Avalon

Not every day at the Jersey Shore can be 80 and sunny. That's when it's time to explore the alternate universe: shopping. You could head for the Atlantic City outlets, but you'd be missing out on the novel spots that dot the coast. Here are my favorites, in a handful of Shore towns: Ocean City has two main shopping hubs. The first, obviously, is the boardwalk, lined with T-shirt stores, eateries, rides, and mini-golf courses. Three stores to hit: The Islander , which sells quality women's fashions geared to 20- to 30-year-olds, plus some men's items and home accents; Air Circus , with every kind of kite imaginable (easy to spot from anywhere on the boardwalk since kites usually are flying on the beach in front of the store)

Just a few months after the Eagles drafted Donovan McNabb, another thing happened to Angelo Cataldi that infuriated him for years. McNabb is long gone, but bring up beach tags and the longtime 610-AM sports personality's bitterness over his 1999 beachfront brouhaha with Avalon comes surging back. "I try to avoid Avalon whenever I can," Cataldi said yesterday. "I am one of the top enemies of Avalon, and I am proud of it. " Cataldi was renting a home in Avalon in August '99 that came with beach tags.

TRAFFIC reporter Kacie McDonnell can add another title to her Fox 29 CV: Official Royal Stalker. When Prince Harry hits the Shore tomorrow, McDonnell will be ready to meet her Prince Charming, even taking etiquette lessons on "Good Day Philadelphia" just in case she comes into contact with Harry in segments they're calling "When Harry Meets Kacie. " Although Harry's brother, Prince William , is generally thought of as the heartthrob of the two, McDonnell goes against the grain.

A political tempest has swept through this pricey resort town in recent months, consuming conversation at the weekly bridge games at the municipal building and up and down the lunch counter at Sullivan's Department Store. "It's got neighbor against neighbor," says Ed Crippin, a 13-year resident. "People aren't speaking to one another. No matter where you go, people will talk about it. It's just a shame. This has never happened before in Avalon. " What is happening is a mud-slinging, eye-scratching political catfight between two Main Line retirees who want to be mayor: Rachel H. Sloan, the incumbent mayor and former nursery-school teacher from Merion, and James H. Redditt, a retired engineer and executive from Narberth.

Last year was a good one for real estate in Avalon and Stone Harbor, known collectively as Seven Mile Island, according to statistics compiled by the Cape May County Multiple Listing Service. There were 295 settlements in 1994, compared with 268 in 1993, an increase of 10 percent. The lowest sale price on Seven Mile Island was a condominium for $36,000. The highest sale price was an oceanfront single-family house for $2,275,000. The highest demand continues to be for single-family houses, with 169 sales in 1994.

MOST DAYS, Lt. Ray Evers is doling out information to the media about crime victims. But the spokesman for the Philadelphia Police Department said he recently had the unusual experience of being a victim himself. Evers said he was assaulted by several people inside the Princeton, a popular bar on Dune Drive in Avalon, N.J., early on June 17. "I don't want to make a bigger deal of it than what it is," Evers said Tuesday. "Everything's good. " According to Avalon Police Chief William McCormick, Evers, sporting a puffy eye, flagged down an officer in the early morning hours.

The Avalon String Band, which selected a theme called "Red, White, Rhythm and Blue" for the 1993 Mummers Parade, will be strutting those colors to honor Bill Clinton's inauguration on Jan. 20 in Washington. Avalon's quick-step appearance in the inaugural parade will be the Mummers' second national exposure of the month: The Travel Channel, available on cable systems that reach 17.5 million subscribers, will carry the Mummers Parade in its entirety, the first such airing for Philadelphia's New Year's festivities.

New Jersey's Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Avalon must pay a Moorestown couple for beach property it took to build protective dunes after a storm devastated the area in 1962. The ruling said Avalon's actions had been "contradictory" and said the borough "skirted its obligation to answer for its action. " However, the court said that despite paying taxes on the property for decades since the storm, Edward and Nancy Klumpp were no longer the legal owners with rights to what had been an oceanfront lot on 75th Street.

It's an opportunity for Shore living for which only the filthy stinking rich need apply. The commonly affluent probably shouldn't bother. For $7 million, give or a take a couple hundred thousand, in a secluded section of Avalon overlooking the ocean is a vacation house just waiting to be knocked down. "The value's in the ground," said Michael Powers, incoming president of the Cape May County Association of Realtors and a veteran Avalon broker. Multimillion-dollar knockdowns are common at the Shore.

David and Elizabeth German had the chance to buy an architect-designed house in Avalon for $1. That's right, Avalon, the ritzy Jersey Shore community where offering $1 million for a house is considered a good starting point and $1 seems like the stuff of 999,999 dreams. There was a catch, though. The Germans had to move the house out of town. "It's really not all that unusual to find a house for $1 in Avalon," said David German, 57, a woodworker who makes his living crafting Adirondack chairs and picnic tables.

Not every day at the Jersey Shore can be 80 and sunny. That's when it's time to explore the alternate universe: shopping. You could head for the Atlantic City outlets, but you'd be missing out on the novel spots that dot the coast. Here are my favorites, in a handful of Shore towns: Ocean City has two main shopping hubs. The first, obviously, is the boardwalk, lined with T-shirt stores, eateries, rides, and mini-golf courses. Three stores to hit: The Islander , which sells quality women's fashions geared to 20- to 30-year-olds, plus some men's items and home accents; Air Circus , with every kind of kite imaginable (easy to spot from anywhere on the boardwalk since kites usually are flying on the beach in front of the store)

STONE HARBOR and Avalon tend to be the most tradition-bound places at the South Jersey Shore, even more than Cape May, with its Victorian claptrap. A change in a menu item from one season to the next can cause an uproar around here. And when an Italian restaurant closes, for instance, another must take its place (as has happened over the years at a space at 98th Street and 3rd Avenue in Stone Harbor). Even the lifeguards return to the same stand year after year. So it is difficult to uncover real quirks for the cognoscenti.

TRAFFIC reporter Kacie McDonnell can add another title to her Fox 29 CV: Official Royal Stalker. When Prince Harry hits the Shore tomorrow, McDonnell will be ready to meet her Prince Charming, even taking etiquette lessons on "Good Day Philadelphia" just in case she comes into contact with Harry in segments they're calling "When Harry Meets Kacie. " Although Harry's brother, Prince William , is generally thought of as the heartthrob of the two, McDonnell goes against the grain.

Embrace every female shape With teens emulating British model Cara Delevingne, there is a problem that girls could go too far to get a so-called thigh gap ("A dangerous teen obsession," April 25). That being said, there's nothing wrong with admiring or having a thigh gap (as I have, without dieting to attain it). But there is nothing wrong with not having one, either. When will the media and their experts on this subject of women's bodies get it right? Feature all body types with the positives expressed, without condemning another shape.

Chef John Brandt-Lee began renovating his Avalon restaurant in West Chester on the cheap a few years ago. One feature was the wooden cheese table in the middle of the dining room. No thousand-dollar table crafted by artisans. Not on Brandt-Lee's budget. It was handmade and topped with 12-by-12 floor tiles. The cheese boards themselves were made of bamboo and were always falling apart, he recalls. A customer directed him to a small woodworking shop in Montgomery County to get better quality.

FOR TWO YEARS, Old City-based photographer Jim Graham has tried to buy his dream Shore house, in Ship Bottom on Long Beach Island. On Friday, the deal finally was settled and Graham, 55, was able to pay for the house in full. But when he went to get insurance, he was informed there was a moratorium on coverage for the East Coast because of Hurricane Sandy's imminent arrival. "I didn't hear about the storm until Friday morning, and now we owned a house that's a baseball's throw to the bay and we had no insurance whatsoever," he said.

The slant in the sidewalk in front of Bonnie's Toppings self-serve frozen yogurt shop in Stone Harbor has been an irritant to owner Bonnie Offit ever since she opened in May. It made it impossible to put tables and chairs out there, she said. The four steps in front of her yogurt store in Avalon were a pain, too, Offit said, making for a precarious entrance and exit for customers with strollers or canes, or anyone not careful. She will never complain about either again. On Wednesday, the 22-year pediatrician-turned entrepreneur was crediting both structural quirks with sparing her shops from storm damage.

Bonnie Offit's medical schooling didn't deal much with the condition known as midlife crisis. After all, she was studying to be a pediatrician; her patients would be a long way from tiring of life's routine. But Offit knows it when she's experiencing it. "This is my midlife crisis, for sure," the 50-year-old Bala Cynwyd mother of two said, laughing, one recent morning as she sat in the frozen-yogurt shop she opened just before Memorial Day weekend in Stone Harbor. It's one of three Bonnie's Toppings stores she has opened in the last year at the Jersey Shore.

Robert Matthew Gillin, 84, of Bryn Mawr, a business owner, entrepreneur and civic activist, died of heart failure Wednesday, June 27, at home. In the 1950s, Mr. Gillin worked with his father in the coal business in Western Pennsylvania. Aware that customers were switching from coal to oil heat, he and his brother Jim established Petroleum Heat & Power Co. in 1957. For the next 30 years he owned and operated the heating-oil distribution company in South Philadelphia. Mr. Gillin also developed real estate and businesses in Avalon, N.J., where he and his wife, Martha "Martie" Wolfington Gillin, had a summer home.

Surveillance footage doesn't back up a Philadelphia police spokesman's claim that he was attacked for no reason at an Avalon, N.J., bar, according to Avalon police records. Lt. Ray Evers told the Daily News earlier this week that he was assaulted by several people while he was inside the Princeton Bar and Grill in the wee small hours on June 17. An Avalon police officer encountered a shirtless Evers, "who had a bruised left eye and was visibly upset," outside the bar, according to the records.