Layers of Ocean City History in a Boardwalk Building

Looking at history is like going back through layers of time. If you examined practically any older building in Ocean City, inside or out, you would find evidence of the passing of time in layers.

When the wind blows away the modern siding added in recent years, you get a glimpse of the layers in a building's history. The photo above shows a three-story building (a store on the boardwalk, and two floors of large apartments above.) You can click on the picture to make it larger and see it close up.

The original siding was classic wood shingles painted bright white. At some point, someone painted this post at the front of the store fire-engine red, probably thinking to attract pedestrians' eyes to the store. I'm reasonably sure that the entire building was never painted red. (I don't even want to think about it.)

Similarly, the interiors of many Ocean City hotels and homes have undergone repeated renovations. Some of the interior walls show layer after layer of paint, wallpaper, and paneling.

The first-floor store in this building, located at 6th Street, also has seen its share of changes. Back in the 1940s, it was Dr. Townsend's Drugstore, complete with soda fountain.

Sometime after World War II, the owners of Edwards 5 & 10 leased the space from Dr. Townsend and transformed it from drugstore to dime store. In those days, all drugstores and 5 & 10s had a soda fountain or lunch counter. McDonald's didn't exist.

Edwards had tried lunch counters at other locations, and found them to be not very profitable. Edwards was ahead of the times in retailing. The first thing they did was remove the soda fountain stools. They laid plywood on top of the soda fountain that first spring, Mr. Alfred Harmon, manager of Edwards, told me, and used the new counter space to display merchandise.

After that first season, they removed the soda fountain and built a permanent 5 & 10 style counter. Meanwhile, most drugstores and 5 & 10s continued to muddle along with unprofitable or marginal soda fountains and lunch counters through the 1960s and well into the 1970s.

Edwards operated the 6th Street store under the name Boardwalk 5 & 10 for about two decades. When I worked there in the 1970s, it still had the original bare wood floors, and the outside was still painted white. The store's counters and shelves were stocked with an amazing variety of fast-moving merchandise. In fact, toward the end of their run, 5 & 10 cent stores began to call themselves "variety stores."

The Boardwalk 5 & 10 was crowded with customers from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day. By the 1970s, window air-conditioners were installed in three high windows along the 6th Street side. No soda fountain, but we had a big Coke machine out front, which I refilled several times a day during the summer.

Eventually, the Edwards owners reached retirement age, and sold their business. In the late 1980s this store became a T-Shirt Factory.

One of these years, the building will be razed, as so many of Ocean City's older buildings have, and a modern hotel or condos will be built on the site. Hopefully, that won't happen any time soon.