Cape May city is, in fact, a seaside island town on the tip of south New Jersey. Although it is steeped in Irish heritage, it looks like a collaboration between Norman Rockwell and Laura Ashley, with its picture-postcard shopfronts, its dreamy Victoriana-era guesthouses and the sense of vacation America.
It would be no surprise to see Chief Brody from the film Jaws wandering about in his shorts, squinting out to sea in suspicion. But it must be Irish because it’s the July 12th weekend, the Atlantic Ocean is squally and ominous and it’s raining heavily.
On Saturday, it’s a steamy, mutinous 33 degrees, and Joe Fahy is giving a couple of hours volunteering as a ticket salesman in the booth in front of the Star of the Sea church. The prize is a spanking new car: a ticket is just $2. He invites me to take shelter from the sporadic showers and talks me through his story.
He lived in Cape May for 50 years, where he worked as a social worker. His wife, Jean, ran an Irish gift shop on the main street for decades, and visits to the trade shows in the RDS have been part of their itinerary since the 1970s. They were Donegal regulars, staying in Dom Breslin’s Hyland hotel on the Diamond.
Joe and Jean both grew up in Philadelphia, in the tight-knit Irish-Italian neighbourhoods in the south of the city. They first met in school, at the age of eight, and got together after he graduated and made the move to the coast. “We had the owner of the liquor store as our landlord – an Irish man’s dream come true,” he says, laughing.
“Philadelphia” is the fast answer to the reason behind the deep Irish strain running through Cape May city (population 4,000) and county, which has been a Republican stronghold forever. The county is where the Philly Irish came to splash in the sea, and to retire. (According to the US census, Cape May is the county with the highest percentage of people claiming Irish ancestry in America at 28.6 per cent.)
“We are governed by a board of chosen freeholders and in the 300-year history of the county, there have only been two Democrats and one of them became a congressman and then became a Republican: Jeff Van Drew,” says Fahy.
Mary Stewart is an artist and also works in Cape May’s Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her family story is quietly extraordinary. Her grandfather John Heron (1855-1938) emigrated from Donegal in 1884 and found himself in Cape May when his employer, John Betz, bought the Stockton Hotel. His future wife, Margaret Mary Gallagher, also from Donegal, arrived in the town a year later. They married in 1895. John later thrived as a beer salesman to the extent that the family visited Ireland with several of their nine children in the 1920s. Mary says her grandfather was “disappointed by the lack of amenities he had become used to” in the US.
“I have a photo of him outside his family home, which is now a summer cottage, still in the family.”
Mary’s grandparents bought the family home in 1919 for little under $1,000 dollars. Fifty years later it was available for about $12,000. Now, it is valued at about $1 million (almost €920 million). “It’s a rather modest home on a nice residential street with no off-street parking, a big deal in Cape May,” says Stewart.
“If I ever have an extra million, I will buy it in a heartbeat.”
The jump in property prices has changed the tenor of the Cape May resort over the past 25 years. Jimmy McHugh runs two fudge shops in Cape May: the interior is a chocolate lover’s dream, and it seems miraculous that Jimmy has retained the frame of a middle-distance runner, given his occupation.
“It’s a 10-hour day doing what you see out there. It’s a physical job. I tend not to sample too much product. I’m not saying I don’t,” he says with a laugh as we sit chatting in his office. “But I tend not to.”
He has “two Irish kids” working with him in The Original Fudge Kitchen for the summer. Wind the time-cassette back 20 years and Cape May was crawling with Irish students on J1 visas, out for good times and bad tans. Now, eastern Europeans fill those roles.
“When the Irish economy started doing well, they stopped coming,” says Jimmy, who wears his own Irish heritage with light humour. “We all know we are a bunch of plastic Paddies. I get it! I think I tracked it down at a family reunion and the McHughs were three generations removed from Cork. The USS Hunley Civil War submarine had a McHugh. But Irish history runs deep all along the east coast.”
Cape May’s historical prestige is something of a happy accident. After a huge fire swept through it a century ago, it was reborn as a seaside resort with a stunning variety of American-Victorian homes: only San Francisco has a bigger range of these lavish, wooden period homes.
The city was in the doldrums in the years after the second World War but after a coast guard couple, Tom and Sue Carroll, opened the first B&B in 1970, the town reimagined itself as a family resort. But half the houses are now owned by nonresidents and appear on Airbnb, which has changed the nature of the seasonal influx.
On busy summer weekends, the local population can increase tenfold: in winter, half the residents go to Florida, leaving about 2,000 year-rounders.
It is then, Joe Fahy reckons, that the Irish streak within the county becomes more evident. Because there is nothing about Cape May city that suggests Irishness: nary a shamrock nor Tricolour. If anything the place resembles a perfectly preserved English seaside town – but with 33-degree heat. Jean Fahy died a couple of years ago, and the Irish gift shop she ran is no longer a feature on Washington Street.
“The internet killed us,” says Joe. “There are only one or two Irish stores left in Jersey. There used to be about 30.”
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He talks about the rhythm of life in the town in anecdotes familiar to Ireland: when his mother was housebound in her later years, Jean would go to the local shoe shop, pick five or six pairs for her to try on and pay for whatever pair she chose, returning the rest. It was informal. And that sense of community still exists. But house sales mean it is also a town in transition.
While he chats, Joe sells six $20 tickets books in quick succession. “I’m keepin’ you here,” he says, laughing. Talk turns to the election. He is not a fan of Joe Biden and thinks for a second when asked how he thinks a second term in office for Donald Trump could benefit the US.
“Well, we could use our own oil. I have nothing against conservation but the screwy deals they got us in. Immigration ... if they want all those people in, then bring them in but do it legally. Vet them before they are allowed it. I really fear for the country. I don’t think anything is going to happen now. At least not organised because that would get Trump elected – unless there is a renegade or something. But I think after the election we are extremely vulnerable in terms of terrorism. Not everybody is coming here for a good job. And I am just run-of-the-mill in my views.”
We are speaking just hours before a 20-year old Pennsylvanian will attempt to take the life of former president Trump.
“I am still up in the air on it,” he says about the election. “I haven’t figured out which way I am going. It is going to come down to whom I believe the lesser of two evils is. As for Cape May, it is such a mix of people and so many small businesses, the thing that matters most to us is making money. I care about issues. But our mentality is: we do what we do.”
One of the certainties of the November election is that when the numbers are crunched, the old Irish bastion of Cape May will continue to reflect its Republican values. The gradual transition of what is a gorgeous Atlantic enclave into a place dominated by the wealthier residents of Philadelphia and New York and the Jersey suburbs may eventually change that. But not yet.
As Mary Stewart says: “I have a sort of visceral connection to the places in Cape May that my grandparents and father frequented. Though so much has changed, I go to the same church, I eat in some of the same buildings, drink in some of the same bars, sit on the same beach. I have photos of them from the 1890s taken at a studio in Cape May.”
And the true values that made Cape May – sea air, quality seafood and a sort of drifting, slower pace of life – will see it through many more winters and summers.
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