Long before Atlantic City, before Newport, before any of the Gilded Age coastal escapes that would later define American summer, there was Cape May. The town claims the title of America's first seaside resort, and the claim holds up. By the late 1700s, Philadelphians were sailing down the Delaware to swim in the surf and sleep in plain boarding houses. The cape sits at the southern tip of New Jersey, where the Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, and it caught the prevailing south wind that made hot summer evenings bearable in an era before air conditioning. Generations of presidents, congressmen, and Philadelphia merchants made it their July escape. The cape was the country's vacation almost before the country knew it wanted one.

What tourists now call the Painted Ladies are the gingerbread cottages and hotels that fill the historic district - Queen Anne, Stick, Italianate, and Second Empire houses, painted in the elaborate color schemes that Victorians loved and modern preservationists have brought back. The walking tours start near the Washington Street Mall and wind through streets that look almost startlingly intact. The Mainstay Inn, the Emlen Physick Estate, the Congress Hall hotel - all survive in some recognizable form. Cape May was nearly demolished during the urban renewal mood of the mid-twentieth century. A small group of preservationists, against the advice of nearly everyone, fought to save it. The 1976 landmark designation locked their victory in place.

Cape May is technically an island, though most visitors never notice. A narrow canal, carved from a shallow natural creek during World War II, connects the harbor to Delaware Bay and severs the city from the rest of the peninsula. The old name for the place was Cape Island, and that name fits geographically better than the modern one. The canal was a strategic project - it gave naval vessels a protected inland route to avoid German submarines that prowled the Atlantic coast in the early 1940s. The same submarines famously sank the SS Atlantus and contributed to wartime tragedies that played out within sight of these beaches. The canal remains, and Cape May remains an island, and most people still call it a town.

The cape sits at the meeting place of the Delaware Bay and the open Atlantic, and that geography makes it one of the richest fishing grounds on the East Coast. The fleet operates year-round out of the harbor and the Lobster House dock. Charter boats run for tuna and marlin offshore. Closer in, hundreds of bottlenose dolphins summer along the cape, and humpback and finback whales pass through with surprising regularity. The Cape May Whale Watcher has been running tours since long before the modern wave of wildlife tourism, and the dolphins still oblige. At Sunset Beach, just outside Cape May Point, there is a daily flag-lowering ceremony in honor of fallen servicemembers - a Cape May ritual conducted every evening, all summer, in any weather.

Walk Sunset Beach at low tide and you will see people stooping, sifting handfuls of pebbles, occasionally pocketing something small. They are looking for Cape May diamonds - rounded, water-clarified quartz crystals that wash up by the thousands on this single stretch of beach. The crystals originate from veins in the upper Delaware River valley, more than two hundred miles to the north. The current carries them downriver, into the bay, and the longshore currents deposit them at Sunset Beach. Cut and polished, they look almost convincingly like diamonds, which the cape's promoters have leaned into for more than a century. The Lenape people knew about them long before the European settlers arrived. Some traditions hold that they were used as trade items and as objects of spiritual significance.