Ocean City Boardwalk

The take

This is the spine of the whole town — nearly three miles of boards from the Inlet up to 27th St. The first planks went down around the turn of the century, and back then the whole thing got rolled up every night at high tide. Walk it at 7am and it belongs to joggers and bikes; walk it at 10pm and it's lights, crowds, and the smell of fries and caramel corn. Either way, you haven't done OC until you've done the boards end to end.

Heritage context

• E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company

  1925

  In January 1925 chemists from the firm's Wilmington headquarters fitted out the Sugar Bowl, a summer amusement stand on the Ocean City boardwalk, as an experimental laboratory for extracting bromine from sea water. It is the earliest industrial research at Ocean City in this registry.

• Playland

  Founded 1929 · active today

  A boardwalk amusement hall at the southern end of the Ocean City board walk, owned by Thomas H. Conway of Wilmington, Delaware, and Joseph Bryant. It burned in the fire of the night of 2–3 September 1929, and its night watchman was the most seriously injured person in that fire; Conway's other hall, the Funhouse on Worcester Street near the boardwalk, was scorched in the same blaze. Within three weeks the owners had announced a new and larger Playland to cost $50,000. The founding year given here is the first year the campaign can document the business and is not a foundation date.

• Ocean City Roller Chair Company

  1935–

  Granted a five-year exclusive franchise over the rolling-chair trade on the Ocean City boardwalk by resolution of the Mayor and City Council on 17 September 1935, "as soon as proper ordinance and agreements were ready". The enabling ordinance passed on 9 December 1935, licensing each chair at $2.00 a year with no personal tax, effective from 1936. It is the earliest exclusive boardwalk concession the campaign has documented.

• National Emergency Council

  1936

  The New Deal coordinating agency whose Maryland state director, Arthur K. Hungerford, came to Ocean City on 17 October 1936 and told eighty of its business people what federal help for the hurricane-wrecked boardwalk would actually require: no flood-control money, PWA or WPA only, and 55 to 60 per cent of the cost to be found locally. His visit is the reason the town's boardwalk decision was taken with the federal terms on the table rather than in ignorance of them, and it is the immediate cause of the decision going the other way.

• Works Progress Administration

  1935-1943

  The federal relief-employment agency, and Ocean City's main federal counterparty in 1936 after the PWA. In March 1936 the council sent W. Preston Laws and the clerk J. M. Mumford to see N. C. Phillips of the WPA about how soon the boardwalk repair project could commence. By August the Worcester County WPA list included $7,000 of Ocean City boardwalk and street improvements, and the town had secured approval to pave the intersecting streets between Baltimore and Philadelphia avenues and was seeking $4,000 more to clay six streets. In September and October the town considered and then rejected a $75,000 WPA project to rebuild the ocean-front boardwalk destroyed by the hurricane.

• The Wood Preserving Corporation

  1936

  A Baltimore lumber-treatment firm, one of the two bidders that supplied the material for Ocean City's rebuilt boardwalk. Its representative came before the council on 21 October 1936 to describe the product and its lasting qualities, returned on 10 November as 'Mr. Clifton of The Wood Preserving Corp of Balto.', and quoted on 17 November: $57.55 a thousand for Wolman-treated lumber and $66.00 for creosote stringers. The town bought its creosote stringers, and dense structural square-edge sound lumber for the decking at $57.55.

• The Adkins Company

  1936

  The Berlin lumber house - the Adkins Lumber Company of Berlin, of which Covington D. Powell had been made general manager in 1926 - which bid against the Wood Preserving Corporation for the Ocean City boardwalk timber in November 1936. Represented at the council by 'Mr. Powell of Adkins Co.', it quoted $53.25 a thousand for Wolman treatment, $60.50 for round square edge, $62.00 for long leaf and $52.00 for short-leaf heart at 85 per cent heart.

• Windsor Resort Company

  1937

  Named in Mayor Elliott's building list of 18 November 1937 as bearing part of the cost of a new section of Ocean City boardwalk, 370 feet long and 21 feet wide, between South First and Somerset Streets — an extension of the walk beyond the stretch Ordinance No. 55 had compelled the ocean-front owners to rebuild.