The Hotel Lafayette

Text by Cassidy Jones / Winter 2025

In the early 20th century, Cape May’s summer visitors often marked their stays with a postcard home. A popular image to front these cards, sprawling three decades and from multiple angles, was the Hotel Lafayette, a large and elegant Victorian building constructed in 1885 by Victor Denizot. It stood at Beach Avenue and Decatur Street where the Marquis de Lafayette stands today.

Most of the postcards in our archive are marked in the summer months—a reminder of how sharply defined the tourist season was. The rhythm of Cape May pulsed from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and only a few ventured past the summer’s edge. An 1888 ad in the Cape May Star and Wave heralded a bold new idea: winter tourism. On January 15, 1889, the ad claimed, “for the comfort of guests, which promise to be many.” A “new era” was coming, when “two or three of [Cape May’s] fine houses are opened for the winter season.”

Reception to Governor Wilson of New Jersey at the Hotel Lafayette, August 14 1911

But time wasn’t kind to Hotel Lafayette—by the 1960s the hotel was in disrepair, and it was demolished in 1971. Loans and preservation funding simply didn’t exist to save the building, and urban renewal was on the rise. Tearing down the Hotel Lafayette became a turning point of awareness of Cape May’s architecture and contributed to Cape May’s Historic Preservation Commission formation.

That same decade, two smaller Victorian cottages that stood on the same property where the Marquis de Lafayette’s curved motor inn section is—now called the Morning Star Villa and Angel of the Sea—were rescued by Rev. Carl McIntire, who bought each for a dollar. In 1963, they were carefully moved on flatbed trucks across town to the east end of the beachfront near Peter Shields Inn. Unlike the massive Hotel Lafayette, these buildings could be saved.

Though Hotel Lafayette is long gone, its image remains on these postcards, faded but full of life. And thanks to the preservation efforts sparked in part by the loss of landmarks like the Hotel Lafayette, much of Cape May’s historic charm endures.