Vanishing Ocean City With Bunk Mann

Vanishing Ocean City With Bunk Mann
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Ocean City in 1915 was a small village with about 600 residents. Most of the men worked as commercial fishermen or on the railroad while the women managed the hotels and boarding houses. The tourist season ran from mid-June to Labor Day and there was no off-season. The hotels closed after Labor Day and the tourists went home — most of them on the railroad that crossed the bay at South Division Street.

The city limits stretched from S. 7th Street (where the Inlet is now) to 15th Street and streets north of 3rd Street were unpaved. The Boardwalk was narrow and raised several feet above the beach. On stormy days, waves rolled under it. There was no Thrasher’s Fries, Alaska Stand or Dumser’s in 1915 and no pizza parlors or T-shirt shops on the Boardwalk.

Because the Inlet did not exist until 1933, Assateague ponies would wonder into Ocean City in search of food. There were no motels, no Beach Patrol, no miniature golf courses and no condominiums — the word did not exist in 1915.

Postcard from Bunk Mann’s collection