The story behind the porches
The History of Cape May
How a small whaling cape at the bottom of New Jersey became the oldest seaside resort in America, and why almost the entire town wears the same Victorian dress.
Long before the boardwalks and the beach umbrellas, Cape May was a quiet stretch of sand at the southern tip of New Jersey, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Delaware Bay. Whalers and fishermen worked the cape in the 1600s. By the middle of the 1700s, Philadelphia families were already coming down to take the sea air, which is how Cape May earned the title it still holds today: the oldest seaside resort in the United States.
For a century it grew the slow way. Grand wooden hotels went up along the beachfront, steamboats and then trains brought visitors from Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, and the town settled into the rhythm of a summer place. Then, in a single week, almost all of it burned.
The fire of 1878
A town rebuilt in a single style.
In November 1878, a fire broke out in the heart of Cape May and burned for days, taking some thirty blocks of the town with it, hotels and homes alike. It was a catastrophe. It was also, by accident, the reason Cape May looks the way it does now.
The town rebuilt almost immediately, and it rebuilt at the absolute height of the Victorian era. Block after block went up in the gingerbread fashion of the day: wraparound porches, gables and turrets, scrollwork trim and bright paint. Because so much was built at once, and in one moment of taste, the result was a town with a single, unmistakable character, frozen at the end of the nineteenth century.
Six hundred Victorians, and a town that kept them
Plenty of shore towns had a Victorian heyday. What makes Cape May rare is that it never tore its down. While other resorts paved over their past for motels and neon, Cape May held on, and by the 1970s that stubbornness had become its greatest asset. In 1976 the entire city was designated a National Historic Landmark, one of only a handful of whole towns to earn the distinction.
Today more than six hundred preserved Victorian buildings stand within the historic district, one of the largest collections of nineteenth-century architecture in the country. Walk the gas-lamp streets on a summer evening and the effect is less seaside and more time travel. The porches are full, the paint is fresh, and the houses are still doing exactly what they were built to do: holding families through a long, slow week at the shore.
The Emlen Physick Estate
The house that saved the rest.
If one building tells the story, it is the Emlen Physick Estate on Washington Street. The eighteen-room mansion was built in 1879, the year after the fire, to a design by the celebrated Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. By the 1970s it was slated for demolition. The effort to save it became the spark for Cape May's whole preservation movement.
The estate is now a house museum run by Cape May MAC, and a tour of it is the single best way to understand how a Victorian shore family actually lived. It is a short walk from both of our homes, and an easy, rainy-afternoon outing for a curious family.
The 1859 lighthouse
A beacon older than the gingerbread.
The Cape May Lighthouse predates the Victorian rebuild by a generation. The current tower, the third on the point, was lit in 1859 and still stands at the southern tip of the cape, where the bay and the ocean meet. Its cast-iron stair climbs nearly two hundred steps to a view that takes in the whole peninsula.
It anchors Cape May Point State Park, one of the great bird-watching spots on the Atlantic flyway, with trails, dunes and a World War II observation tower right on the beach. You can climb the lighthouse itself through Cape May MAC.
Walk the history yourself
The best of Cape May's past is still out in the open, a short stroll from New Jersey Avenue. A few good places to start:
- Cape May MAC runs the trolley tours, the Physick Estate, the lighthouse and the seasonal festivals, and is the best single source for what is on while you are in town.
- The Washington Street Mall, a pedestrian shopping promenade in the historic district, has been car-free since 1971.
- Sunset Beach on the bay is where you hunt for Cape May diamonds and watch the daily flag-lowering ceremony, with the wreck of the concrete ship SS Atlantus just offshore.
- The City of Cape May keeps an official calendar of town events through the season.
When you are ready to plan the days around the history, our Cape May guide covers the beaches, the food and the seasons, and our family-vacation page shows how two homes on one block turn all of it into a tradition.
Historic photographs on this page are drawn from the Historic American Buildings Survey and the NOAA Photo Library and are in the public domain. The modern color photography of our homes is our own.
Book direct with the owner
Stay in the history, a block from the sand
Hi, I'm Wayne, the owner of both Sea Foam Manor and Azure Estate here on New Jersey Avenue. Call me directly and I'll personally check availability and pricing for your dates. No call center, no run-around, just a quick conversation about your week at the shore.
One tap to call. No fee, no middleman.
Prefer to book through a broker? Both homes are also listed with Coastline Realty.