The Christian Admiral hotel looks out beyond the snapping oversize American flag, beyond the anchor curled like a fossil at its feet, past the sun-worshipers and strollers, to the sea.
White-columned, deep-porched, it hints of billowing curtains and cool marble and matronly propriety within. A substantial place.
But the Admiral, a gemstone in the earthly ownings of fundamentalist minister Carl McIntire for nearly three decades, is again as he found it:
bankrupt.
The hotel`s finances sank last year with North Jersey Savings & Loan of Clifton, which held its mortgage, in the national flood of S&L failures.
”It was a very fast-paced thing,” said hotel manager Sandy Montano.
In less than 90 days last summer, this new set of crises beset the old hotel and its owner, the plain-speaking preacher whose life is seamed with the perils of politics, money and the spirit.
”We`re going to get out of it very soon,” McIntire said of the bankruptcy. He would not say how. But he clearly expects this will prove true. Now 86 years old and still straight-backed as a scrubbed young deacon, McIntire tends the forge of his faith as he always has.
”He`s a separatist Protestant. Actually, his theology is quite close to the Puritans`,” said Norris Clark, McIntire`s oldest grandson, who has stepped into the Admiral`s latest drama as his grandfather`s champion.
On June 5, 1990, the 34-year-old Clark became vice president of the Christian Beacon Press Inc., the holding company for the Admiral and the Congress Hall hotel, another McIntire property in Cape May.
”I was the one to go into court and, basically, face the music,” Clark said.
Publicly, Clark distances himself from his grandfather`s political beliefs. But he clearly admires him: ”I grew up right in the middle of all his struggles. He`s one of the most dedicated men I`ve ever seen.”
In 1963, McIntire`s dedication brought his search for a Christian retreat to the shores of this town, where he found a storm-battered wreck of a structure called the Hotel Cape May at Beach and Pittsburgh Avenues.
His popularity was ascendant: A crusader for fundamentalist Christianity and fundamental capitalism, he had his own radio show, the ”Twentieth-Century Reformation Hour,” beamed out six days a week from 600 stations across the country. About 2,000 people belonged to his home church in Collingswood, N.J. By then, almost everything he did brought him controversy and influence. So his quick and handy purchase of the crumbling hotel, which had served the Navy as a hospital and convalescent center during both World Wars but was slated for demolition, seemed inspired.
He paid $360,000 for the 300-room, eight-story building, which had been put together of steel, cement, brick and masonry in 1908 and which still sat stolid as a sphinx at the north end of town. Six blocks of dilapidated houses and scraggly lots behind it were thrown into the sale for good measure.
Then, with a fanfare that collected hundreds of friends and believers at his beach-front project in one weekend, McIntire led a blitz of carting, hammering, scrubbing and polishing.
That weekend, the cavernous old hotel was reborn as the Christian Admiral, a summer haven for the most literalist of Bible students, for their conferences and lectures in its former ballroom, and for their reflection on its wide, shady porch.
”My mother was part of the cleanup crew for the Admiral,” Clark said.
”And I saw them wheelbarrow out tons of sand and feathers”-gull feathers-”from the lobby.”
Now, 28 years later, ”I spend a lot of time picking up the pieces,” he said.
When the S&L called in its loan, the Admiral and the Congress Hall owed nearly $1.8 million between them. McIntire`s Shelton College, on the land behind the Admiral, was nearly defunct. About the same time, his Faith Theological Seminary, an old estate in Elkins Park, Pa., just managed to edge past its own default with an 11th-hour loan.
Clark had graduated from Shelton, and he spent two years at the Faith Seminary. But of all his grandfather`s holdings, the Admiral claims his heart. ”I baked bread and pies for two years at the Admiral, I busboyed two years, I bellhopped one year,” he said.
Clark, a soft-spoken doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, moved permanently to Cape May three years ago. He opened the Cape May Institute, a nonprofit cultural program that serves about 3,000 students a year, offering among other projects one of the most prestigious photography workshops in the country.
His institute rents space in the main building of Shelton College. Clark is now the college`s president; it has 22 students. While his own projects kept expanding, his grandfather`s floundered.
When he stepped into the breach for McIntire, he did not expect much encouragement from officials in Cape May. Nor has he gotten it, Clark said. In a town locked into itself against the winters for decades, many in Cape May harbor memories of his grandfather`s political and legal escapades.
For instance, the publicity from the repeated demonstrations supporting the Vietnam War. And the drawn-out squabble over whether the town could charge beach fees for the sand in front of the Admiral. And the court fight over property taxes for McIntire`s properties.
The hotel`s top floor is closed because the original tile roof leaks. It needs $1 million in repairs. New smoke detectors were recently installed, and the sprinkler system was upgraded.
The bricks need repointing. The guest rooms have no air conditioning, no television, no telephones. Many have no private bathrooms. But they do have new bedspreads and paint.
”We`re so elated with all the little things we`ve done, and then somebody comes here, and walks through, and says, `If only someone could fix this up,` ” said Montano, the Admiral`s manager. She started at the hotel as a desk clerk a year after she finished high school and has husbanded the hotel`s flagging resources for years.
”I love this building. I grew up in it,” she said.
As a compromise to financial dictates, the Admiral now accepts ”walk-ins” – guests from the nonsectarian public – but of the 7,000 patrons Montano expects to stay there this summer, more than 90 percent will be from conservative religious organizations and other low-budget groups.
”We intend to break even, or make a small amount this year,” Montano said.
For the long term, one plan to rescue the Admiral from bankruptcy would involve selling-or forming an investor-partnership venture for-McIntire`s smaller and more dilapidated Congress Hall hotel.
But the sale price is $3.5 million, and as Montano said, ”nobody`s willing to put up that kind of money for a hotel these days.”
Another plan provides for the sale of the seminary property; McIntire opposes that absolutely. A third entails the sale of church property in Collingswood. Montano says that plan is only in the early stages of consideration.
But one thing, she said, is certain: ”The Christian Admiral will never be up for sale.”
