History

Joseph Bryant

amusement operator, Ocean City boardwalk · active 1929

Co-owner with Thomas H. Conway of Playland, the boardwalk amusement hall destroyed in the fire of 3 September 1929, and joint announcer of a new and larger Playland at $50,000 three weeks later. Named once in the whole 1929 corpus.

In the record (1)

  1. 1929

    Five weeks before the Crash, Mayor McCabe puts the summer's net receipts at $1,250,000 and forecasts a winter building boom: a $300,000 boardwalk hotel, a wider boardwalk, a $50,000 Playland and a $115,000 amusement hall on the new pier.

    A Delaware weekly of 25 September 1929 printed the whole of what Ocean City meant to build that autumn and winter. Permits were already in at the mayor and council's office for several new summer cottages and one boardwalk hotel costing about $300,000. Thomas H. Conway and Joseph Bryant, owners of the burned Playland, announced a new and larger one at $50,000; the Rapoport Brothers of Philadelphia, whose properties burned, also meant to rebuild, and several smaller places already had. The town planned to rebuild the boardwalk in the amusement section eighteen feet wider, to build a $20,000 bulkhead on the ocean front in north Ocean City near the Catholic Home — a site 'which 50 years ago was the site of an inlet between Ocean City and the Sinepuxent Bay' — and probably to rebuild the sewer system, especially the outlet lines, doing it properly being estimated at $100,000. Also listed: a $2,000 swimming pool at the New Atlantic Hotel, a $5,000 power line to Maridel Beach, $60,000 of new summer cottages, and a $115,000 pier and amusement hall at the shore end of the new pier, to start that fall and be finished for the opening of the 1930 season. Mayor McCabe put the town's net receipts for the summer just ended at $1,250,000.

    This is the high-water mark of the boom, and it is dated by the calendar rather than by anything the town did. Read beside the fire of three weeks earlier it is defiance; read beside 29 October it is a list of things about to be tested. Note also the aside about the bulkhead site — an inlet at the north end of Ocean City in about 1879, a claim no other source in this campaign makes.

    Ocean City BoardwalkAtlantic HotelOcean City Fishing PierSinepuxent Pier and Improvement CompanyMaridel Beach CityWilliam W. McCabeThomas H. Conway

    Source · checked 2026-08-06