Villas

Villas — The Delaware Bay Shore in 1933

The Villas is a mainland community on Delaware Bay at the lower end of Cape May County — not an ocean beach community, but a bayside town facing west across the Delaware Bay toward Delaware. The 1933 aerial captures the Villas in the year of the Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane — a storm that entered the coast from the south and produced severe bay surge along Delaware Bay shores. The aerial shows the modest grid of year-round homes along the bay edge, the fishing and crabbing docks, and the wetlands and meadows behind. This is the other side of Cape May County: a bayside community that lived by the water as much as the ocean communities, but with a different economy and a different relationship with storms.