How Cape May earned the score
Population 2,768 year-round residents (2020 census).
Situation The nation’s oldest seaside resort, a town of fewer than 3,000 that draws a slice of the 11.6 million visitors and $7.7 billion in spending its county logged in 2023.
Action After the great fire of 1878 it rebuilt in Victorian gingerbread, then refused for the next century to tear any of it down, protecting the whole city as a National Historic Landmark.
Result A perfect Visitor Impact Score of 100, the Destination Leader band, and a one-of-one brand no developer could ever copy.
A Sandbar That Got There First
Drive to the very bottom of New Jersey, past the marshes and the farm stands, until the road simply runs out of country. That is where you find Cape May, perched on a peninsula where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Delaware Bay. It is a small place. The 2020 census counted just 2,768 year-round residents, which is roughly the size of a single large high school. And yet this little sandbar has a claim almost no other town in America can make: it got to the beach-vacation idea first.
People have been coming here to escape the summer heat since the 1760s, when Philadelphians and southerners began arriving by sloop and stagecoach to take the sea air. The State of New Jersey and the city itself recognize Cape May as the nation’s oldest seaside resort. By 1816, a Cape May innkeeper named Thomas Hughes had built a boarding house so large that locals mocked it as “Tommy’s Folly,” certain no one would ever fill it. He renamed it Congress Hall, and over the following decades it hosted presidents Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Benjamin Harrison, the last of whom treated it as a summer White House.
The Queen of the Seaside Resorts
By the mid-1800s Cape May had earned a nickname: the Queen of the Seaside Resorts. It was the place to be seen on the Atlantic coast, drawing the political and social elite of Philadelphia, Washington, and the antebellum South. This was decades before Atlantic City built its first boardwalk and generations before the Hamptons or Newport became shorthand for summering money. Cape May was not competing with those places. It predated them.
That matters for one simple reason. A destination’s deepest, most defensible advantage is the thing competitors cannot manufacture, and authentic age is exactly that. You can build a bigger water park. You cannot build a longer history. When we score a town’s Visitor Impact, the rarest and most valuable trait we look for is a one-of-one identity the place actually owns, and Cape May owns “first” outright.
Why a captain named Mey gave his name to the cape (and lost the spelling)
The cape is named for Cornelius Jacobsen Mey, a Dutch navigator who charted the region around 1620 while sailing for the Dutch West India Company. The Dutch established a presence on the bay, and the captain’s surname stuck to the land even as English settlement took over and the spelling drifted to “May.” So the oldest seaside resort in America carries a 400-year-old Dutch sea captain’s name, slightly misspelled, on every welcome sign. Source.
Survive the Fire, Then Survive Success
Being first is a gift, but it is not a guarantee. Cape May faced two existential threats in the span of a century, and how the town answered them is the whole story.
The fire that rewrote the skyline
The first threat was literal. Cape May burned, badly, more than once, with the Great Fire of 1878 destroying roughly 35 acres of the resort district at the height of the season. For a wooden boomtown built on summer crowds, a fire on that scale was the kind of event that ended places. Congress Hall itself went up in the flames. The town had a brutal decision to make: rebuild cheap and fast to reopen, or rebuild in something more permanent and ambitious.
Cape May chose ambition. It rebuilt in the elaborate Victorian style that was then at its peak, all turrets, wraparound porches, scalloped shingles, and the lacy wooden trim collectors call gingerbread. Congress Hall came back in brick the very next year, specifically to reassure nervous guests it would not burn again. Block by block, the burned district came back grander than before.
The slower threat: going out of style
The second threat was quieter and, in the long run, more dangerous. As the 20th century rolled on, the smart money moved elsewhere. Atlantic City got the casinos and the bright lights. The automobile let families chase newer, flashier shore towns. Victorian architecture went from the height of fashion to hopelessly old-fashioned, and “old-fashioned” is one stop away from “knock it down.” By the mid-1900s, much of Cape May’s irreplaceable building stock sat aging, underused, and very much in the path of the wrecking ball, including the grand 1879 Emlen Physick Estate, which by 1970 was slated for demolition.
This is the moment the brand was actually won or lost. Plenty of towns inherit something special and then quietly pave it over for parking. Cape May’s task, whether anyone phrased it this way at the time, was to recognize that the old houses everyone found dowdy were in fact the most valuable thing it had, and to protect them before they were gone.
A Town That Decided to Save Itself
The turnaround did not come from a developer or a state mandate. It came from neighbors who refused to let the town’s character get bulldozed, and it started with a single house.
Saving the Physick Estate
In September 1970, a small group of Cape May citizens formed a nonprofit for one urgent purpose: to rescue the 1879 Emlen Physick Estate, an 18-room mansion designed by the celebrated Philadelphia architect Frank Furness, from the wrecking ball. That group became the Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts and Humanities, known today as Cape May MAC. The City of Cape May acquired the estate in 1973 with state and federal grants and leased it to MAC for the now-famous rent of one dollar a year. The mansion was saved and reopened to the public as a museum.
That single rescue became the template. MAC did not stop at one house. It built a year-round engine of guided trolley tours, lighthouse climbs, ghost tours, a Victorian Christmas season, and festivals that today serve more than 300,000 people annually and gave residents an economic reason to keep the old buildings standing rather than replace them.
From one mansion to a National Historic Landmark
The preservation push hit its high-water mark fast. In 1976, the entire city of Cape May was designated a National Historic Landmark, one of only a handful of whole-city designations in the country, recognized for its extraordinary concentration of more than 600 Victorian buildings. That status did something powerful: it converted “old and unfashionable” into “nationally protected and rare,” permanently. The very houses that nearly came down in the 1960s were now the legal and emotional centerpiece of the town.
Leaning all the way in
Once the identity was protected, Cape May committed to it without hedging. Bed-and-breakfasts moved into the painted ladies. The town restored its 1859 Cape May Lighthouse, a 157-foot tower with a 199-step climb to the watch room, and opened it for visitors. Congress Hall was lovingly restored into a luxury anchor hotel. Cape May did not try to be a generic beach town with some old buildings attached. It went all in on being the Victorian seaside town, the only one of its kind, and let that singularity become the entire pitch.
The accidental upside: Cape May became one of the best birding spots on Earth
Because Cape May sits at the tip of a peninsula, migrating birds funnel down its narrow point and pile up before crossing the Delaware Bay, making it one of the premier migration hotspots in North America. The Cape May Bird Observatory has run a fall hawk watch every year since 1976, and on a strong autumn an average of roughly 30,000 raptors stream overhead. In 1984, birder Pete Dunne launched the World Series of Birding from here, a 24-hour species-counting competition that doubles as a conservation fundraiser and now draws teams from across the country. Cape May did not plan to become a global birding capital. Geography handed it a second, entirely separate tourism economy on top of the Victorian one, and the town was smart enough to embrace it. Source.
A Perfect Score and a Brand Nobody Can Copy
The decision to protect the old houses instead of replacing them turned out to be the best economic move the town ever made. Cape May today is the recognizable, photographable, instantly knowable heart of one of the most visited counties in New Jersey.
The numbers
Cape May County logged roughly 11.6 million visitors and $7.7 billion in tourism spending in 2023, a 4.1 percent jump over the prior year, second only to casino-fueled Atlantic County among all 21 New Jersey counties. A meaningful share of that draw runs through Cape May city itself, the brand-name anchor that puts the whole peninsula on the map. For a town of 2,768 residents to sit at the center of a multibillion-dollar visitor economy is a remarkable ratio, and it is no accident.
Why the Visitor Impact Score is 100
Our Visitor Impact Score rewards the things that make a place genuinely worth traveling for and hard to replace: a singular identity, a deep stock of attractions, a walkable and characterful downtown, and a strong reputation. Cape May scores at the very top, a 100, landing it in our Destination Leader band, because it stacks nearly every one of those traits in a way almost no small town can match.
It has the rarest ingredient of all, a one-of-one identity the town built and defended on purpose. It has genuine depth of things to do that has nothing to do with the weather, from lighthouse climbs to museum tours to world-class birding, which means it works in October as well as July. It has a downtown, the Washington Street Mall and the surrounding district, where the architecture itself is the attraction. And it has the credibility of being the original, the oldest seaside resort in the country, protected at the highest level as a National Historic Landmark. (The score is a Tier 1, provisional rating, our published online assessment.)
The biggest opportunity
A perfect score does not mean there is nothing left to gain. From the outside, Cape May’s clearest opportunity is the calendar. Its Victorian-and-birding identity is genuinely four-season, yet like most shore destinations its visitation and spending still concentrate hard in the warm months. The county’s own tourism research notes that economic pressure is pushing some visitors to trim trips and spending, which makes shoulder-season and off-season demand the most valuable growth lever available. A place that is just as compelling in a foggy November as in a sunny July, and that markets itself that way, captures revenue its competitors physically cannot. That is the upside still on the table, and it is the kind of move a focused visitor-economy strategy is built to unlock.
Protect the Thing Only You Have
Cape May is the clearest possible proof of a principle we see again and again: the towns that win the visitor economy are not the ones with the most attractions or the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the clearest, most ownable identity, fully committed to.
Cape May could have rebuilt cheap after the fire. It could have bulldozed its Victorians in the 1960s like so many towns bulldozed their old downtowns. It could have chased Atlantic City’s neon and lost. Instead it recognized that its old, unfashionable, irreplaceable houses were the entire point, protected them at the national level, and turned “the oldest seaside resort in America” from a historical footnote into a living, breathing, multibillion-dollar brand.
The gingerbread trim was never the liability everyone in the 1960s thought it was. It was the moat. Every town has some version of that moat, a story, a building stock, a craft, a landscape, a piece of history that is theirs and no one else’s. The question is whether they protect it and build on it, or pave it over and become interchangeable. Cape May chose the harder, slower, and far more valuable path, and a hundred years later it is still collecting the dividends.