Cape May, the iconic Victorian beach town at the very bottom of New Jersey, just made USA TODAY’s list of the ten best small towns in the Northeast. It came in at number nine—sitting alongside well-known destinations from Vermont, Maine, and Pennsylvania. The same publication also ranked it sixth for best coastal small town and threw in an honorable mention for best small town food scene. Not bad for a town of 2,700 people.
None of this will shock anyone who’s actually been there. Cape May runs on a different clock than the rest of the Shore. There are no high-rises here. No neon signs, no corporate restaurant groups muscling out the locals. What you find instead are gaslit streets, sprawling wraparound porches, and Victorian homes stacked so close together and kept so meticulously that the whole place starts to feel slightly unreal. USA TODAY called it “a gorgeous Victorian gingerbread home showcase.” That’s technically correct. It also doesn’t quite capture the feeling of walking those streets for the first time.
Cape May is the oldest seaside resort in the country. Presidents were summering here before the rest of the Jersey Shore had figured out what it wanted to be—Lincoln, Pierce, Grant, all of them made the trip. That history is baked into the architecture, which is why the town looks the way it does. Strict preservation rules have kept developers from doing what they did to so much of the rest of the coastline in the 1970s and 80s. The result is a town that actually still looks like itself.
The beach is worth its own mention. Most of the Jersey Shore faces east. Cape May faces west, which means the sun goes down over the water rather than behind you. It sounds like a small thing. It isn’t.
The food scene has grown into something genuinely worth traveling for. Seafood drives most of the menus—the town sits where Delaware Bay meets the Atlantic, and crabbing, fishing, and oystering are still real industries here, not just aesthetic ones. The restaurants that do it well are doing it at a level that has nothing to do with the town’s size. The honorable mention from USA TODAY was earned.
Washington Street Mall, the pedestrian shopping corridor in the middle of town, is the kind of downtown that most small Shore towns gave up on decades ago. Independent shops, local galleries, restaurants that have been around long enough to know what they’re doing. It gets busy in July. It can handle it. A local hotel bar was even named one of the country’s best back in 2025.
On the real estate side, the recognition comes with a number attached. According to Zillow, the average home value in Cape May sits at $701,549 as of early 2026. That makes it one of the pricier markets in a state that already isn’t cheap. Remote work shifted things here the same way it shifted them everywhere—buyers from Philadelphia and New York started looking further south, past Atlantic City, toward towns with more character and fewer crowds. Cape May caught a lot of that attention, and the prices reflect it.
The rest of the USA TODAY list gives some sense of the company Cape May is keeping. Woodstock, Vermont is number two. Provincetown, Massachusetts is seven. Boothbay Harbor, Maine is eight. These are places people plan trips around. Cape May is on that list now officially, though anyone from New Jersey could have told you it belonged there a long time ago.
The New Jersey Digest is a new jersey magazine that has chronicled daily life in the Garden State for over 10 years.