Michael Thomas Leibrandt: See you down the shore

In Philadelphia, July 4th isn’t just a single day for fireworks. Each year in late May, as cool spring days take on the warmth of summer,  Philadelphians turn their attention to the pleasure of vacations. 

Memorial Day may very well be the unofficial start of summer, but July 4th is its most popular shore-vacation holiday — with last year boasting more than 950,000 vacation visitors around Independence Day. When it comes to our Philadelphia getaway destinations, we aren’t visiting the ocean, going to the beach, or enjoying the seaside. Nope: we are down the shore.

This spring, our neighbors to the north announced that in response to President Trump’s tariffs and international political tension, they may not be frequenting our beloved Jersey Shore. Sounds like we may be able to take advantage of less traffic and perhaps  a little extra room on the beach.

Much like the area around Philadelphia and long before European colonials settled along New Jersey’s shoreline, the Lenape occupied the area and even fished around Ocean City Island. But it was the advent of the 19th century railroads that gave the Jersey Shore the accessibility and spawned the birth of what would become its renowned seaside resorts.

One of those seaside resorts was the Chalfonte in Cape May, New Jersey. Built by a civil war colonel in 1876, the historic building still stands today. Cape May Point has a real concrete World War II ammunition bunker constructed between 1941–1942, a lighthouse dating all the way back to 1859, and even a concrete vessel that is still submerged off the shoreline dating all the way back to the roaring 1920s. Wealthy Philadelphians started to vacation in Cape May in the 1800s and even purchased homes there.

For many people from the greater Delaware Valley,  one hundred years prior to the inviting glow of casino illumination in the location another area once inhabited and populated by the American tribes,  Atlantic City was once popular not for casino attractions but for leisure. 

Just an easy ferry trip from Philadelphia, AC began to emerge as a resort town in 1850  and would open three years later as Atlantic City, the same year that its first resort (Belloe House) was opened. In 1854, its Absecon Lighthouse was designed none other that George Meade himself   who nine years later would defeat Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia on the fields of Gettysburg. Some one hundred and fifty years ago — as depicted on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire  — some half a million visitors were frequenting the city in the Prohibition Era each year. Just prior to Memorial Day weekend back before 1980, the city’s initial destination of gambling would open its doors as Resorts International Casino Hotel.

South of all of those bright Atlantic City casino lights is the island of Ocean City, whose shorelines were once foraged for food by the Lenape. Then around the turn of the 18th century, the island was used for storing whales by John Peck. But it was in the year 1879 when four ministers bought a portion of the seaside with the intention of opening a seaside resort. Beneath the cover of a cedar tree that still can be found today,  the men would develop the Ocean City Civic Association. For decades,  visitors could even see a portion of the Sindia,  which sank off the coast of the island in 1901.

For those of us Philadelphians  whose summer family traditions are as important as the history of vacationing at the Jersey Shore, we’re not down during the summer months  —  but we are down the shore.

Michael Thomas Leibrandt lives and works in Abington Township, Pennsylvania.