Opinion: Ocean City should fill open Historic Preservation Commission Seats

Originally published in Shore Local Newsmagazine

by Richard Barth

A reader writes in

Ocean City’s Historic District is one of the things that makes this town more than just a beach. Long before the Boardwalk and the Ferris wheel — and long before it was called Ocean City — this island was Peck’s Beach, land that Lenape people had fished and gathered from for generations. In 1879, a group of Methodist ministers chose it as the site for a new seaside religious community. Within a year, 48 buildings had gone up around the camp meeting grounds between 5th and 6th Streets. Over the following decades, the neighborhood filled in with the Victorian architecture — the “Painted Ladies” many of us walk past every day between 3rd and 8th Streets, Central and Ocean Avenues — that still defines the character of the North End.

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