Cape May's Rain-Delayed October: The House Tour, the Hawks and the Jazz Now Stack Up Back to Back

"Moved to Saturday, October 17th!" That was Cape May MAC's update on its Victorian Weekend page this week, posted a few lines above a second notice: "Cancelled due to rain!" The Craft & Collectibles Show is gone for the year, along with its planned appearance by the Wheelmen, who keep pre-1932 bicycles on the road. The Historic House Tour survived, but it moved out of Victorian Weekend, which ran October 9 through 12, and into the following Saturday.

That one change packed the rest of Cape May's October into ten crowded days. The house tour now lands in the middle of NJ Audubon's Cape May Fall Festival. Right behind it comes the Exit Zero Jazz Festival, and the City's Halloween Parade takes the jazz weekend's Sunday afternoon. Between October 15 and October 25, three of the town's biggest fall organizers are working the same streets.

Saturday the 17th Now Holds Two Calendars

The Fall Festival opens the evening of October 15 and runs through October 18. The house tour now sits on that Saturday, 1 to 4 p.m. Here's how the four days line up:

1. Thursday, Oct. 15, evening. The Fall Festival begins.
2. Friday, Oct. 16. The festival runs field sessions at Higbee Beach and Cape May Point State Park, a Sparrow ID Workshop with Michael O'Brien and Eastern Warbler ID with Kevin Karlson, then a reception at Convention Hall.
3. Saturday, Oct. 17. The festival offers sessions with Scott Barnes, Chris Brown, Ryan Hasko, Pat and Clay Sutton and Scott Whittle, and its keynote in the Lower Cape May Regional High School auditorium. MAC's house tour opens five Historic District doors from 1 to 4 p.m.
4. Sunday, Oct. 18. The festival closes with a special walk at The Nature Conservancy's South Cape May Meadows and "My Backyard Is for the Birds" with Mary Birrer at the Nature Center of Cape May. The same day is the entry deadline for the Halloween Parade, a week ahead.

The two Saturday events use different parts of town. The festival works out of the Northwood Center, Higbee Beach, Rea Farm, the Meadows, the state park and Convention Hall, and the house tour stays on Washington Street, Lafayette, Stockton and Ocean. With the tour starting at 1 p.m., you can spend the morning at the festival and the afternoon touring houses.

Five Houses, and the One That Took Additions Off

Adult tickets are $35, children 3 to 12 are $20, and MAC members pay $25. The five properties span nearly two centuries:

• The Colonial House, c. 1730, 653½ Washington St. This is the Greater Cape May Historical Society's headquarters. It started as a tavern and the family home of Revolutionary War patriot Memucan Hughes, and it will be decorated for fall with natural and native materials.
• The Norris Smith House, 1904, 1023 Washington St. It was built for a Cape May maritime family, and the first floor is set with period decorations.
• The Carlin Residence, c. 1855, 1102 Lafayette St. Now called The Blue Heron, it has just finished a renovation.
• The Bedford Inn, 805 Stockton Ave. It was built as a "Mother-Daughter" double home for the children of Joseph French, a Philadelphia stockbroker, and is now part of The Queen Victoria Bed & Breakfast family.
• The Queen Victoria, 102 Ocean St. It was built as a private residence for Douglas Gregory, a Delaware River and Bay pilot, and blends Italianate Villa, Edwardian and French-inspired mansard elements.

The Carlin house is the one to study if you care how old Cape May buildings change. According to MAC's tour notes, the original dwelling picked up several additions over the years and operated as the Primrose Bed & Breakfast from the 1990s through 2014, with six bedrooms and seven baths. The Carlin family bought it in October 2014. The renovation kept the original house intact and removed the earlier additions to make room for a primary suite, a larger kitchen in place of a galley, a gathering room, a mudroom and laundry, a rear covered porch, an upper balcony, a garage and a pool. As a private home it now has five bedrooms and five and a half baths, with a Victorian exterior and a transitional interior.

Going from inn back to home cost the house a bedroom and a bath. Anyone who walks Lafayette toward the Physick Estate has watched the landscape work from the sidewalk. On the 17th the inside is open too.

A Fiftieth Anniversary That Started at Higbee Beach

NJ Audubon is billing this year's festival as the Cape May Bird Observatory's 50th anniversary. The keynote speaker shows how far back those roots go. Laurie Goodrich, PhD, now the Sarkis Acopian Director of Conservation Science at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, got her first hawk-watching job in 1981. Pete Dunne hired her to assess hawk flights at Higbee Beach and how human disturbance affected roosting raptors there. NJ Audubon writes that the fall she spent in Cape May set her on the path to Hawk Mountain. Dunne returns to talk about his new book, Under Their Wing: A History of Birds and Humans, and Peter Marra, PhD, will discuss The Atlas of North America's Migratory Birds.

The Bird Observatory explains the timing by geography: in autumn, Cape May funnels migrating hawks, seabirds, shorebirds, songbirds, butterflies and dragonflies. Full registration is $280 for three days, $220 for two and $110 for one, and the registration page lists an October 10 cutoff. Check current availability with NJ Audubon directly. The festival schedule describes the hawk ID station at Rea Farm and the waterbird ID station at Avalon Seawatch as "Drop in or stay awhile."

The clearest no-cost way in comes a week later. On October 24, NJ Audubon is holding a free, family-friendly Hawk ID Mini-Workshop at the East Shelter in Cape May Point State Park, with no preregistration required. That puts it on the jazz festival's Saturday, which is how the two weekends link up.

The Following Weekend, Sorted by Price

Exit Zero's fall festival starts Thursday, October 22, with a separately ticketed benefit at Convention Hall, "Evans Meets Elling," featuring Kyle Roussel and Kurt Elling with Orrin Evans. The main passes cover Friday through Sunday, October 23 to 25. A three-day general admission pass is $240 before Eventbrite fees and three-day VIP is $280, the same figure as NJ Audubon's full three-day registration the weekend before. The festival's ticket page says walk-up sales at the Convention Hall box office carry no service fee and phone sales carry a $1.00 fee, and phone sales end Wednesday, October 21 at 9 p.m.

The music also spreads beyond Convention Hall and its deck stage to Carney's Main Room and Other Room, Harry's at the Montreal Beach Resort, and the Nauti Spirits outdoor stage. Nauti Spirits sells its own passes, $30 for Saturday or Sunday and $50 for both days, and children get in free. The program lists no ticket requirement for the Saturday morning second line on the Mall. Add the free hawk workshop at the Point, which runs 9:30 to 10 a.m., and the morning of October 24 needs neither a pass nor a registration.

Sunday the 25th, Between 2 and 5

The tightest overlap of the whole stretch falls on the last afternoon. The City's Halloween Parade steps off at 3 p.m. on October 25 and runs until 5 p.m. on the Washington Street Mall. On the same afternoon, Chucho Valdés's birthday set starts at 2 p.m. at Convention Hall and Eddie Palmieri follows at 4.

The parade's own timeline starts earlier than most people expect. Registration numbers go out at Perry and Lyle Lane at 1:30 p.m., judging is on South Lafayette Street at 2:30, and the parade starts at 3. The entry form lists age divisions from 3 and under through 18 and up, plus groups and floats, with the trophy ceremony afterward at Cape May MAC. Forms are due October 18, either at Convention Hall or by email to the City contact on the form, and the form gives no rain date. Families with a costumed child in the parade will be on South Lafayette at the same time as the Valdés set at Convention Hall. After the rain earlier this month, the missing rain date is the detail to remember.

So the house tour you could have walked last weekend is now on Saturday the 17th. The hawk workshop is free on the 24th, and the parade forms are due the day after the house tour.

If the Carlin house leaves you wondering what an old Cape May building can lose or gain in a renovation, Marialena Recupero is glad to talk it through. She has spent four decades building and renovating homes across Cape May County. Let's Connect.