As printed on the site

Five kinds of lodging

The 2002 about page named the members in one series: bed and breakfast inns, guest houses, guest suites, apartments, and historic hotels.

Five kinds, one rule after them. All owned properties built in Cape May before 1910. The page did not define the difference between a guest house and an inn, or between a suite and an apartment.

The series, and the word that follows it

The sentence is “We have over 70 members,” and then the colon, and then the five kinds. The next sentence begins “All own properties…” The “all” is the only definition that applies across the list. Whatever separated an inn from a guest suite, the age and the town did not. Both had to be a Cape May property built before 1910, owned by the member.

The page does not say the association owned any of them. It says the members own the properties. It does not say how many of the over-70 fell into each kind. A reader who splits “over 70” into five equal shares is doing arithmetic the page refused. The founding paragraph is where that count lives, still undivided.

Later pages narrowed the public labels. The 2006 homepage menu said Types of Lodging, then B&B’s, Guest Suites/Apts., and Hotels. That menu folds suites and apartments into one link and does not say “guest houses” in the fragment this capture kept. The 2014 and 2015 menus said Bed and Breakfasts, Guest Houses, and Hotels. Suites and apartments are not on that later menu as their own words. The five-kind sentence remains the 2002 sentence. This site does not “update” it to match a menu from twelve years afterward.

Inns and guest houses

Bed and breakfast inns come first. A separate page in 2002 was titled Historic Accommodations: Bed and Breakfast and printed names only. Those names are not repeated here as if each one had been classified in print. The about page did not mark The Abbey as an inn and the Wooden Rabbit as something else. The classification page and the name page are different pages. Names without a kind attached stay on the name list.

Guest houses are the second kind. The about page gives the phrase and no example. The later homepage menu used the same phrase as a browse heading. The pages those headings opened are not in this archive, so there is no captured list of guest houses to set beside the inn names. Saying which 2002 names were guest houses would be a guess.

Both kinds sit under the hotline’s narrower phrase, “historic guest accommodations,” only if a reader forces them there. The hotline page used that phrase for the vacancies on the ten-day list. It did not say the list was organized by the five kinds. A caller was not described as asking for “a guest house rather than an inn” and receiving that filter. The caller received names that had space.

Suites and apartments

Guest suites and apartments are the two kinds a beach visitor might not expect in a historic-inn association. They are in the sentence anyway. The 2006 menu’s “Guest Suites/Apts.” shows the site still using both words three years later, joined by a slash. Joining them in a menu is not the same as deleting them from the about page.

The about page does not say that a suite or an apartment was inside one of the inns. It lists them as members in their own right, provided the property was built in Cape May before 1910. An apartment in a new building is outside the sentence even if the building is in Cape May. The 1910 rule is the line that does that work, and it uses “all,” which is why the suites do not get a later cutoff.

No suite name and no apartment name appears on the bed-and-breakfast page. That absence matches the page’s title. It does not prove there were no suite members. The about page claimed the category. The name list did not itemize it. Both facts can stand.

Historic hotels

Historic hotels are last in the series, and they are the only kind with the adjective “historic” inside the label. The other four rely on the next sentence to make them historic, by the before-1910 rule. A hotel, in the label itself, was already called historic. The page does not explain why the adjective was saved for that kind. It does not name a single hotel.

The 2014 and 2015 homepages speak of historic bed and breakfasts, guest houses, and hotels in a directory. They drop suites and apartments from that sentence and they do not repeat 1910. They also tell the reader to relax on the beach and to expect amenities. That is directory marketing. It is not a definition that overrides the five kinds, and the directory it describes is not in this archive. The hotline, which is in the archive, still withheld amenities and rates.

A hotel on the ten-day list would have been offered the same way as any other name: a name and a telephone number, if it had space, and no location. The hotline page does not have a hotel exception.

What the kinds are not

They are not a price ladder. Nothing on the about page says an inn cost more than an apartment or that a hotel cost more than a guest house. The hotline page said rates were not given. Building a cheap-to-dear order out of the five words would invent the scale the phone line was forbidden to quote.

They are not a map. Guest houses are not placed nearer the beach than hotels. The directions page gets a driver to Lafayette Street and stops. The directions do not branch by kind of lodging. One approach for all five.

They are not a current inventory. “Over 70” is the 2002 count of members across the kinds. The 2015 site still presented itself as a directory of historic lodgings in Cape May. It did not print a new total. This page will not supply one, and it will not say that all five kinds were still being offered in 2015 under those exact labels. The menus are the evidence of the labels. The menus are not a census.

Questions

Did the about page define “guest house”?

No. It named the kind. It did not say how a guest house differed from a bed and breakfast inn.

Why do later menus show fewer kinds?

The 2014 and 2015 menus printed bed and breakfasts, guest houses, and hotels. Suites and apartments stay in the 2002 sentence even so. This site does not delete them to match the later menu.

Which names were hotels?

The bed-and-breakfast page did not mark a kind beside any name, and no hotel list is in this archive. The names are not reclassified here.