Cape May Weekend: Victorian Architecture, Birding & the Delaware Bay Ferry

More than 600 Victorian structures survive in Cape May's compact resort district — the most intact nineteenth-century seaside streetscape in America, a product of the town's fortunate stagnation after its Gilded Age peak. Congress Hall, the colonnaded 1816 hotel that defined the American resort experience for a century, anchors the south end of the district; Presidents Grant, Arthur, Harrison, and Pierce all summered here. The surrounding blocks are dense with Queen Anne cottages, Italianate villas, and Stick Style confections — elaborate wood fretwork, asymmetrical towers, wraparound porches, and polychrome paint schemes competing for attention on streets laid out before automobiles. The Emlen Physick Estate, designed in 1879 by Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, is the architectural centrepiece: an eighteen-room Stick Style mansion with steeply pitched cross-gables, exposed stick decoration, and inverted chimneys that taper toward the ground — Furness at his most deliberately eccentric. Guided tours of the Physick Estate run 90 minutes and include the original furnishings.

The 1859 lighthouse at the tip of Cape May Point stands 157 feet above the beach — the third lighthouse built on this site, its predecessors having succumbed to beach erosion. The 199 cast-iron spiral steps lead to the watch room, where the original Fresnel lens mounting is still visible and the views encompass both the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Delaware Bay to the west, the two bodies of water meeting directly below at the confluence that defines the peninsula. The lighthouse has been in continuous operation since 1859, and the light itself — automated since 1946 — is still an active aid to navigation for vessels rounding the point.

The Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts operates 90-minute narrated trolley tours of the Cape May Historic District, covering architectural history, social history, and the remarkably complete story of how a Victorian resort town survived intact into the twenty-first century. The narration moves between the architectural details visible from the trolley — the machine-cut gingerbread, the stained glass transoms, the wraparound porches designed to catch sea breezes before air conditioning — and the social world of nineteenth-century resort culture, when Cape May's hotels hosted a mix of Philadelphia merchants, Southern planters, and the president's summer party in an uneasy peacetime proximity that defined the town's antebellum character.

The most elaborately documented Victorian house in Cape May — Frank Furness's 1879 Stick Style mansion for Dr. Emlen Physick Jr. is the only major Furness-designed domestic building open to the public and among the finest surviving examples of the Victorian Stick Style anywhere in the country. The interior retains original furnishings and wallpapers, and the MAC's interpretation covers both the architectural significance — Furness's deliberate rejection of classical symmetry in favor of irregular massing and exposed structural ornament — and the social history of a Philadelphia medical family's relationship to its Cape May summer cottage over three generations. The adjacent carriage house holds the MAC's historical museum, with exhibits on Cape May's evolution from colonial port to Victorian resort to twentieth-century shore town.

The western beach at Cape May Point fronts Delaware Bay rather than the Atlantic — the water is calmer, the sunsets are unobstructed to the west, and the beach itself yields Cape May diamonds: naturally tumbled quartz agates worn smooth by the surf that arrive on the beach from deposits far up the Delaware River. The rusting hull of the SS Atlantus, a World War I experimental concrete ship that broke free during a 1926 storm and grounded on the shoals offshore, lies embedded in the shallow water a few hundred yards from shore — one of only three concrete ships still extant in the world. The beach hosts a nightly flag-lowering ceremony at sunset, when patriotic music plays over loudspeakers as the sun drops behind the bay.

Cape May is the single most important raptor and songbird migration concentration point on the East Coast — the peninsula acts as a geographic funnel where birds traveling south along the Atlantic flyway converge at the tip before making the 12-mile crossing of Delaware Bay, and the concentration of species in a small area during peak migration is unmatched anywhere in the northeastern United States. The New Jersey Audubon Society's hawk watch platform records more than one million birds annually; the count from the platform in September and October includes thousands of Sharp-shinned Hawks, Cooper's Hawks, and American Kestrels on single peak days, plus regular sightings of Peregrine Falcons, Merlins, and Bald Eagles riding the thermal columns above the dunes. The Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area at the northern tip of the peninsula is the premier songbird trap in the fall — a concentration of coastal shrub that holds warblers, vireos, and thrushes at dawn in densities that experienced birders describe as overwhelming.

The Cape May Bird Observatory's Northwood Center runs daily banding demonstrations during fall migration — ornithologists extract birds from fine-mesh mist nets, weigh, measure, and band them before releasing them from the hand, and visitors are invited to watch the process up close and occasionally to release a bird themselves. Holding a banded Yellow Warbler or a Merlin in the hand before releasing it into the morning sky is the kind of encounter that converts casual observers into committed birders. The observatory's shop is the best birding bookstore in the Mid-Atlantic, stocking field guides, optics, and the current site reports that tell you exactly which rare species have been seen in the area that morning.

The 17-mile crossing of the mouth of Delaware Bay takes 85 minutes — long enough to have a meal in the ferry's dining room, walk the outer deck as the New Jersey shore recedes and the Delaware coast appears, and watch the bay's active wildlife from a deck that puts you at water level. In spring and fall, Northern Gannets plunge-dive around the ferry as it crosses the shipping channel, Laughing Gulls beg on the stern rail, and Red-throated Loons surface alongside. In May, the ferry route passes above the horseshoe crab spawning grounds on both shores — the ancient crabs have been coming to these beaches to spawn for 450 million years, and the spawning aggregation on the Delaware Bay shores is the largest in the world. Vehicles travel on the lower deck; walk-on passengers have priority boarding.

Delaware's finest state park covers the point where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, and its landscape is defined by the tension between military history and natural systems: Fort Miles WWII coastal defense bunkers — massive concrete gun batteries armed with 16-inch guns designed to destroy any warship attempting to enter the Delaware shipping lanes — stand on top of the same dune ridge where shorebirds rest during spring migration. The 70-foot concrete observation tower built in 1941 to spot German submarines now offers the best panoramic view of the coast and bay available anywhere in Delaware. The Gordon's Pond hiking trail runs 3.5 miles through dune forest, freshwater marsh, and the open shore of the pond, where Great Egrets and Dunlin feed in the shallows. Herring Point, the ocean-facing beach at the park's southern end, has the best swimming conditions in Delaware — clean, lifeguarded, with a sandy bottom and consistent summer surf.

The oldest town in Delaware was settled by the Dutch in 1631 — a whaling colony called Zwaanendael that was destroyed by the Lenape within a year of its establishment and later resettled as an English port. The Zwaanendael Museum, a 1931 replica of the Hoorn Town Hall in Holland commissioned for the 300th anniversary of the colony, stands in the center of the historic district and holds exhibits on the colonial period, the area's maritime history, and the astonishing archaeological record of the Delaware Bay shoreline. The Cannonball House at 118 Front Street is a 1730 colonial structure with a British cannonball from the War of 1812 still embedded in the west foundation wall — a souvenir of the 1813 bombardment of Lewes by the HMS Poictiers that has been left in place as the town's most tangible piece of military history.