Cottage

From her second-story deck, Jean Bell used to be able to watch Ocean City's annual Night in Venice boat parade on the bay. These days, that view is blocked by the trees growing in her backyard - a backyard that is guarded by gargoyles, as is the front door of her post-World War II cottage. "It was just a summer cottage when I bought it," says Bell, 74, who moved to Ocean City from Philadelphia in 1973. The Shore was familiar territory. When Bell was growing up, her family took vacations in Atlantic City.

It was a simple choice. Weather a Category 3 hurricane on a narrow spit of sand five miles off the North Carolina mainland, or spend the next six hours in an impenetrable traffic jam with a pre-schooler and his 6-year-old brother, not yet off their sugar highs. I choose to stay. But the wife, who listens too much to the news media, insists we go. The Dare County Commissioners has ordered a mandatory evacuation. But our cottage in Duck is 900 feet from the beach, built on pilings 10 feet above the ground and designed to withstand hurricanes.

Mal and Dottie Knapp had a tough call to make. They wanted to keep the one-story cottage they bought in North Cape May in 2003, though the house was more than 50 years old and needed quite an overhaul. They worked with an architect and schemed about additions and renovations. In the end, however, they decided to tear the house down. In its place rose not a seashore McMansion, but a quaint 1,600-square-foot cottage that tips its hat to the Craftsman style while keeping some of the layout of the original house.

A fire destroyed a key outbuilding at the Absecon Lighthouse yesterday, sharply setting back plans by officials to begin using the beacon this summer to bring economic development to the city's depressed Inlet section. The fire began about 5 a.m. in the light-keeper's cottage, a newly rebuilt structure that was to have served as the visitor center for the tourist attraction, which was tentatively scheduled to open early next month. Steve Schluntt, Atlantic City's acting deputy fire chief, said the blaze was brought under control about 20 minutes after the first firefighting units arrived, but that the cottage, which was unoccupied, could not be saved.

Up there with the piping plover, one of the most endangered species at the Jersey Shore just might be the modest beach cottage. With some lots fetching million-dollar prices, small abodes built for simple family escapes have fallen victim to the teardown phenomenon - demolished to make way for bigger, flashier places built to impress or reel in rental dollars. Yet there are still those who believe a seashore retreat doesn't require multiple decks, a two-car garage, or an air-conditioning unit the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.

From the porch of her mother's summer cottage, Alix Cheston Thorne enjoys a spectacular view of boats bobbing in sparkling Penobscot Bay, against a backdrop of the verdant Camden hills a few miles across the water. She watches as a young boy - he could be a nephew, or maybe a third cousin, it's hard to tell because her familial roots are an incredible tangle - scrambles into a dinghy for a quick trip across the protected cove. "It's like a rite of passage, when you first get to go back and forth across the cove by yourself," she says, eliciting nods from the others on the porch - her mother, a cousin, a great-uncle and various others.

The Drosts do not run a seafood restaurant, though there's a "Lobster Lair" sign over the front door of their three-story house in North Beach Haven. The only lobsters served there are prepared by Adrienne Drost for family and friends - at no charge. "It's the name of a game we played. The good dolphins were chased by an evil lobster," Drost, 47, said. She and daughter Samantha, now 21, were the dolphins; her husband, Joe Drost, 47, pretended to be an evil lobster, keen on capturing and whisking them to his dreaded Lobster Lair.

The Rosemont College T - short for Tea-House - evokes another era, which officially comes to an end next month when the little white cottage will be dismantled. Though the former cafe and student lounge, built in 1937, will soon be gone, memories of the T remain. The Catholic college is now trying to figure out how to commemorate the place where students in the 1940s and 1950s played cards, smoked cigarettes, and entertained visiting men from Villanova, away from the watchful eyes of the nuns.

At age 41, Daniel Elliott seemed to have it all: a high-paying job, an impressive house, a charming wife, and two healthy children. But Elliott didn't have what he wanted most: a 12-year-old girl who hung around his young son. For two years, Elliott pursued Jessica Naylor, a middle school student from Deptford, according to a federal arrest warrant issued against him. "He courted her over a period of time," said Stan Field, a state police...

Ask anyone who had a house there from the 1950s through the 1990s to define Jersey Shore decor, and you might get a funny look. Used to be Shore houses were small, quirky cottages filled with cast-off furniture - threadbare couches, mismatched chairs, that sort of thing - culled from the basements of the houses their owners lived in year-round. Today's Shore houses are bigger and splashier, the result, of course, of skyrocketing property values earlier this decade. And as folks spent more money on their vacation getaways, a new design style emerged.

Evidence is still being analyzed from the blaze that consumed 10 cottages at the historic Chester Heights Camp Meeting Saturday, Trooper Timothy Greene, of the Pennsylvania State Police fire marshal's unit, said Monday. But Pat Smith, president of the 30-acre site in Delaware County, said she has a hunch what caused the fire. "Absolutely suspicious ... but not necessarily intentional," she said, noting that an October fire, which leveled three cottages at the site, apparently was caused by three people gathered in the woods and acting carelessly with a lighter.

What happens when a handful of young men rent a fragile 19th-century house and have too many parties? That house is a real bargain when it hits the market. "We got a good deal here," Michael Anderson says of the cottage on Iseminger Street that he and Thomas Scheufele bought in 2001. "Those kids really messed up the house, but as soon as we saw it, I wanted it and knew we could fix it up. " If the 1832 property had not been in such poor condition, adds Anderson, a flight attendant on international routes, he and Scheufele, who teaches economics at a secondary school in Stuttgart, Germany, probably could not have afforded it. Once the couple purchased their bargain, the reality set in: The problems would be enormous - how would they proceed?

From her second-story deck, Jean Bell used to be able to watch Ocean City's annual Night in Venice boat parade on the bay. These days, that view is blocked by the trees growing in her backyard - a backyard that is guarded by gargoyles, as is the front door of her post-World War II cottage. "It was just a summer cottage when I bought it," says Bell, 74, who moved to Ocean City from Philadelphia in 1973. The Shore was familiar territory. When Bell was growing up, her family took vacations in Atlantic City.

This year, the Ocean City house that Evan Andrews' great-great-grandmother bought so many decades ago will turn 100. The "cottage," as it is affectionately known by the seven family members who own it and the countless others who spend summers here, has seven bedrooms, three baths, and the requisite rocking-chair porch. It has never been winterized, has neither air-conditioning nor dishwasher, but does have sleep porches where the smallest of the clan dream under the stars when the heat bears down.

Big news from the Flying Scottoline Ranch. Mother Mary is moving in. Maybe. Rather, she's here, but I'm not sure how long this will last or how it will end. There are two possibilities: Either a shootout at high noon, or we'll just use our bare hands. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll tell you how it came about, because, like all disasters, it happened all of sudden. With tornadoes, they say you have only a few seconds before your world turns upside down. I had more notice than that, but even if it happens more slowly, you're still not ready.

Linda Fahy Newman's garden in West Mount Airy happened gradually, over the last 25 years, with no strict blueprint in mind. She discovers now, to her surprise, that without planning it, she has pretty much re-created the quintessential English garden of the early 20th century, a design that bores the modern minimalist but continues to excite American gardeners like no other. It's often described as "controlled chaos," the horticultural response to Victorian industrialization.

The Drosts do not run a seafood restaurant, though there's a "Lobster Lair" sign over the front door of their three-story house in North Beach Haven. The only lobsters served there are prepared by Adrienne Drost for family and friends - at no charge. "It's the name of a game we played. The good dolphins were chased by an evil lobster," Drost, 47, said. She and daughter Samantha, now 21, were the dolphins; her husband, Joe Drost, 47, pretended to be an evil lobster, keen on capturing and whisking them to his dreaded Lobster Lair.

Mal and Dottie Knapp had a tough call to make. They wanted to keep the one-story cottage they bought in North Cape May in 2003, though the house was more than 50 years old and needed quite an overhaul. They worked with an architect and schemed about additions and renovations. In the end, however, they decided to tear the house down. In its place rose not a seashore McMansion, but a quaint 1,600-square-foot cottage that tips its hat to the Craftsman style while keeping some of the layout of the original house.

Carol Romano reluctantly confesses to being a real-estate looker, someone who roams the local listings most Sundays for fun, just to see what's out there. She and her husband, Tommy, spent 13 years in a Yardley Cape Cod - a Sears "Five-Star Dream House" kit home, to be exact, which they enlarged and enjoyed raising their two young sons in. She loved the place, and he did too, but a little more land would have been nice. One Sunday while Carol was out teaching Sunday school, Tommy Romano spotted a circled ad she had left on the kitchen table with the word interesting scribbled next to it. The ad was for an open house at a 1950s ranch in an older Yardley neighborhood.

FOR YEARS, I avoided using cottage cheese in recipes because it tasted like such a "diet" food to me. But when I started experimenting with these shrimp enchiladas, I was pleasantly surprised to find that pureed cottage cheese mixed with green chiles adds flavor to this dish while slashing calories and fat grams. Whole wheat tortillas provide plenty of fiber, and I slim down the sauce by stirring in less butter, reduced-fat cream of chicken soup and light sour cream. My changes to this recipe cut the calories by 27 percent and trimmed the fat by 58 percent.