The Layers of Local History
A Trip Through The Past Down The OC Boardwalk
By Levi Fox
After our ‘Footsteps of the Founders’ Tour through the historic district, the next most popular walking tour of Ocean City regularly offered by Jersey Shore Tours, is surely our ‘Taste of the Shore Tour,’ which heads down the busy section of the Boardwalk, from Wonderland Pier on 6th Street down to 12th. Wonderland Pier was founded by Roy Gillian in 1965, a decade after Stainton’s Playland, which had been at the same site, was destroyed in a fire, and two decades before Gillian became Mayor of Ocean City. Both amusement parks and politics seem to run in the family as Roy’s father David Gillian had opened a Fun Deck at Plymouth Place in 1929, following the 1927 fire that destroyed much of the old Boardwalk, while Roy’s son Jay Gillian, who built the town’ first water park in 1988, has served as Mayor since 2010.
While there is nothing quite like the immediacy of walking along the Boardwalk while hearing about its history, the best place to learn about the Boardwalks that came before, and that 1927 fire, is the Ocean City Historical Museum, which is where I did much of the research for my Ocean City tours. In addition to the exhibit on the various boardwalks, which also documents how the shoreline has moved over the decades, the museum is home to an Interactive Boardwalk Building display that exhibit creator, and museum Executive Director, Jeff McGranahan told me was designed to engage younger audiences. The museum, which regularly brings in excellent temporary exhibits such as one on surfboards last year, has for the last three years, also held History Camps, where students learn to do research and give tours. One can also learn about several iconic Boardwalk buildings and businesses at the museum, such as the Music Pier, which opened on Independence Day of 1929, and the Moorlyn 4, built in 1901 as a bowling alley, then converted into a theatre in 1922, before being moved by horses after surviving the 1927 fire.
There are quite a few stories that I tell on the ‘Taste of the Shore Tour’ that are not easily told in the museum, especially those relating to the Boardwalk foods which lend that particular tour its name. Indeed, after spending two summers talking about the history of taffy and fudge, as well as chocolates and macaroons, at the James Candy Factory, I try whenever possible to integrate food history into tours, though this is the only tour where visitors regularly get to taste the past while learning about their food. For example, tour- goers learn that fudge dates to 1880s Baltimore, and likely resulted from a batch of caramels that did not cook correctly, before trying a piece in front of the Original Fudge Kitchen, which was founded by the Bogle brothers in 1972. Visitors can also sample Johnson’s Popcorn while learning how it was founded in 1940, then sold to a local teacher in the 1950s. They then can see taffy being made on decades-old batch rollers at Shriver’s Candy, the oldest business in Ocean City that was founded in 1898.
William Shriver also founded the Strand Five as a one-screen Art Deco theatre with a balcony in 1938, though in 2017 it became the latest in the chain of pizzerias that was initially founded by Anthony Mack and Vincent Manco in 1956, and is now best known for its workers throwing their dough in the air. Indeed, the Ocean City Boardwalk is today home to several businesses that have adaptively reused older architecture, such as the Surf Mall, which opened in the 1980s at the site of the 1929 Showboat Theatre. Perhaps no Boardwalk along the Jersey Shore undergoes such regular change as Ocean City’s, which every year sees new businesses like Laser Mazes and Escape Rooms, although many stores have persisted since the 1980s, when I first remember learning the layout of the Boardwalk. One such store is Only Yesterday’s, which has sold nostalgia since 1987, that I recently learned will relocate after this year.
