Qualla: Cape May

Cape May: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a November night in 1878, fire swept Cape May. Most of the old wooden hotels - some dating to the resort's earliest decades - burned to the ground, taking with them the prim Greek Revival lines that had defined American seaside leisure for half a century. What rose from the ashes was something else entirely. The rebuilding boom coincided with the height of the Victorian era, and so Cape May reinvented itself in the architectural fashion of the moment: gingerbread porches, turrets, ornate brackets, painted gables in defiant pastels. Today the city holds one of the largest concentrations of Victorian buildings anywhere in the United States, and the entire town is a National Historic Landmark - a designation it received in 1976.

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Cape May: The First Resort

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Cape May: The Painted Ladies

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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....

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Cape May: An Island by a Canal

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Cape May: Two Ocean Currents

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 offsho...

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Cape May: Diamonds on the Sand

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. Th...

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