Cape May Diaries
8- Not the original Cape May
In constructing East Cape May where our motel would later be located, developers in the early years of the 20th Century had dredged the harbor and had dumped the sand and muck into the swamp there at the time.
They got the double benefit of a harbor that could accommodate world class ships and new land upon which they could construct new houses. What they actually did was to change the eco-system so fundamentally that the altered currents began to chew away at the very thing that had made Cape May so desirable: its vast beaches.
Such schemes were as big a part of Cape May's history as the historic houses. In 1926, the construction of a bridge between Philadelphia and Camden convinced many investors that the whole sea side would soon see a massive increase in property values. Developers sold investors on the idea that all this change would bring about a huge boom in the economy, when that boom failed to materialize. Everyone lost money. One home just up the beach from Cape May proper went from $75,000 in value to $750 the following year -- an ugly premonition of what people could expect a few years later with the crash on Wall Street.
Even as we reached the Beach Avenue and began our hunt for our hotel, a massive federal project was underway to save the beach. This fifty year and fifty-million dollar project would send trucks up to Wildwood and dig up the sand winter storms routinely stole from Cape May and return it. Federal authorities would also authorize an effort to restore many of the original beach-side features that had originally helped keep the beach in place, such as planting of sea grass. Over the next decade, we would take notice of these changes as they gradually made the sea side seem a little more natural. But when we pulled the car over in front of the motel that night, we heard the ocean but made no move to climb up over the protective embankment to glimpse it in the dark. We were both too concerned about access to our room, and whether or not the hotel clerk had actually put the key under the mat as she said she would.
We could not have picked a place that suited our needs better than the one we found. For unlike the larger motels that loomed along that particular section of East Cape May, the motel seemed to blend traditional with the new, taking its clue in design from the Victorian Cottages to which most visitors went. While it did not go as far as some of the newer cottages to imitate the architectural details, the motel instead captured the intimate flavor of the Cape's later years when after fire wiped out the great hotels, Philadelphia's wealthy began to build cottages meant as homes away from home.
From the front, the motel looked like a Victorian Cottage -- with a guest house to one side of the main building, forming a kind of arch onto the property -- with a small garden and fountain directly between, and two small swimming pools situated in the court yard beyond. The pink stucco front reminded me of Spanish buildings I had encountered in my trips to the Southwest, although framed with small details that clearly allowed it to fit in with Cape May's themes.
Like many of the older buildings, the motel was constructed in an L-shape. The main building formed the right and rear walls around the court yard with the small freestanding cottage up front anchoring that side. The bubbling fountain greeted us even in the dark, with it overflowing flowers and its live frogs. In the morning we would see both as well as the golden movement of the bass at the murky bottom. The court yard glowed blue from interior pool lights that showed lines of lawn chairs situated like theater seats on two sides of the pool. The pool lights gave the whole interior a blue glow, which added to the quiet atmosphere.
We parked our car in one of the few slots in front near where a handful of steps led up to the level of the hotel -- the street itself was technically below sea level and many developers after the 1962 storm took example from some of the older cottages in constructing living quarters well above flood levels.
After the miles of road, the sudden stillness gave Cape May a quiet its summer season didn't deserve. During the summer months, noise and lack of parking caused the most complaints. Even this far removed from the center of Cape May, cars rumbled passed in a constant party mode, with many of the younger people blaring stereo systems. In the narrow streets of the more historically authentic sections, crowds of people talking made quiet impossible until well after midnight. Even people seeking to be silent on the side walk projected their voices into the rooms above. Only winter silenced Cape May -- the way it did most communities along the Jersey Shore (save Atlantic City) freezing the beach side into a tundra where wanderers were rare, and even then, gulls kept up a non-stop diatribe in their hunt for food.
But standing there, my car engine clicking as it cooled behind us, we heard no gulls, just the dull whisper of the ocean muffled by a flood-control embankment people used as a walkway. We tested our legs and then climbed the stairs to the motel, finding the mat under which I key supposedly was hid.
And it was there.
We did not know it at the time, but this moment seemed to mark a change in innocence in Cape May. We had arrived at the end of one era and the beginning of another. In 1989-90, the country had fallen into a serious recession, as it climbed out of that condition, a new Cape May would emerge, and the sleepy community would become a destination place second in popularity only to its former rival, Atlantic City.
A battle for historic preservation that had gone on for almost thirty years would come to a resolution in the 1990s, a kind of compromise that did not quite live up to the original vision. As people came, the place would lose some of its charm, the way all suddenly popular resorts would, and though the town would thrive and its residents could look forward to increased prosperity, each left something valuable in the sand, something that washed away with the increasing waves of tourists: an innocence, a frame of mind, that would not come back again.