I didn’t grow up far from Avalon, and in the ’90s my wife and I took our kids there for family vacations, packed into a little blue bungalow that I’m fairly certain doesn’t exist anymore. Those were some of the best weeks of my kids’ childhood. They also cost nothing close to what a week in Avalon costs now, because Avalon isn’t really that town anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. But a story out of the Cape May County Herald this week put a number on exactly how far it’s traveled, and the number is 17,694.

That’s the square footage of the home Eustace Mita, CEO of ICONA Resorts, is about to build at 5475 Dune Drive, in Avalon’s High Dunes section — one of just 11 properties sitting at the top of the town’s dune system. The Herald reported that Avalon’s Planning and Zoning Board approved the plans June 9, clearing the way to demolish the existing 7,800-square-foot house already on the lot and replace it with something more than double the size. Mita bought the property in 2024 for $10.3 million. According to the Herald, the approval received little public discussion at the board meeting itself, even though the finished home will be rivaled in size only by one other house on the entire dune system — a 12,631-square-foot property a few doors down owned by heirs to the Utz potato chip fortune.

A house that outgrows its own skyline

Residents didn’t stay quiet for long. At a subsequent Borough Council meeting, several raised concerns, with one resident calculating that the new home would stand 65 feet tall — in that person’s words, “clearly the tallest structure in the Avalon skyline.” The Herald also reported that construction will require enough fill to raise the structure’s elevation by 10 feet, a detail the board apparently didn’t discuss before signing off.

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Reddit remembered a different Avalon

The story made its way to r/SouthJersey, and the comment section turned out to be its own kind of local history. One user, going by ComprehensiveDingo54, reached for a Sunday school song about a house built on sand, the kind that comes tumbling down when the rains arrive. Another, IKillZombies4Cash, put it more bluntly: with a house three times the size of the one it’s replacing, sitting on a barrier island, it only takes one big storm. A user named FreshCords pushed back on the doom, arguing these are vacation homes that sit empty most of the year, and that when a storm does hit, insurance pays out and the land appreciates anyway, ready for the next owner to build something even bigger.

But the comments that stopped me weren’t about flooding. They were about memory. A user named malfera wrote about grandparents who built a retirement house in Avalon Manor, since replaced by a mansion, and a grandmother’s later duplex near a hardware store, since replaced by condos. Time moves forward, the person wrote, but it still feels like the soul of the town is long gone. Another commenter, going by Crazy-Positive3978, remembered vacationing in Avalon in the mid-1970s for $250 a week, a bayfront cottage with a dock where their sons crabbed before breakfast, watching the first house go up in the dunes near 57th Street on the way to the beach. A $60,000 lot seemed like too much money to spend back then. Nobody in that thread needed to do the math on what that same stretch of sand costs today.

I don’t know what happened to my family’s little blue bungalow, or the town around it. But reading that thread, I got the sense I’m not the only one who still goes looking for it.

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