My wife, a dyed-in-the-wool Jersey Girl, likes nothing better than spending a sweltering summer weekend in a lively beach town in her home state. I can think of nothing worse. New Jersey might be known as the Garden State but to my mind the Shore is the back garden - the place where they've thrown most of the junk. At every Shore town I've been to, the ocean looks dirty, the sand is off-brown and the beaches usually so crowded you might as well have stayed in gridlock on the Turnpike. I'd rather fork out for a flight to Florida or risk running into P Diddy's posse at the Hamptons.
For our recent wedding anniversary though, I agreed to give the Shore another try. My wife longed to visit a town called Cape May, supposedly the oldest seaside resort in America. "It has great restaurants, sexy hotels and the best beaches on the coast," she said. "You'll love it!" Somehow I doubted it. I hadn't heard of Cape May and neither had any New Yorkers I spoke to. We packed the car anyway and drove south.
I had no idea quite how far south. Cape May is literally the end of the line, the last stop on the Garden State Parkway that runs along the Jersey Shore. It sits on a lush, low-lying peninsula on the Delaware Bay. Three hours south of New York, we suddenly found ourselves in a quiet village of sycamore-shaded streets lined with immaculately preserved, brightly painted wood-built Victorian mansions - reminders of a genteel age. Couples waved from trellised porches, kids bought fudge from shops on cobblestone streets, and a pristine promenade fronted the widest swath of clean white sand I had yet seen in the US. How come so few people have heard of this place?
In the 19th century, Cape May was the Hamptons of its day, the place to see and be seen; it was the summer retreat of choice for both northern industrialists and southern plantation owners as well as several US presidents, among them Benjamin Harrison, who turned the ground floor of Congress Hall, the town's landmark beach hotel, into his summer White House, and Ulysses S Grant, the Union army general who was partial to a whisky in the town's gilded gambling dens. Even the great fire of 1878 couldn't break the strut in Cape May's stride. Thirty-eight acres of lavish Victorian seafront were destroyed in the blaze, but it was all rebuilt within a year, and came back more glamorous than ever.
The Golden Age didn't last, however. As automobiles became more common, Cape May's remote location meant it began to lose out to the flashy upstart that was Atlantic City, an hour north and closer to New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. When, in 1901, town officials, in a bout of puritan fervour, banned booze and gambling, many loyal summer holdouts deserted it for its only worthy rival, Newport, Rhode Island. Cape May spent most of the 20th century in somnambulant isolation, its unfashionability confirmed in the 1970s when a local preservation movement, (among them a millionaire fundamentalist preacher who bought Congress Hall, closed its bar, and turned part of the hotel into a bible centre), stopped developers from knocking down the shabby Victorians to build condos and beachfront high rises, as was happening in other Shore towns.
Now though, a century after its heyday, Cape May is making a comeback and those preservationists seem like visionaries. In-the-know tourists are discovering the town at the end of the line, its beautiful tree-lined streets, clean beaches and extraordinary architecture; and urbanites are fixing up those vintage houses, turning them into second homes, hotels, B&Bs, and restaurants. Whisper it, but Cape May is cool again.
Nothing better exemplifies the sultry new cool than Congress Hall, the handsome 1806-built Southern plantation-style hotel, recently reopened after a 10-year hiatus and a multi- million dollar overhaul by Curtis Bashaw, a local hotelier who, somewhat ironically, is the grandson of that preacher. It was here, over martinis in the Gatsbyesque cocktail lounge (all zebra-print rugs, lush palm trees and low-slung sofas) that we met one of the urban transplants: Jack Wright, the Scottish-born editor of the town's local entertainments newspaper, Exit Zero. In 2002, Wright was a high-powered glossy magazine editor in New York, when he took the summer off to run the cabana pool bar of Congress Hall, just as Bashaw was about to reopen it. "I wanted to come down, sip cocktails on the beach for a summer, then go back to New York. Instead, I never left. Cape May looks like nowhere else on the Shore, and it feels so secret."
That secret is slowly getting out. Enough Baltimore, Philly and New York residents now have summer homes in Cape May that they have their own "Cottage Society"; a twice-yearly Jazz Fest now draws in fans from across the east coast, as well acts such as South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela; and Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman is a regular visitor to Cape May Stage, the town's thriving professional Equity theatre. In summer meanwhile, its 3,000 population swells to 30,000, who come for bird watching, cycling, surfing and those fabulous beaches. Which was, after all, why we were there.
The most popular beach is the main, Atlantic-facing strand, recently rated by US Condé Nast Traveler as one of the top 20 in America. It's surely the only one in New Jersey where, like clockwork, every summer, you can watch dolphins swim up the coast at 9am and back down at 3pm, usually followed by a dolphin-watching boat. The beach will become more popular this summer when Congress Hall begins the first cabana service in New Jersey: in another echo of its Victorian heyday, hotel guests will be able to lounge in candy-striped private cabanas and order food and cocktails from uniformed waiters on the sand.
My wife and I wanted seclusion though, and Wright had recommended Higbee, a little-known beach on the Delaware Bay side. A 10-minute drive west and we found the deserted crescent of sand dotted with twisted bits of driftwood. Apart from two fishermen and a hermit crab, we were alone. True, the water was not Caribbean-blue, but it felt like our own private island. I was just as impressed though with busier Sunset beach at the end of aptly named Sunset Boulevard nearby, one of the few places on the east coast from where you can see the sun set over water to the west.
Cape May's top tourist attraction, its 1859-built lighthouse, is here too, and behind it spread protected coastal marshland with wooden walkways for walkers and bird watchers. Cape May sits on a major bird migration route and ornithologists from around the world flock here, so to speak, for sightings of rare falcons, gulls, plovers. I chuckled that the most famous birder in town was another UK transplant, Yorkshire-born photographer Richard Crossley, known as The Birdman of Cape May.
Most of all though, what outdoors Cape May seemed to offer, unlike any other Shore towns, was a laid-back island feel more Nantucket than New Jersey. This is partly because it is an island. In 1941, engineers cut an inland canal across the narrow peninsula to protect American vessels from the German U-boats that lurked off shore. (A U-boat surrendered off Cape May in 1945.) We only had to drive a mile inland to be in rolling countryside. And here, at last, was the Garden State my wife has told me so much about: narrow winding lanes that took us past horse farms, orchards, fruit markets, farm stalls and even a vineyard.
No Cape May visit is complete without a tour of its extraordinary architecture though, and by mid-afternoon we were back in town. Some 600 buildings in the historic district have been landmarked, most of them Victorian gingerbreads with trellised porches, in yellows, greens and reds as bright as the art deco in Miami. Many had been turned into B&Bs in the 70s, some elegant, others more Victorian lace such as the Duke of Windsor Inn on Jackson St, where the Baltimore debutante Wallis Simpson held her coming out party long before she scandalised British society. Most impressive was the Emlen Physik Estate, an 1879-built gothic mansion on Washington St, now a museum and tea room and home to the Mid Atlantic Center for the Arts, a heritage group formed by those 70s preservationists. Today the MAC put on architectural talks, food and wine festivals, music weekends and heritage tours - from trolley bus trips to visits to the supposedly haunted mansions on Jackson St. You don't find that in Atlantic City or Asbury Park.
To me though, it was the combination of Victorian architecture with modern beach-chic design at Curtis Bashaw's properties that made Cape May so appealing. Bashaw spent US$25 million restoring Congress Hall to its former glory. His sister Coleen, a designer in New York, vamped up the interiors, from the sea-view rooms with their sky blue walls, candy-striped carpets and vintage stand-alone bath tubs, to that glorious palm-lined, zebra-print cocktail lounge.
Across the street, Bashaw has restored another property, a once-crumbling cinder block, into a funky 19-room Miami Beach-style motel called The Star, with its own gourmet coffee shop, and further down the beach turned another near-derelict building, The Sandpiper, into the town's first beach-front condo apartments.
But for all its grand architecture and new glamour, Cape May has kept a laid-back down-home beach town feel and that, ultimately, is its charm. You can still play mini-golf, drink frothy beers in boardwalk bars and eat lobster with the fishermen who caught them at the port. You can't do that in the Hamptons - let alone South Beach.
We got a magnificent final glimpse of the languid beach town feel on our anniversary-night dinner at the 1879-built Ebbitt Room, the classiest restaurant in town, done up with blood-red carpets and red leather banquettes like a cross between a Parisian bordello and a New York supper club. We ordered oysters drizzled with iced champagne, melt-in-the-mouth calamari, and sea bass with foie gras. If the Jersey Shore is always like this I'll never utter a bad word about it again.
Getting there
Continental Airlines (0845 6076760, continental.com/uk) flies direct to Newark from seven UK airports from £342 rtn inc taxes. Car hire through Hertz (08708 448844, hertz.co.uk) from Newark for five days in July and August starts at £141.
Where to stay
Congress Hall Hotel, (251 Beach Ave, +609 884 8421, congresshall.com) doubles from $115. Star Inn (29 Perry St, +800 297 3779) doubles from $90.
Where to eat
The Ebbitt Room (25 Jackson St, +609 884 5700, thevirginiahotel.com). Lobster House (Fisherman's Wharf, +609 884 8296, thelobsterhouse.com). George's Place (Beach Ave and Perry St, +609 884 6088).
Further information
Cape May tours: Mid Atlantic Center for the Arts (+609 884 5404, capemaymac.org).
Country code: 001.
Flight time London-New York: 7hrs.
Time difference: +5hrs.
£1= 1.81 dollars.
