History · 1881–2025
The Boardwalk: no founding date, because it was never founded
Ocean City's boardwalk has no single origin: it existed before the winter of 1880–81 as board walks in the plural — and the county paper was already calling them the city fathers' responsibility in May 1881, which unmakes the tidy story of a private accretion the town only adopted in 1908, and "board walks" in the plural led from building to building for at least seven years afterwards. But the CONTINUOUS walk does have a season — a near-mile promenade was described as new in October 1891, four months after the same beach still had only paths between buildings — and it became a public work only in 1908–09, by ordinance, assessment and a taxpayers' protest. The received date of 1902 marks nothing that happened at either end.
The earliest known description of plank "board walks" at Ocean City is in the report of a January 1884 storm, which is how the structure keeps entering the record: visible because the sea has just taken it. They were private and plural. As late as July 1891 visiting editors still found only "board walks lead[ing] from building to building all along the beach" — and by 17 October 1891 a Snow Hill dispatch describes "the new board walk, extending for nearly a mile along the front," with "the mile and a half board walk" following in August 1892. The continuous promenade was therefore built in a single season; the charter did not empower the council to erect board walks until 1894, a decade after the first ones existed; and as late as February 1903 the town was ordering them renewed at the owners' expense. Storms destroyed the walk in 1896, 1897, 1899, 1918, 1928 and 1933, and fires took three blocks of it in 1925 and a block and a half in 1929 — and every rebuild was wider than what the ocean removed. The only thing resembling a founding is administrative: sealed bids in 1908, fifty-foot sections and Ordinance No. 302 in 1909, an itemised municipal share of $1,065.33, and ocean-front owners protesting the assessment for a walk their own predecessors' planks had become. — EXTENDED TO 2025 (task 3.2): rebuilt in wood after the 1944 hurricane at $18.00 a running foot, of which abutting owners paid $15.50; unwidenable by 1964 because the beach in front of it had not come back; and from the mid-1970s the one surface on which the town legislates conduct - skateboards, bare chests, T-shirts. In 1977 a sitting judge told the council its attire ordinance was courting disaster, and in 1983 a councilman valued the resulting unconstitutionality at eighteen million dollars of free publicity. A steel seawall went in beneath the boards in 1991. In 2021 the boardwalk produced national publicity of the other kind, and the town bought body cameras.
Every town wants a birthday. What Ocean City actually has is a thing that grew the way a path grows — laid by whoever needed to cross the sand, widened by whoever came next, and formalised only when somebody had to be billed for it. The 1909 assessment protest is the most revealing document in the thread: the owners whose private planks had BEEN the boardwalk objecting to paying for it now that it was public.
35 beats · 143 dated facts · 3 open questions
The arc
1881–1891 · pivotal
Board walks, plural, municipal — and already old by 1881
The earliest description found is not the 1884 storm report the campaign long cited. It is the *Democratic Messenger* of 28 May 1881: "The board walks were torn up to a considerable extent and scattered over the beach by LAST WINTER'S STORMS, and nothing has yet been done in the way of repairing." Three things in one sentence. They are **plural**. They are **retrospective** — they existed through the winter of 1880–81, so before the town was six years old. And the paper's next line is "Our City Fathers had better be stirring," which makes them **the town's responsibility from the beginning**, not a private accretion the municipality only adopted in 1908. A second 1881 use is independent: Selby's plans for the 1882 season include "new board walks." The 1884 storm report and the January 1884 flood still enter the record the same way — visible because the sea has just taken them. As late as JULY 1891 a party of visiting Maryland editors still found only that "board walks lead from building to building all along the beach." AND THEN, IN ONE SEASON, IT CHANGES. A Snow Hill dispatch of 17 October 1891 describes "THE NEW BOARD WALK, extending for nearly a mile along the front of Ocean City." Plural paths in July; a continuous near-mile walk called new in October; "the mile and a half board walk" by August 1892. So the continuous promenade was built between July and October 1891 — while board walks in the plural had already been there, and already been the city fathers' problem, for at least a decade.
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1892
The promenade the local paper never mentions
A measured negative that is worth more than a hit. All 182 pages of the Democratic Messenger for 1892 were read, and the string 'board walk' / 'board-walk' / 'boardwalk' occurs exactly TWICE in the whole year — in the 13 August Ocean City letter ('beyond the end of the mile and a half board-walk') and in the 27 August storm report ('rolled in up to and beneath the board-walk'). Both are already in the record. The county's own weekly paper, which printed the Worcester County deed book, the county levy, the road contracts, the fence specifications and every hotel repair in Berlin, never once reports the board walk being built, extended, repaired, funded or damaged in the year in which it says the thing is a mile and a half long. That is a real finding about where the construction record is not. The 1891 items already in the record ('the new board walk, extending for nearly a mile') plus this silence point the same way: it was built privately, by the hotels and the beach company, block by block along their own frontages, and it therefore left no municipal or county paper trail. The place to look next is not the newspaper columns but the Sinepuxent Beach Company's own records and the Board of Commissioners of Ocean City minutes — and 1892 has now proved those commissioners existed and kept tax books back to 1887.
1894
A statute, a maintenance schedule, and a height
1894 is the year the walk acquires a statute, a maintenance schedule and a height, and it does so without ever being called a boardwalk. Chapter 128 of the Acts of 1894, approved 27 March, rewrote the town's charter and gave the new city council express power, in section 162, 'to provide for the erection of board walks upon the sidewalks of said city' — the plural again, and 'upon the sidewalks,' which reads as surfacing rather than promenade. Ten weeks later the council did it: on 9 June the Ocean City correspondent reported that 'the Town Commissioners are laying new walks on the cross streets and renewing the front walk so that the people can "keep their feet out of the sand."' That single sentence carries the thread's whole 1890s argument. There is a FRONT walk, distinguished from the cross-street walks; it is old enough to need RENEWING in the second year we can watch it; the town does the work; and the reason given is not promenading but mud. And six weeks before that, in the dark of 23 April, Col. Lemuel Showell fell off it — 'falling from the board walk along the beach, a considerable distance to the ground below.' Not a plank path laid on sand: something elevated enough that a man could fall a considerable distance from it and be lucky to break no bones. Those two items are the only occurrences of a walk on the beach in all 206 pages of the county paper for 1894, which is the same measured result 1892 produced and is worth as much: the walk is never news, because it is not new. What 1894 adds to the received dating is a statute. Whatever the sources mean by placing the Boardwalk's origin in 1900 or 1902, in March 1894 the General Assembly of Maryland was already writing board walks into Ocean City's charter as a thing the city council should provide for, and by June the council was renewing one it had not built.
1895
Three mentions, none from its own town
The walk's own town has almost nothing to say about it, and every paper that does is somewhere else. In 1895 the Democratic Messenger printed 208 pages about Ocean City's beach and never once wrote the words 'board walk' or 'boardwalk'; the only walk it mentions all year is the one an old friend of the editor's stepped off, breaking his ankle on a brick. This pass found three descriptions of the structure, and all three came out of the cross-title sweep. Elkton and Wilmington, August 1893, in a drowning report: the bather went in 'in front of Mr. Page's cottage, near the NORTH END of the board walk.' Wilmington again, three weeks later, on the night the sea crossed the island: 'About 5 o'clock the breakers began to roll entirely over the boardwalk... the breakers rolled clear over the walk along the ocean front and rolled right through the parlors of Congress Hall.' Annapolis, December 1895: 'A portion of the boardwalk SOUTH OF CONGRESS HALL was carried away.' Together they give a continuous ocean-front structure with a north end at a named cottage, a Congress Hall stretch that storms took twice in three years, and a name spelled as one word by 1893. Set that against the charter of 1894, which gave the new council express power 'to provide for the erection of board walks upon the sidewalks of said city' — a power for which this pass found no evidence of use at all. The conclusion the thread has been circling is now hard to avoid: this was never a municipal work and never had a founding. It was a private, incremental, hotel-by-hotel structure so ordinary to the people who used it that only outsiders wrote it down, and only when the sea took a piece out of it.
1896–1899
The ocean takes it, twice, and it comes back wider
In October 1896 a storm washes the walk away from Congress Hall southward. In October 1897 a gale "the worst in the memory of the oldest inhabitant" wrecks it again — a Wilmington paper calls what the sea took "the NEW board walk," so the 1896 rebuild had lasted a single season. Sixteen months later it is rebuilt WIDER. That is the pattern the whole thread turns on and it never changes: destruction is not an interruption of the boardwalk's history, it is the mechanism of it. Each rebuild is bigger than the thing the ocean removed. ⭐ AND THE 1896 FULL PASS MEASURED WHAT THIS BEAT WAS ASSUMING. 1896 breaks the silence, and breaks it the wrong way round. Four years of measurement now stand: two mentions of the walk in 182 pages of the county paper in 1892, two in 206 pages in 1894, zero in 208 pages in 1895, and — in a complete page-by-page read of all 204 surviving pages of 1896 — five, of which four are Ocean City and one is a camp-meeting ground on another island. The town's own paper says more about the boardwalk in the year the ocean destroyed it than in the four years it stood. Three of the four are damage: the May gale drove sand so hard 'it was impossible for pedestrians to face it on the board walks'; the October storm 'washed all the boardwalk away from Congress Hall down to the south end,' and a second dispatch three days later reports that 'all the board walk south of the life-saving station has been torn up.' The fourth is the only one that treats the walk as a thing with an extent rather than a casualty — 'there is talk of two new hotels, one at each end of the board walk' — and the paper immediately disowns it: 'to this however, we give little credence.' The pattern the thread has been arguing is now four-for-four and it is not an accident of coverage: the walk was infrastructure, and infrastructure is invisible in a country weekly until weather makes it news. Chapter 128 of 1894 gave the council power 'to provide for the erection of board walks upon the sidewalks of said city'; nothing in 204 pages of 1896 shows the council exercising it, before the storm or after. The one thing 1896 does supply is geography — Congress Hall, the Atlantic Hotel, Meyer's cottage, the life-saving station — and the fact that the front walk stood 'about ten feet higher than the bay is generally,' which is the first elevation the campaign has for it.
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1897
The walk traced from Congress Hall to the Atlantic
The year the ocean took the walk twice and the out-of-town press finally described it against fixed points. Count first, exactly: 18 of 2,056 pages carry a board-walk mention with a Maryland marker within 800 characters; two of the 18 are Atlantic City hotel advertisements sitting in the same column as an Ocean City advertisement, and ten of the remaining sixteen are reprints of one Baltimore American dispatch. Six distinct original statements survive, and three of them locate the walk. The Wilmington Evening Journal puts the destruction 'south from Trimper's hotel… and north from the same point it is broken in places'. The Delaware Gazette puts it 'south of the life-saving station'. And the New York Journal and Advertiser, in a staff dispatch nobody in this campaign had read, draws the whole line: from the three cottages below Congress Hall on the southern point, 'going northward from here the board walk is completely torn away until the Atlantic Hotel is reached.' Congress Hall to the Atlantic, past Trimper's and past the life-saving station, is a continuous public promenade across the built-up town in October 1897. It is not a set of private planks in front of hotels, and it was there before the year in which the received story says the boardwalk was built. Add the Evening Journal's first-night note of 25 October — damage 'excepting to railroad tracks and boardwalks', plural — and 1897 becomes the strongest pre-1900 evidence the thread has.
1898
Three miles, constantly crowded
The year the walk is measured, and the measurement kills the received date. On 4 March 1898 the Wilmington Evening Journal ran "IMPROVEMENTS AT OCEAN CITY — NEW RAILROAD STATION TO BE BUILT AND A BOARDWALK WIDENED AMONG THEM", with the widening as one of the season's two headline works: "That portion of the boardwalk which is being rebuilt will be much wider than ever before." On 13 July the Washington Evening Star's Ocean City correspondent gave it a northern terminus — St. Rose's new summer home stood "at the north end of the boardwalk". And on 23 August the same correspondent measured it: "Its boardwalk, extending three miles, is constantly crowded with ladies and gentlemen, watching the great breakers leap upon one of the finest beaches on the Atlantic coast." Three miles, in the ordinary tone of a resort letter, from a paper that had no reason to exaggerate a Maryland walk to Washington readers. Set that against 1892's "a mile and a half board walk", 1897's continuous structure from below Congress Hall north past Trimper's and the life-saving station to the Atlantic Hotel, and 1900's rafters and addresses, and the chain from 1884 to 1902 is not merely unbroken — it is a walk that doubled in length in six years. Whatever the town did in 1900-02, it was not building its first boardwalk. What is still missing, in every year, is who paid: Chapter 528 of 1898 gives the Mayor and City Council power over board walks at p. 1245, and the $30,000 of bonds the same charter authorises are for water and sewerage only.
1899
Measured by the refusal to write about it
1899 measures the walk by refusing to write about it. A second and independent filming of the Democratic Messenger — 165 pages held by the Worcester County Library, read page by page — uses the words "board walk" three times in the whole year, and only two of them are Ocean City's: a party of fourteen Washington men "camping at the lower end of the board walk" in July, and "the boardwalks", plural, on which "nearly the whole population spent the afternoon" watching the August gale. The third belongs to Atlantic City, in an essay whose entire argument is that Ocean City is not it — no iron piers, no dance houses, and none of "the hoots and toots and shrieks of a thousand ear-splitting musical instruments that line the board walk from the Inlet to the Excursion House." Five years are now counted page by page and not estimated: 2 mentions in 182 pages of 1892, 2 in 206 of 1894, 0 in 208 of 1895, 4 in 204 of 1896, 2 in 165 of 1899. The walk plainly exists — it has a lower end you can camp at, and by August there is more than one of it — and the county paper still notices it only when weather breaks it or a stranger sleeps on it. Nothing in 1899 contradicts the conventional "first boardwalk, 1900–1902"; but a town that already had boardwalks in the plural in August 1899 did not build its first one the following year. And the owed 1896 sweep, run at last, moves the walk five months earlier in that year than the record had it. The campaign's 1896 boardwalk evidence was four mentions, all from October or later, all about a storm taking it. But the May cyclone dispatch — datelined Ocean City, Md., carried by three Delaware papers and never read until now — says that on the evening of 18 May 1896, in a seventy-mile-an-hour wind, the driven sand "was so cutting that it was impossible for pedestrians to face it ON THE BOARD WALKS." Plural, in ordinary use, in May, by people simply walking on them. Five months later the ocean took the length from Congress Hall to the south end. The thread's problem has never been whether the walk existed before 1900. It is that the only people who wrote it down were passing through.
1900–1903
It becomes a place rather than a path — and the town makes the owners pay for it
By 1900 the walk is an elevated promenade you stroll on and BUILD UPON: a Washington man puts up a hotel on it. A senator keeps a bungalow up the board walk in 1903. And in February 1903 the town orders its board walks torn up and renewed AT THE OWNERS' EXPENSE — still, twenty years in, a private obligation the municipality merely directs. Farmers' Day 1903 brings forty-three carloads of excursionists onto a jammed walk. It is now the town's principal public space and nobody owns it as a whole.
1901–1902 · pivotal
The dating question, and how a silence nearly became a fact
The received history dates the Boardwalk to 1902. The record does not support it, and the campaign's attempt to test that claim produced its sharpest methodological lesson. A 1902 pass read all 302 pages of the county paper's run for the year and found NO mention of a board walk — and wrote that down as an argument from silence. A later cross-title pass read 950 pages across 27 titles and found the Washington *Times*'s own Ocean City correspondent referring to it three times in the same year: "the stretch of boardwalk," the St. Rose sisters "on the upper end of the board walk," the Waverly "directly on the boardwalk fronting the ocean." The silence was the newspaper's, not the town's. Both facts are kept, because together they are the answer to the dating question: there is no founding year to find, and a claim that there is one survives only where nobody looks in more than one paper. AND 1891 NARROWS THE QUESTION RATHER THAN ANSWERING IT. The continuous walk is datable to a season; "the boardwalk" as an institution still is not, because what was new in October 1891 was itself a replacement for planks that had been there since before 1884 and would be destroyed and rebuilt wider at least seven times after it. ⭐ AND 1901 SEPARATES THE TWO THINGS THE CAMPAIGN HAD BEEN CONFLATING. The sentence this fact rests on — "Board walks have been laid in every direction leading to the shore" — describes ACCESS WALKS running down to the water, not the promenade along it. The promenade is attested in the same year and separately: a cottage advertised on 4 May as "on board walk facing ocean," and on 18 July, from the town itself, "at nights the boardwalk presents quite a brilliant effect when the four hundred stroll by on dress parade." So 1901 has both — paths to the sea, and a lit promenade people dressed for — and the dating question was partly a question about which noun the sources meant.
1905–1906
Measured at last: two miles long, sixteen feet wide, bulkheaded
1905 is the first time anyone puts dimensions on it — two miles long, sixteen feet wide, and bulkheaded, with the beach in front of it described that April as "never better." By 1906 it carries a state senator's cottage and a camping ground. Twenty-one years after its first appearance in a storm report, it has a length, a width, an engineering description and residents.
1908–1912 · pivotal
The year it becomes a public work — and the owners fight the bill
If the boardwalk has a founding, this is it, and it is an ordinance rather than a ribbon. In 1908 the Mayor and City Council advertise for sealed bids to BUILD the boardwalk; in 1909 it is let in fifty-foot sections, Ordinance No. 302 orders boardwalks on Atlantic Avenue with cement pavements, and by July there is "an almost entirely new boardwalk." The town's own share is itemised at $1,065.33. And the ocean-front owners PROTEST the assessment for a twenty-four-foot walk they are being made to pay for — the same owners whose private planks the thing had been for twenty-five years, now objecting to becoming ratepayers for it. By 1912 a new twenty-five-foot walk runs north from the Plimhimmon to St. Rose's. The transition from private accretion to municipal infrastructure takes four years and generates a taxpayers' revolt.
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1915–1925
An address, a rent, and a business district
Once it is public it becomes real estate. A furnished ten-room-and-bath cottage on the boardwalk has a price by 1915; an eight-bedroom furnished cottage goes for four thousand dollars in 1920; a weekly newspaper column lists the boardwalk's advertisers. Josephine Hastings opens a forty-room "daylight" hotel on it in 1923 and the mayor puts up an apartment house above it the same year; a pharmacy opens for the season. In April 1918 a forty-eight-hour northeaster takes a THOUSAND FEET of it, and it is rebuilt again. By July 1925 it is "the mile and a half of boardwalk" — a phrase that had also described it in 1892, which is either a coincidence or evidence that a third of a century of rebuilding had not made it longer.
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1925–1933 · pivotal
Fire, fire, and then the ocean again
The last movement is destruction at a new scale. The Great Fire of 29 December 1925 burns the boardwalk for three whole blocks along with the Atlantic, the Seaside, the pier and the Casino. On the night after Labor Day 1929 fire runs a block and a half of it through the amusement section. The storm of 11–12 August 1928 throws the sea clean over it and undermines the piles beneath the ocean-front hotels. And on 23 August 1933 the hurricane takes a QUARTER of the walk, including the fishing pier. In half a century it had been destroyed by water at least seven times and by fire twice, and every time it came back — which is the only continuous fact in its history.
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1934
Rebuilt on a New Deal bargain
The boardwalk had been destroyed by water seven times and by fire twice and had come back every time, and 1934 finally shows HOW. On 2 April the council resolves 'that City furnish all materials to rebuild Board walk and ask for labor from Relief Board be furnished', and sends a certified copy to the Relief Board at Snow Hill. That is the mechanism: the town buys the lumber and the Depression supplies the men. On 22 May, three weeks from the season, the council rules that boardwalk work continues and 'if any work had to go let the street work come last' — the walk outranks the streets, explicitly, in a town that is borrowing $10,000 from three banks to get through the summer. Relief workers are still on it in October. In December the town orders 40,000 feet more lumber, at $25 a thousand for framing and $27.50 for dressed decking, before the first season's rebuilding is even paid for. The thread's claim that the boardwalk is the one continuous fact of the town's history acquires its hardest evidence here: it is the thing Ocean City would not stop building even when it could not pay its own light bill.
1935
From relief-labour repair to capital work
**1935 is the year the boardwalk stopped being a relief-labour repair job and became a federal capital project — and, in the same season, valuable enough to be worth a monopoly.** In February the whole instruction is still one line and one condition: *'Secretary instructed to repair board walk and unload cinders soon as men were available.'* By **20 August** the council held a meeting with a single item on it and resolved to apply to the Public Works Administration **to surface twenty side streets, build boardwalk on North Division and North First Streets, and repair the balance** — an extension northwards, not a patch. In November it bought 30,000 more feet of lumber, awarded to Bud Powell at $27.40 a thousand by a margin of ten cents over W. R. Bounds, the third winter running the town bought its own timber. Meanwhile the deck itself was earning: on **17 September the council resolved to grant a five-year exclusive franchise to the Ocean City Roller Chair Company**, and the December ordinance licensed each chair at $2.00 a year with no personal tax from 1936 — **the earliest exclusive boardwalk concession this campaign has documented.** And the boardwalk was carrying more than walkers. The Arcadia ran a Depression **walkathon** from 8 June, open twenty-four hours a day for a $1,000 purse, with **the mayor firing the starting gun**; Jackson's opened the season on 3 May with a nine-piece orchestra and no cover, enlarged its dance floor to two hundred couples in September, and by December was the home court of Ocean City's basketball team. And on **23 August, twenty-one boardwalk establishments were raided in a single morning**, eighteen slot machines seized, carted to the Snow Hill jail and some of them broken up and thrown into the Pocomoke — **with Mayor Elliott sitting in the conference that planned the raid on his own boardwalk, a fortnight before the season closed.**
1936
The hurricane takes it, and the town refuses federal money to rebuild
1936 is the year the boardwalk stops being a wooden sidewalk and becomes a public work with an engineer's specification and a bill attached. The hurricane of 18 September took five blocks between the Washington Pharmacy and the Colonial Hotel and everything from the Shoreham north to the walk's end, carried a hundred-foot section a block inland, and left the Majestic without a shingle out of place. For six weeks the town argued about who should pay, and the argument was the whole point: the charter said the adjoining owners, the owners said that was unfair and organised to refuse, and Washington - in the person of Arthur K. Hungerford of the National Emergency Council, speaking to eighty business people in Col. Mann's cottage on 17 October - said the WPA would take a third at most and the town must find 55 to 60 per cent. On 23 October the solicitor Edmond Johnson told the council it would be 'holding the bag' if it sponsored the federal project, and the town chose the charter: $7 a foot on 7,700 feet, $53,900, against $75,000 by grant. Ordinance No. 55 of 21 November made it law and forty registered letters made it real. What was then built was different in kind from what the sea had taken: creosote piling of 8-inch butts driven two feet down, caps 8 by 10 and 6 by 8, dense structural square-edge decking at $57.55 a thousand, laid crosswise instead of diagonally at Dr. C. W. Purnell's suggestion to save a quarter of the cost, and a resolution that no old lumber be used at all. By 29 December the town had ordered about $18,500 of lumber. The thread's thesis - that the boardwalk was never founded, only ever rebuilt - takes its sharpest single instance here, and gains a corollary: the modern boardwalk's engineering dates from a decision to refuse federal money. ONE FIGURE SHOULD BE PREFERRED OVER THE TOWN'S OWN. The Worcester Democrat and the Ledger-Enterprise of Pocomoke City - a third 1936 county paper, found this pass through Chronicling America and absent from the source register - put it starkest on 25 September: 'Ocean City was stricken worse than on the day in 1933 when that August gale swept the coast. Only 250 feet of that city's boardwalk has been left intact.'
1937
From public work to assessed private obligation
**1937 is the year the boardwalk stopped being a public work and became a private levy — and the levy did not hold.** Ordinance No. 55 had made the ocean-front owners rebuild at their own expense, and on 19 January 1937 the council put a figure on it: $369.57 for a fifty-foot lot where the new walk was twenty-four feet wide, $257.83 where it was sixteen — $7.39 and $5.16 a running foot — read out lot by lot, name by name, down the whole front, with the secretary instructed to bill each frontage as it was finished. The work itself was done in one winter on eighteen-foot creosoted piles with fourteen-inch drift-iron pins, guaranteed twenty years, and it held when the sea crossed the island at Eighth and Tenth Streets on 26 April. But the accounting, published in June, says the thing the ordinance was written to prevent happened anyway: of $38,945.63 the assessed owners paid $17,377.92 and the town paid $21,567.71. The owners paid 44.6 per cent. A town that had refused $75,000 of WPA money rather than let the public purse build a private frontage ended by putting more public money into it than the owners did — on a job that came in at two-fifths of the sum the ordinance's own rate implied. And it was still not finished: on 9 November a neighbour had to come to the council to ask that the walk in front of two owners between Second and Third Streets be put in 'to complete the walk', and the council's remedy was to write them a letter. **The strongest evidence in the whole thread is a negative: across 645 pages of the Democratic Messenger and 2,766 of the Salisbury Times, a complete year of both county papers, there is no suit, no injunction, no protest meeting and no published text of Ordinance No. 55.** Ocean City's owners were compelled to buy their own boardwalk and, so far as two newspapers can show, they simply did it.
1938
The instrument gets used on something else
**In 1938 the instrument the boardwalk was built with gets used on a back street, and it turns out to be the town's ordinary way of doing business.** Ordinance No. 55 of 1936 had compelled the ocean-front owners to rebuild the walk at their own expense or have the town do it and bill them. On the night of 14 October 1938, having already adjourned at a quarter to midnight, the council was recalled to pass a resolution 'that walk be raised which require new walk and for clerk to notify property owners that they must build walk with in 20 days at their Expense or the City would have it put in and charge to them' - between north Second and north Third Streets, on the west side of the island, nowhere near the ocean. The five typed letters that went out on 20 October are the only typed pages in the whole 1938 minute book and the only surviving impression of the council's printed letterhead. They run down Block 29 lot by lot - lots 8 and 9 to Mrs. Paul L. Thebaud of Snow Hill for the George W. Purnell heirs, lot 10 to Joseph Elliott, lot 11 to William and Nellie Gibbs, lot 12 to Thomas Spencer, lot 13 to Wilmer Cropper - and each begins 'Dear Wilmer', 'Dear Tom', 'Dear Bill', 'Dear Joe'. A town small enough to dun its neighbours by first name, using on a sidewalk the same compulsion it had used to buy itself two miles of boardwalk. **And the collection question the campaign has been asking since 1936 gets its firmest answer yet, from the town's own book: Ocean City advertised its 1938 assessments, mailed the notices on 22 June, sat down at eight o'clock on 12 July to hear objections, and 'No one appeared opposing assessment notice'.** Nobody came. The books were closed.
1939
The boardwalk from the accounts department
**1939 shows the boardwalk from the accounts department, and it is unflattering in the ordinary way.** In February the town opened bids for 30,000 feet of lumber and awarded the contract to E. Raymond Bounds at $21.00 - a sitting councilman, low bidder by a dollar and a half, recorded in the minute without a flicker of comment. In August a Mrs. V. E. Landon fell on the walk; her lawyer's letters were read in September and the council told the city attorney to offer $25; she held out and was paid $50 on 24 October. The 1940 estimate carries 'Boardwalk 1500.00' as an annual line, alongside street upkeep at $2,000 and cleaning at $1,500. **And the ordinance that priced the whole boardwalk economy passed on 2 June: rolling chairs $2 a chair, shooting gallery $15, penny pitch $5, merry-go-rounds and carrousels $5 each, palmist or phrenologist $5, and street and beach photographers $25.** Bingo was priced at $500 - three times a night club, ten times a circus, by a wide margin the highest fee in the ordinance - and in July Dale Showell got it cut to $150 by pointing out that bingo could only pay off in merchandise. **A town that sets a licence at five hundred dollars is not raising revenue, it is discouraging a trade; a town that cuts it to a hundred and fifty four months later has decided it wants the trade after all.** That is the boardwalk's whole argument with itself, conducted in a fee schedule.
1940
Defined by what the council would not allow
The boardwalk in 1940 is defined by what the council would not allow near it and by the machine it refused to install behind it. A man named Jackson asked to put a windmill east of the walk in March and was refused in one sentence. Irving Faustin asked in October to move a bungalow OFF the walk and build a ninety-by-seventy-five-foot store building behind it, and got it over four objecting households. And in May the council moved itself into the Municipal Building's large room - because it knew the room would be full - to hear a parking-meter salesman, and then voted unanimously to change nothing. A resort that in 1937 had two thousand cars unable to get into town looked straight at the machine invented for that problem and said no, then debated hucksters and said no to that too. What makes 1940 a turn rather than a repetition is one sentence of 2 October: the council wanted an ordinance 'to protect the kind of business & building that should be erected on the properties near the new Bridge'. A body that had unanimously voted down a building code twelve months earlier was now discussing land-use control - not on principle, but because a bridge was coming and it could see what would be built at the end of it. Nothing was enacted in 1940. But Ocean City's first zoning conversation is a conversation about an approach road, and it is one sentence long.
1941
The Boardwalk economy legislating for itself
1941 is the year you can see the Boardwalk economy legislating in its own favour, twice in one evening and once in a licence schedule. On 3 June a delegation headed by James Jarman and Dr. Charles W. Purnell asked the council to grant no licence to anybody renting umbrellas from a push cart, and got exactly what it came for: five dollars a year to rent umbrellas from a fixed place of business, and a flat refusal to any traveling cart. The men with premises kept the trade and the man with a cart and no rent was legislated off the boards. Six weeks earlier the same council had ordered James Jarman's own small building on the Boardwalk between 7th Street and Surf Avenue removed after Parker Smith objected to it — so the delegation's leader was, in April, on the receiving end of the same instinct. The licence schedule the council revised on 12 May puts numbers on the rest of the boardwalk trade: fortune telling at fifty dollars, two unnamed items raised to a hundred, twenty-five cents on every boat at a dock collected from the dock owner, and — in April — a midget golf course licensed for Philadelphia Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets at not more than twenty-five dollars, the earliest municipal record of mini-golf the campaign holds for a town that now has a dozen courses. Read together they describe a boardwalk that had stopped being a promenade and become a rent roll, and a council that policed the difference between a shop and a cart with real care in what turned out to be the last season before the war took the crowds away.
1942
Where the war's two pressures meet
The Boardwalk in 1942 is where the war's two pressures meet and both of them are about money. In July the council licensed James N. Jarman's wagon on the boards at fifty dollars, on condition that he not solicit in front of any property that rented umbrellas and had objected; the fixed umbrella renters were taxed ten. That is the 1941 push-cart quarrel decided the other way, and it tells you the boards were worth working. In September the same council turned on the same trade: it was 'boardwalk stand people' who were advertising the colored excursions of 24 September, and it was the council that sent the chief of police to stop them. So in one summer the Boardwalk's concessionaires won a licence they wanted and lost a market they wanted, and in both cases the decision was made in a room above the fire house by four men. The Boardwalk has no founding date because it was never founded; what it has instead, year on year, is this — a surface whose use is settled by whoever is on the council. And the boards were dark. From the first week of May a car approaching Ocean City could show nothing but its parking lights, by order of the Commanding General of the Third Corps Area, to stop ships being silhouetted against the shore; in June that dim-out was named by the police as a possible contributing factor in the death of Ralph Purnell, 35, of Ocean City, struck at eleven at night on the Sinepuxent Bay bridge.
1943
The war ends with a decision to change nothing
The Boardwalk's war ends with a decision not to change anything. On the night of 1 November 1943 the Army-proclaimed coastal dim-out came to an official end in Wicomico, Worcester and Somerset counties; lights went back on, paint was scraped off headlights, theatre marquees burned past the dim-out hour for the first time that year. Ocean City did not join in. Colonel Henry S. Barrett, State Commander of A.R.P. Services, said the town had decided to leave its dimmed boardwalk illumination system intact for the present, in case a resumption of the dim-out was ordered. Twenty months after the resort dimmed itself five weeks ahead of the Army's county order, it declined to undim on the Army's word — the same instinct, running in the same direction, and the darkened Boardwalk is the one piece of the war the town chose to keep. The other Boardwalk note of 1943 belongs beside it: on 11 August, with the season half over and the tourists half absent, the council spent an evening on 'the need for rebuilding the old Board walk.' Nothing came of it, and nothing in the minute book returns to it. But the argument for what the Boardwalk became after 1945 starts in that sentence — the town was already thinking about replacing it while it was still keeping its lights turned down.
1944
The hurricane, and the walk that stayed wood
The 1944 hurricane is the first time the Boardwalk's owners were asked what it should be made of, and their answer was refused on price. On 14 September the walk was wrecked; the council boarded it off, nailed up signs, and decided not to wreck any more of it. On 27 September it voted to replace it as it was, at the owner's own expense if he wanted his section tied down better. Then on 24 October it invited fifteen property owners into the Firemen's room, and five of them - Dr. Purnell, Earl Conley, Tom Shill, Frank Truitt and John Hagan - argued for concrete, which they said would be cheaper and last longer. The council agreed to investigate. Clark Gardner and George Purnell brought the plans on 28 November and the cost was prohibitive, so the walk stayed wood. What the town could not afford in materials it took in width instead: a year later, on 5 November 1945, it voted to widen the walk from North Division to South Division Street to thirty feet. The rebuilding was done by a man the minutes call Bob Allen, told in September 1944 to find what men he could, and still at it in November 1945 when the council raised him to $50 a week 'until Boardwalk was finished'.
1945
Thirty foot, and a view sold for a season
The hurricane's argument is settled in 1945, and the answer is width. Refused concrete in November 1944 on cost, the town rebuilt in wood and spent 1945 trying to buy the wood: on 22 August, eight days after Japan surrendered, it was still writing to the Koppers Company to ask whether treated decking was available and whether wartime priorities would be required for it. It discussed widening on 15 October and could not agree; on 5 November, on Savage's motion seconded by Lynch, it voted to widen the walk from North Division to South Division Street to thirty feet. The man doing the work, Bob Allen, was raised to $50 a week on 26 November 'until Boardwalk was finished' - he had been on $40 when the council first told him, in September 1944, to find what men he could. And in July, at the south end of the same walk, Samuel and Sadye Margolis sold their ocean view for a season: a sealed agreement not to act against Nathan Rapaport's concession, for a sum the instrument leaves blank.
1946
1946
1946 puts a price on the hurricane. The walk wrecked on 14 September 1944, rebuilt in wood because concrete was prohibitive, and widened to thirty feet on 5 November 1945, is billed out on 25 April 1946: the town paid $18.00 a running foot and charged the abutting owners $15.50, which is $775 for a fifty-foot lot, and absorbed the difference. No total, no length and no list of assessed owners is entered, and no later minute says what was collected. The same year drew the first legal line around what could stand beside the walk. Under Ordinance No. 99 the amusement trade could exist only in a BB district by leave of the Board of Zoning Appeals, and the map put the town's main BB district between the Inlet and Wicomico Street - the Boardwalk core - with the only other one four blocks at the far north end. A penny arcade was defined at five coin-operated machines. And a non-conforming amusement building that burned could be rebuilt within twelve months only for a use lawful in a plain B district, which excluded what it had been. In August the council ordered every slot machine and gambling device out of the town and began studying a ban on bingo, and a casino operator threatened an injunction in the Worcester County Circuit Court - none of which is in the minute book at all.
1946–1957
Eighteen dollars a running foot, and who pays it
The walk the hurricane of September 1944 took was rebuilt in wood because concrete was priced and found prohibitive, widened to thirty feet from North Division to South Division in November 1945, and then billed. The town's cost was $18.00 a running foot; the abutting owners were charged $15.50, which is $775 for a fifty-foot lot, and the town absorbed the difference. That split is the boardwalk's whole political economy in two numbers — a public promenade paid for partly by the private frontages it enriches. In 1957 the same arrangement is running at municipal scale: $75,000 of General Improvement Bonds for streets, sidewalks, sewer, water and the general repair of the boardwalk from North 5th to North 15th, plus a new stretch from North 26th to North 27th — built, that is, at the very edge of the fifteen blocks the town was in the act of annexing.
1964
You cannot widen a boardwalk that has no beach in front of it
Irving Bainum asked the council in May 1964 to budget for widening the walk north of 15th Street — he had asked for it when he owned the Ocean Park, and had told Mr. Church so when he sold it. Mayor Cropper's answer was physical rather than financial: widening had been considered, "however, the beach had narrowed to such an extent after storms that it was not deemed advisable to widen the walk with such a little beach." Two years after the Ash Wednesday storm the sand had not come back, and the boardwalk's limit was the ocean's. Bainum and Mike Lynch also wanted it extended north of 27th Street, pointing out that they paid boardwalk taxes, and suggesting the town build one or two blocks a year so that "the people north of 41st Street realize that the boardwalk was coming towards them." It never reached them. The boardwalk stops where it stopped, and the town that grew ten miles north grew away from its own spine.
1976–1977 · pivotal
The boardwalk becomes the place the town legislates behaviour
Three miles of publicly owned boards, crowded, lit and watched, turn out to be the one surface on which a resort can regulate conduct — and from the mid-seventies that is mostly what the council does with it. An emergency skateboard ordinance in April 1976 was amended within a fortnight to designate permitted areas, after a resident warned that Cape May had given children a skateboard area and was being sued because one was injured; asked whether the town needed insurance, Attorney Cathell said "Oh yes — well, we get sued all the time." Then in May 1977 a sitting judge came to the council about its attire ordinance. Judge Sweeney did not like bare chests on the boards either — "I don't like it, it looks tacky" — but: "in adopting an ordinance that makes it a crime to be attired on one inch of real estate as it is legal to be attired on another inch, I think that you are courting disaster. And if I read the papers correctly, when your ordinance was enacted it was done contrary to the advice of your City Attorney as to its Constitutionality." The council reported 85 per cent compliance.
1978
Every bit of it from 10th Street north
On 1 May 1978 Mayor Kelley described a nor'easter that had sat two hundred miles offshore for a full day and then gone away, and in doing so priced the boardwalk more precisely than any budget in this record. "I saw that ocean coming up underneath the boardwalk. It was all white foam at 12:00 midnight and if we had had any wind, God knows every bit of that boardwalk would have been gone. Every bit of it from 10th Street north. You're talking about 2 or 3 hundred thousand dollars a block just for boardwalk. You're talking about into buildings, street ends, sidewalks — you're talking about 50 to 60 million dollars worth of damage." Told afterwards by a critic that his response had been wrong, Kelley put his answer in the minutes: "I called him a stupid son of a bitch and you can take that from there, Mr. City Solicitor, if I go to jail." The City Engineer's contribution was four words: "Look what happened to Norfolk."
1983 · pivotal
Eighteen million dollars of publicity
Six years after a judge told this council its attire ordinance was courting disaster, a councilman explained why that was fine. "I know what it is going to cost the taxpayers if we pass unconstitutional ordinances and lose cases in court," said Councilman Deutsch. "We would get a lot of publicity out of it — the T-shirt ordinance got eighteen million dollars worth of publicity all over the country. I thought it was wonderful. If it cost us a million dollars, we are still ahead." Another member had just objected that an ordinance might be unconstitutional "just because people thought a dress code for the boardwalk would be very nice. Is that a service or is it a disservice? That bothers me." Councilman Hurley asked the City Solicitor how many times the city had been sued since 1976, because "that seems to be an awful big issue here." **A municipal government pricing its own unconstitutionality as marketing, in open session, with the arithmetic stated** — and the boardwalk is the shop window that makes the arithmetic work.
1991 · pivotal
A steel wall under the boards
In 1991, as part of the federal shoreline protection project, crews drove a steel sheet-pile bulkhead with a concrete cap along the oceanward edge of the boardwalk — roughly 1.4 miles from 4th Street to 27th, rising 14.5 feet above the vertical datum, in the stretch where the island is too narrow for a dune. It is the town's first true seawall and the direct answer to Kelley's 1978 arithmetic. Five months later the Halloween storm broke the 1962 tide record, and the town's own minutes for November and December 1991 contain no mention of it whatever: probed for "halloween", "nor'easter" and "tide" across seventeen searchable documents, the only occurrence of "storm" in the two months after it is a boilerplate risk clause in a bid specification — to install boardwalk clocks. The boards that had been the town's most expensive vulnerability had become, in one season, the thing that did not need discussing.
2008
Zoning the shop window
By 2008 the instrument has changed from ordinance to zoning district. The town regulated sexually oriented businesses by district and by licence rather than by prohibition — the same move the 1946 ordinance had made when it confined the amusement trade to a single class of business zone and left fire to clear it out of the rest. And in the same year the thirty-two-year refusal of gambling ended six to one. The boardwalk had been the surface on which Ocean City argued about what kind of place it was for half a century: bare chests, skateboards, T-shirts, arcades, slot machines. The arguments do not stop; they migrate into the zoning map, where they are less quotable and harder to lose in court.
2020–2021
A graduation, and then the videos
In June 2020 the boards did something they had never done: they held a high school graduation. Stephen Decatur could not meet indoors, so the town lent it the boardwalk, and the mayor's fortnightly activity report lists it between eleven news interviews and a meeting with police command to prepare for protests. The following summer the same surface produced the town's worst modern publicity. Viral videos of Ocean City police tasing and kneeing teenagers over boardwalk vaping ran nationally, and by December the council had signed a body-camera contract. Set that beside 1983: a councilman had once valued an unconstitutional boardwalk ordinance at eighteen million dollars of free publicity. In 2021 the boardwalk generated publicity on the same scale and the town paid to be recorded on it. **The shop window works in both directions, and it took thirty-eight years for that to be demonstrated.**
What we still cannot show
Recorded by the research itself, with where the answer would come from.
- ?–1884 **Nothing establishes when the first plank was laid.** The 1884 storm report is the earliest DESCRIPTION found, not the earliest walk — it describes board walks as an existing feature, plural and unremarkable. The town's pre-1900 municipal records, which might date the first ones, are largely absent: the Snow Hill court house burned in 1893 and the town books were stolen in 1896.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — Ocean City municipal records; Worcester County land records for beachfront lots
- 1902 The received 1902 date is repeated by the Chamber of Commerce and local histories and this project has never found its source. Knowing WHERE it entered the literature would be worth as much as refuting it, because the refutation is already documented and the claim persists anyway.Where to look: human-archive-visit — Ocean City Chamber of Commerce records; local history publications; the Ocean City Life-Saving Station Museum
- 1892–1925 The walk is "a mile and a half" in 1892 and "the mile and a half of boardwalk" in 1925, with a measured two miles and sixteen feet wide in 1905 in between. Either the phrase is a cliché repeated across thirty-three years, or the walk genuinely did not grow, or the 1905 measurement was of something else. No surveyed length exists in the record.Where to look: maryland-state-archives — Ocean City ordinances and assessment rolls; Sanborn fire insurance maps
Threads that cross this one
Fire: a wooden town that kept burning, and a fire company that kept paradingThe Inlet: sixty-four years of asking, and one night of weatherBlack Ocean City: present from the second season, recorded almost entirely by other peopleWater, light and sewer: a town that kept acquiring utilities it could not keepThe Railroad: the reason the town exists, and the thing it agreed to loseThe Hotels: the town's cause, its whole economy, and its standing riskThe Life-Saving Service: older than the town, and the only institution here whose business was other people's lives