Cape May Diaries
38 - In search of the “real” Cape May
For the last four or five years, our strolls through historic Cape May took us up Washington Street away from what most consider the heart of the town’s attractions. While many people make the trek to the Physick Estate, we actually find the houses near it as big an attraction for us as those that most often make newspapers.
Although we made daily visits to Washington Street Mall, we lived with the nostalgia for that time when that part of Washington Street still looked and felt like the center of a city rather than a suburban mall.
Although the mall has often been called “classy” because it has still has the superficial air of Victorian times, old photographs from grandfather’s honeymoon here in 1927 displayed the kind of historic texture I had longed for in coming south.
We caught some of this in our early visits to Atlantic City, but over time, most of the working class textures have been scrubbed from the waterfront there, leaving only glitter and lights. In one photograph taken of my grandmother reaching into a 1920s car, my grandfather scrawled the words “hiding the evidence” because in her flapper outfit and in that era car, my grandmother looked a lot like a mobster’s girl while nearby along the street, signs for local business such as “The Sugar Bowl” and “Hunts” could barely be made out.
In many ways, the conversion of Washington Street in 1971 seemed to symbolize the change of culture New Jersey itself was undergoing, that move towards suburbanization in which anything urban was considered ugly and old fashioned in an unacceptable way.
Whereas other cities in the north used federal money to construct housing for its poor, Cape May used it to transform its business center into what would to my mind symbolize suburbia – stealing away all the grit that had made the street seem real to me.
During that period, Cape May still hadn’t quite decided what it was to become, a historic document testifying to the city’s long history, or a kind of theme park. People told us during some of our visits, that the early 1970s saw a significant struggle between those who revered the old and those who wanted to rid the city of those items that seemed out of date with a modern society.
Cape May was not alone in this. Asbury Park, which I visited frequently, during the 1970s, became a temple of doom, a slowly decaying testament to a past that could no longer live up to its glittering Victorian heritage. Atlantic City – if not for the efforts of Hudson County political boss William Musto (who fought for legalized gambling and helped establish the state’s lottery) would have continued to deteriorate as well.
Several old timers during our walks along Washington Street from mall to the harbor bridge told us that street we saw in my grandfather’s honeymoon pictures wasn’t the one that survived into the 1960s when the city fathers had to make some hard choices about the future. The grittiness of the 1920s had developed into a grim and sad reality little different from the fate many traditional downtowns from Bloomfield to Bayonne up north, needing something to make the place feel special again.
The closing of the street from Perry to Ocean streets to make way for the pedestrian mall seemed to make sense, giving a new face to a part of the city that lesser measures seemed unable to achieve. This ancient lady, we were told, needed a face lift, not layers of make up.
This change was part of the compromise that seemed to help modernists and preservationists make peace.
Though as with the destruction of the Sawyer House and the Christian Admiral in the 1990s, compromise often made it easier for later less flattering compromises, and in removing the grime that had settled over Washington Street over previous century, some of its essence also vanished.
In strolling further north, we found a little sense of that older Cape May tucked into the corners of the lesser estates, a sense of reality that had not yet be corralled into a marketing plan.
In strolling along the northerly portion of Washington Street, we did not suddenly discover the city that may grand parents saw during their visit here, but wandered through places where yards were still kept up in a manner less artificially than closer to the mall area. We could walk and talk, pretending that time had not tainted this place so as to have ever needed the face lift the center of town required.
We found small niches of pure delight among clearly private homes, yards spilling over with flowers and pathways, statues decorating little corners where we could pause and admire the subtly of this part of a city that has become the second most popular tourist destination in the state.
George Harrison – in a musical comment about the breakup of The Beatles – once wrote that “all things must pass,” that sunrises don’t last all morning, but also cloud bursts don’t last all day. In our wandering through Cape May each year, we have come to understand that even the most commercial tastes, those that still wish to pave over the lawns of the great estates and install swimming pools in the backyards of every cottage, will not always hold sway over the future development of the city – that over time, opinions vary, and here – unlike places like Atlantic City – some of the grander old spirit is still retained, despite the urges of the financial community to bend to the current trends.
The history of Cape May is not written in the face of the fancy painted cottages, but in the hearts of those who live in the community. While some of us still long to find “the real Cape May” that my grandparents encountered in their visit here long ago, many we meet everyday guard that treasure, despite surface appearances. Sometimes, you find it in places you least expect by stepping out from the well-trodden pathways that the tours might take, by simply strolling up streets here you might otherwise have overlooked.
While I know I will still long for the Cape May my grandparents saw, one to which trains regularly ran, and people went to Washington Street for more practical purchases than souvenirs, I know I still find some measure of reality hidden under the face lift if I look hard and often enough.