Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

‘It just means a lot to me': Owner works to save historic Cape May boathouse

nbcphiladelphia.com · 6hShare

A more than century-old boathouse in Cape May is being raised about 8 feet in an extraordinary engineering project designed to protect the historic property from increasingly frequent flooding. The boathouse at 1537 Yacht Avenue was built in 1910 and has been owned for about 15 years by Keith Laudeman, a third-generation Cape May resident. Because the property is considered historic, tearing it down wasn’t an option as flooding repeatedly swamped the structure. Instead, the boathouse had to go up — a project costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “It just means a lot to me,” Laudeman said. “We had a lot of flooding. It got to the point where it was even on a moon tide.” The boathouse originally had a shop downstairs, living quarters on the second floor and three boat slips underneath. Today, it has two bedrooms and two bathrooms. Since April, SJ Hauck Construction has been working to lift the roughly 45-foot-wide and 60-foot-long structure. Unlike most of the company’s projects, the

First report: In Muskoka, Ontario, Building a Boathouse Was a Family Affair — nytimes.com, 2d