening of Saturday, May 25, 2024. Most of these calls were related to the extremely large number of young adults and juveniles that were in the city for the Memorial Day weekend. At the peak of this civil unrest, mutual aid requests were sent out to multiple agencies in Cape May County. . . .

Mayor Ernie Troiano, Jr. stated, “Wildwood will not tolerate unruly, undisciplined, unparented children nor will we stand by while the laws of the state tie the hands of the police. We wholeheartedly support the City of Wildwood Police Department in protecting this community from these nuisance crowds on our boardwalk and in the city.”

And it wasn’t just Wildwood — judging from the mostly blurry footage available, there was havoc and mayhem and what appear to be ecumenically multiracial chimpouts running north from Wildwood in the Jersey beach resorts of Ocean City, Seaside Heights, and Atlantic City.

Last Saturday evening, around 30 miles north of Wildwood in Ocean City — which I remember from my late teens as a “dry” town that didn’t serve booze — “a fight broke out and a 15-year-old boy was stabbed.” Neither the boy nor his assailant have been identified, but video footage shows that people fleeing the melee were mostly white.

15-year-old stabbed on Ocean City boardwalk as teen crowds cause chaos Memorial Day weekend

Last Memorial Day, Ocean City officials had “put a number of new rules in place in order to curb teenage infractions at the beach, after police responded to 999 emergencies over the holiday weekend.”

A friend from the Philly area whose family were “Ocean City people” rather than “Wildwood people” fondly recalls the days when there “was a game on the boardwalk where you throw a softball at a target and if you hit it, a squealing piglet comes tumbling down a chute.”

Twenty miles north of Ocean City in Atlantic City, ­­a “stray bullet” hit an 11-year-old boy last Saturday night. The unidentified victim was rushed to the hospital with what were described as “non-life-threatening injuries.”

Atlantic City police say that their Violent Crimes Unit “determined that Yanirah Davis, 22, and Yontay Cooper, 33, were the suspects in the shooting.” They say that the pair of colorfully-named women

showed up on North Rhode Island Avenue armed with a handgun and a hammer with the intent to fight a group of people who they had a previous altercation with. . . . Davis and Cooper are accused of smashing a vehicle’s window before shooting at the group, according to officials. During this shooting is when the boy was hit by a bullet while he was lying on the floor of a home.

Unlike the other three Jersey Shore towns where bedlam struck during last weekend’s official launch of the summer vacation season, I don’t recall Atlantic City ever having a sweet and unspoiled reputation. I remember it as a saltwater ghost ghetto until casinos opened in 1978 and pumped some life into the rusted, sandy burg. But if, like a stray bullet, you were to wander a block or two in any direction from the casinos, you were likely to find mangy locals with names such as Yanirah and Yontay armed with handguns and hammers.

Finally, about 60 miles due north of Atlantic City via the Garden State Parkway in the town of Seaside Heights — most famous for the reality-TV, guido-douchebag carnival Jersey Shore — a stampede of about 300 people erupted last Saturday night on the boardwalk after there were sudden rumors of either gunshots, firecrackers, or a car backfiring. But alas, it was merely the result of a “TikTok challenge” that Seaside Heights Police Chief Tommy Boyd described as “beyond stupid”:

It’s a game we’re playing on TikTok. They sit there and scream ‘gun’ and then they take off. There were never gunshots. . . . We’re gonna flood the boardwalk with cops this coming weekend and every other weekend. We’re gonna be very busy, but we’re gonna be ready.

I remember the boardwalk at Seaside Heights because it was close to where my cousin Patty lived in Toms River, New Jersey. It was about 20 miles due east of the spooky-ooky New Jersey Pine Barrens, but apart from that legendary real-life forested horror movie, both Toms River and Seaside Heights seemed placid and benign. They definitely weren’t the type of places you’d need to “flood” with cops.

I don’t ever remember any summertime boardwalk violence at Wildwood, Ocean City, Atlantic City, or Seaside Heights, much less violence happening simultaneously at all four places. But the friend who told me about the Ocean City softball piglet game says that these little working-class vacation spots were always a little rough.

Perhaps, as Katherine Dunn once wrote in the intro to the homicide detective’s scrapbook Death Scenes, “There were no ‘good old days.”

But it’s hard to shake the feeling that both the days and nights are getting worse than ever.