Cape May Diaries
13- More than an elaborate mall
Despite Cape May’s historic destination, many people we met prior to our coming here in 1990 talked a lot about shopping – especially along a section called the Washington Street Mall.
We soon found several odd shops selling an assortment of offbeat items, and while some of these survived, locating themselves on the Washington Street Mall, others -- beyond the usual business district -- did not. The most popular stores in Cape May focused on food, beachwear or Victorian memorabilia -- although a doll shop and shops selling artist items from around the world retained their place year after year. Yet even these seemed to make concessions to the typical tourists by supplying inexpensive novelties or items loaded with the imprint of the Victorian era or the name Cape May.
A walk down Washington Street Mall made me think of theme malls then being constructed nationally by Mills Corporation, and revealed how commercial an enterprise Cape May had become. Hints of the misguided belief that Cape May would become the center of an alternative culture remained during our first few visits, a few of that philosophy holding on to the bitter end against the tide of a more main stream economic reality.
During our first visit to Cape May in 1990, we stumbled onto a bookstore up Washington Street, away from the shopping mall. It was one of a group of small stores situated in the fronts of historic houses, like a slice of New York City's Greenwich Village. The store's stock did not reflect the typical picture books of sea gulls and ships as the mall stores did, but a variety of books on Cape May's natural environment, oriental and other philosophies, witchcraft and Wicca.
The two women owners had opened the shop expecting support from the gay community that we learned had once populated Cape May during the late fall and early spring. The owners -- who had started there business there in the late 1980s -- thought people would view Cape May as New Jersey's Woodstock, an arts and cultural community. We caught some of their expectations, and we were extremely disappointed to return to the store a year later to find the women gone and the books replaced with candy.
The conflict of philosophies over Cape May's future had gone on since the 1960s between those who would turn the town into a more conventional seaside resort like that of nearby Wildwood and those who would preserve its historic heritage. The preservationists, however, were never so radical as time and circumstance made them seem, and the prospect of making money stood sanded down the rough edge of their philosophy, making restoration of Cape May financially possible.
We had noticed the subtle changes in Cape May over the previous decade as the hope of the preservationists turned into a solid investment with a strong commercial sector new store springing up where sections of the acne parking lot had once provided spaces for cars and bicycles. What disturbed us, however, was the similarity of goods we found in these new shops, novelties and Seashore bric-a-brac that we could find anywhere from Cape May to point Pleasant with only the names on the goods changed. Stores with original merchandise materials authentic to Cape May seemed to grow less prominent in window displays, while acute items designed to lower the unsophisticated tourist seemed to expand. Work of local artists and craftspeople shrank as tree manufactured Christmas time Village buildings seem to take their place. Many of the stores seemed to duplicate themselves, each establishment taking on its share of the same goods as if victimized by the same traveling salesman. Shops that remained dedicated to the effort of supplying original goods became surrounded by stores full of manufactured junk, Cape made memorabilia also had fine print stating their manufactured in places like China and Taiwan.
We knew that each year’s change took the town slightly further from the authentic culture its founders thought to preserve and later to capitalize on. We were, of course, not naïve enough to think Cape May could maintain its pristine culture and still sell itself to the general public. In an error of television docudramas and enhanced documentaries like Survivor, Cape May needed to polish its act up in order to remain competitive.
Yet we greatly feared what had once served as a clever scheme to cleanup and modernize Cape May’s business district by turning it into a pedestrian mall was rapidly reshaping itself into a mall mentality found everywhere else in the state from Woodbridge to Willowbrook. While true Washington Street avoided the cliché shops such as the gap or Sam Goodies, the Cape May district we feared might adopt a mentality that made it look and feel like an ordinary shopping mall.
Of all things, we dreaded this theme park sensibility most, fearing that we had fallen for the historic sales pitch like common tourists. As strangers to Cape May, we fell into the romantic notion that the historic element could survive without the economic, while the human stock upon which Cape May was first built -- the Pilgrims, Quakers, farmers and whalers, had a much more practical attitude. Despite the numerous get quick rich schemes that had led to numerous disasters, it was this natural practicality that helped Cape May rebuild. Years later, we would come to understand that the remarkable nature of Cape May was less in its buildings than its people.