November 2nd 2021

A 19th Century hotel in Cape May Point that became a seaside religious retreat will not be demolished after all, and instead will be adapted for reuse as a nature center, its owners announced on Monday.

The Saint Mary by the Sea retreat house, a sprawling Victorian structure with a distinctive red roof, was built in 1889 as the Shoreham Hotel. It was purchased in 1909 and converted with minimal alteration to a religious retreat by the Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a women’s religious order based in Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill section, dedicated to good works in the northeastern United States.

In 2016, the sisters announced they were looking for a conservationist group to purchase the property, demolish the hotel and guarantee the site would not be redeveloped.

The planned demolition, with a deed restriction preventing future development of the valuable oceanfront property, was intended as a kind of return of the site to its natural state, consistent with the sisters’ reverence for the natural world.

The summer of 2021 had been intended as the retreat’s last, though the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 shut the retreat two summers earlier.

The sisters’ plans to demolish the building were decried by historic preservationists, who viewed the 132-year-old former hotel as a prime example of the region’s Victorian heyday.

And recently, according to Monday’s statement, the sisters were won over by a proposal from a newly-formed nonprofit group, the Cape May Point Science Center Inc., to purchase the site and preserve St. Mary by the Sea as a place for the study of nature and the environment. The new nonprofit also agreed to the deed restriction against any future commercial development of the property.

“The Sisters knew that those red roofs are iconic and a treasured part of the landscape of Cape May Point and explored options for this property consistent with their pledge,” the Sisters of St. Joseph said in a statement. “After much discussion and negotiations, the Sisters agreed to sell to the Science Center, an entity devoted to protection of the environment.”

The statement does not discuss plans for the nature center’s operations, its opening date or other details.

“Cape May Point Science Center, Inc., a New Jersey nonprofit corporation, has agreed to purchase the property with conditions to respect and honor the Sisters of Saint Joseph’s pledge to the community,” the statement read. “They intend to create an environmental center that will focus on education, research and advocacy devoted to the conservation, protection and preservation of nature. This mission is aligned with the Sisters’ land ethic and their commitment to the ocean, climate and marine life.”

Under the agreement, if the building is destroyed by a natural occurrence, the site would not be redeveloped and rather returned to an open beachfront expanse.

A spokesperson for the Sisters of St. Joseph, Cecilia Rupell, declined to elaborate on the statement.

“We felt strongly that the sisters wanting to preserve that site for nature is extremely worthy,” a former council member said said at the time. “At the same time, we had, at that time also discussed with them the formation of a coalition of nonprofit and educational and preservation groups to spearhead an effort to preserve St. Mary’s as an environmental and nature center.”