Cape May, New Jersey

A Short History of Cape May

Cape May calls itself the oldest seaside resort in the country, and it has a decent claim. Philadelphians were coming down here to sit by the ocean in the middle of the 1700s, first by sloop around the cape, later by steamboat, and by the 1850s the town had the largest resort hotel in the United States, the Mount Vernon, which could sleep 2,000 people before it burned. The place was called Cape Island then. It took the name Cape May in 1869, after Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, the Dutch captain who charted this coast in 1623.

Cape May is the one shore town that feels like both halves of my life at once. I grew up going to the Eastern Shore of Maryland every summer, Ocean City and the bay behind it, and that is still the coast my body defaults to. Then I married into New Jersey, and my in-laws rent a place up in Wildwood every year, so now I am a Jersey Shore person too. Cape May sits right where those two things meet. It is close enough to Wildwood to walk over from another century, and close enough to the Delaware side that I usually arrive on the Lewes boat. I try to get down for that trip every year.

The thing that makes Cape May look the way it does, though, is a disaster, and it is worth its own section.

The Fire of 1878 and Why the Whole Town Looks Victorian

On the night of November 9, 1878, a fire started in a hotel called the Ocean House and burned for a day. Cape May had almost no permanent population to fight it and one working hose, and by the time a supply train got down from Camden the fire had taken something like 35 acres, most of the commercial center and a long row of the big wooden hotels.

What makes Cape May Cape May is what happened next. The town rebuilt immediately, in the styles of the moment, which in 1879 meant bracketed porches, mansard roofs, scrollwork, and a lot of paint. Congress Hall, the hotel that had anchored the beachfront since 1816, went back up in brick in 90 days and is still running, with its long colonnade porch facing the sea. Because so much of the town went in at once and very little has come down since, Cape May now holds more than 600 Victorian buildings standing more or less as a matched set.

In 1976 the whole city was named a National Historic Landmark. That designation usually covers a single building, and only a couple of American towns carry it end to end. Cape May is one of them.

The Ghost Walk

Cape May has leaned all the way into being haunted, and I say that as someone who booked the tour. There are a few operators. Cape May MAC, the preservation nonprofit that runs the lighthouse and the Physick Estate, does a whole slate of ghost tours, including one that ends inside the 1879 Physick house after dark. Elaine's runs a walking tour that starts from its restaurant.

Ours was a slow lap of the quiet blocks off the mall at dusk while the guide told us which mansion had which story. It is theater, and it is good theater, and standing under those gables in the blue hour it does its job. I will get to the ghost walk in Berlin, Maryland when I write up the Eastern Shore, and it is the same kind of evening in a different town.

The Promenade and Convention Hall

Cape May's version of a boardwalk is not made of boards. The last wooden one washed away in the March 1962 nor'easter, the storm that did more damage here than anything before or since, and the town replaced it with a paved promenade and a seawall running about 2 miles along Beach Avenue. Convention Hall sits in the middle of it.

The walk is the evening event. You get an ice cream or a drink and you go up and down it with everyone else, which is more or less what people were doing on this beach in 1880, minus the pavement.

Best Time to Visit Cape May

Summer is the whole point and also the problem. July and August are when every restaurant, tour, and beach chair is running, and also when the drive in on the Parkway can take an extra hour and a table means a wait. It is the full resort at full volume, and worth doing once that way.

My honest advice is to come in June or September. The water is fine, the light on the houses is better, and the town still has its flowers out. Christmas in Cape May is its own draw, when the bed and breakfasts decorate and the trolley tours switch over to lights. Deep winter is quiet, though the ferry and the larger hotels stay open all year.

Where to Eat and Drink in Cape May

For pizza to carry back to the house, I go to Mario's on Ocean Street, across from the Washington Street Mall. It has been a family place since 1989, the dough and the sauce are made there, and you end up ordering the garlic knots whether you meant to or not.

The Washington Street Mall is the three blocks of Washington Street that the town closed to cars in 1971 and filled with gas lamps and gardens, and it is where you end up walking after dinner. Several of the counters on and around it do a proper fried fish sandwich with slaw, which is my default lunch when I have been in the sun too long. The Buoy Coffee Shop, which opened in 2022 and has a spot across from Convention Hall and another downtown on Ocean Street, is where I get a drink and a cookie to take out to the promenade.

Out on Town Bank Road, the Cape May Winery has been growing grapes since 1989 and pours flights on a deck that looks over the vines. It makes a nice slow middle of the afternoon. And in Lower Township, on a 60 acre farm between the ocean and the bay, Nauti Spirits is a farm distillery that grows its own sweet potatoes and corn and turns them into vodka, gin, rum, and whiskey. It has been open since 2017. They once reposted a photo I took there, which I have decided to treat as a career milestone.

Taking the Cape May to Lewes Ferry

I almost always come and go by the ferry. It runs 17 miles across the mouth of Delaware Bay between Cape May and Lewes, Delaware, it has been running since 1964, and it takes about 85 minutes. It carries cars, so the whole road trip can go on the boat.

There is a bar on board and a bar at each terminal, the deck is open, and for the money it is the best boat ride on this coast. I get an orange crush and stand at the rail for the crossing. Lewes on the other side is its own small, old, worth a day town, and it has a full guide of its own now.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line: Cape May is a whole Victorian resort town that burned down in 1878 and rebuilt itself prettier, then left it alone. Walk the Victorian blocks, do the ghost tour, eat fish on the mall, and take the ferry at least one direction. Come in June or September if you get to pick.

Quick Facts

The essentials, at a glance.

Why This Fits an Austen Themed Guide

Cape May is the town on my whole list that matches a Jane Austen novel most exactly, and the novel is her last one. Sanditon, the book she was still writing when she died, is about a man named Mr. Parker who is trying to turn a small fishing village into a fashionable seaside resort by force of promotion, with terraces going up on speculation, subscription lists, and sea air sold as medicine. Austen never finished it, so the resort stays half imagined. Cape May is what it looks like when the plan works. Philadelphia money built it as a place to be seen by the sea, the fire gave the whole town a single Victorian face, and the promenade is still the stage Mr. Parker was building toward. I put Cape May at the top of my running list of Austen settings and their Northeast doubles for exactly that reason.

There is a second Austen book here, quieter, and it is Northanger Abbey. That one is a comedy about a girl who has read too many horrid novels and walks through a perfectly ordinary house convincing herself it holds a murdered wife and a ghost. Austen was teasing the Gothic craze of her own moment. Cape May has taken its stock of dark Victorian mansions and built a working industry on exactly that impulse, the tour by lantern, the house with the story, the pleasure of deciding a gable looks sinister. Catherine Morland would have bought a ticket.

Continue Exploring the Jersey Shore

Just over the bridge, Wildwood is Cape May's opposite number, a bright grid of 1950s and 60s motels with plastic palms and space age signs, the Doo Wop to Cape May's Victorian. My in-laws are up there every summer and the two towns make a strange, perfect pair. Next to it, North Wildwood has the older lighthouse and the seawall walk.

Other Invented Resort Towns

If the built on purpose resort is the thread you want to follow, Newport, Rhode Island is the Gilded Age version, a town that gave itself over to being looked at. So is Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, where a Methodist camp meeting turned into a pastel resort one cottage at a time. And Asbury Park up the Jersey coast is a resort that has had to reinvent itself more than once.

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