Cape May Diaries
14: Saving the Trade Winds
Although “preservation” was the hall mark of Cape May, we knew instinctively from the first to expect change.
While local efforts managed to preserve the Physick Estate and Congress Hall, icons like the Christian Admiral, one time Cape May Hotel, and the two-story Sawyer House were demolished, leaving vast gaps in the hearts of people like us who admired them even from a distance.
Business was even more precarious. While a bed and breakfast might change hands, most of the cottages would remain year after year. But any business was a risky affair, here or up north. And for people like us, who came once or twice year to carry back home mental snap shots of Cape May, the loss of any business left us a bit lessened at heart, as if we believed Cape May might vanish if enough of the businesses vanished.
Each year, before we left for the north, we always took one last walk through the historic and business districts, making note of what was there and hoping it would be there when we returned the next season or by our anniversary.
Sometimes, we chatted with people we met on the street, home owners taking time after the season ended to make needed repairs or to paint. Most of these people had invested their lives and livelihoods in these buildings, so each repair was a matter of survival.
Unfortunately, as the decade waned, we found fewer and fewer people outside doing their own work, but contractors hired to take on the chore, most likely by some new more corporate-minded owner who had purchased the property less out of love and more as an investment.
Our barometer for the health of Cape May changed. We looked towards businesses along the mall and elsewhere to tell us everything remained solid here. One such institution was The Trade Winds from which we made at least one yearly purchase on principle. We figured if everyone did, the store would never vanish and Cape May would retain its core value as an eclectic vacation place rather than some elaborate theme park.
So When we came to Cape May in 2000 and we walked along Washington Street Mall we found The Trade Winds was gone, we were stunned.
No single store had seemed so vital to us, its imported goods so much akin to the living history of sailing and sailors.
The Trade Winds, of course, had hardly more history than we did in Cape May. Its owner set up business here in 1985, one of those odd little shops that had helped define that era of Cape May as a kind of cult attraction for off beat people seeking an off beat life style, especially in off season.
Its goods like many of the shops came from around the world. Unlike many of the shops where the imprint of Taiwan needed a magnifying glass to discover, the Trade Winds boasted of its foreign sources, giving people a taste of culture that few lectures or text books could. None of the pieces found in the Trade Winds were mass produced in some sweat shop, but rather the art and craft of native artists, who did their best to convey their vision of the world.
Tourists were unlikely to find the name of Cape May scrolled across their surface the way they might the more commercial products. What people found might have been similar to those items historic Cape May residents would have encountered when Cape May was still called Cape Island and sailors brought such goods here from overseas.
The Trade Winds seem one of the few places left where we could find the old sense of the seaport, and we paid several visits here on each trip, once when we arrived and again before we left, carrying away with us this last taste of the old seaport.
When we found the store absent from its customary location, we presume the worst.
The mall itself had changed taking on a similar appearance to the more posh malls upstate, where every inch of floor space was calculated to appeal to modern aesthetic sensibilities. Cold department stores had developed the less is more concept and smaller mall stores throughout the state took up to crusade, shaping their goods into neat rows and wide aisles, loading down shells with simple by appealing items.
Trade Winds as we later learned had not vanished as we first feared but had lost its lease it after having spent 15 years in the same spot. We were not the only people upset by the change, and many barged into the new store and demanded to know where the Trade Winds had gone.
“While those people were relieved to find we hadn’t gone out of business, they did get the answer they’ve wanted because the person there could give only vague directions as to the new location,” said the blond hair late ‘40s woman who professed to own the Trade Winds, when we found its new location a short time later.
The woman said the loss of lease came in late 1999 forcing her to scramble to find another space, a much smaller store front on Lafayette on the other side of the Acme parking lot.
The woman had accompanied her husband to Cape May in the early 1980s but had not yet thought to set up the store. She wanted to set up but catalogue mail-order business. The store developed out of that. And though she supplied some less expensive novelty items such as frog shaped clickers, rubbing stones and various jewelry items, much of what could be found in her store reflected the religious and cultural artwork of several dozen countries, to which she what she had traveled as a buyer for the shop.
“On the mall they wanted us to set up things in rows, and we couldn’t do that,” she said calling some of what she saw going on in the mall shops as dumbing-down to attract the tourist trade.
Most of the shops that maintained their integrity owned their buildings so felt less pressured to adapt to the new spiffed up image Washington Street had adopted, she said.
For us, The Trade Winds' move did not keep us coming to Cape May for another year, gave us one less reason to wander Washington Street at all. The way the loss of the Christian Admiral removed any reason to wander towards that part of town