Photography By Vince Lupo
For the first third of the twentieth century, the Chesapeake Beach and North Beach area was the closest thing Washington and Baltimore had to a full-service seaside resort. Contiguous towns on the Chesapeake Bay at the northern tip of Calvert County, they offered sweltering urbanites a relatively short shot to bracing salt air, warm sandy beaches, and the most rollicking waterfront scene this side of Atlantic City. And while all the unnatural attractions are many decades gone and all-but-forgotten, there are encouraging signs that now, as the twenty-first century revs into gear, the two towns are ready to launch a comeback.
Chesapeake Beach and North Beach, known collectively as Twin Beaches, have much in common, but they’re hardly identical twins. Chesapeake Beach was a summer resort town from day one, a fantasy fulfilled by railroad promoter Otto Mears, who needed to build a destination at the end of the railroad line from Washington he opened in 1900. To see what Mears had wrought, drop by the compact Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum, which now occupies the old Chesapeake Beach Railway terminal. Along with old photographs and railroad paraphernalia, the museum displays a diorama depicting all the major attractions of Chesapeake Beach’s 1920s heyday: the grand Belvedere Hotel, the park with the “Great Derby” roller coaster, a 1,600-foot boardwalk built five hundred feet offshore, the casino, the German beer hall, the race track, and a lengthy bathing pier surrounded by a nettle net that seemed to extend halfway across the Bay.
North Beach was conceived around the same time as a part-time retreat for city folk and a full-time home for working watermen. A century later, it’s working hard to retain its low-key residential character. “North Beach was originally one-story beach cottages with an A-frame roof, a porch, initially without the air-conditioning and heat,” says North Beach Mayor Mark R. Frazer, who is also a dentist. “As they adapted to year-round use, they became very unique, very eclectic homes that define the style of both North Beach and Chesapeake Beach.”
So what happened to Twin Beaches? The Great Depression happened, accompanied by an upsurge in automobile travel, which made other shore destinations accessible, and, in 1935, killed off the Chesapeake Beach Railway. The opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952 drew urban sun worshippers to jellyfish-free Ocean City and other Atlantic resorts. The (perhaps temporary?) loss of slots in the ’60s seemed like the coup de gráce until recent developments inspired tourists to reconsider a day at the Beaches. “The Bay Bridge and Ocean City are so crowded that people are coming back here,” says Bill Cavanaugh, who staffs the North Beach Information Center.
Today, Chesapeake Beach and North Beach remain quite different places, with Chesapeake Beach still playing the role of seaside tourist magnet. “This is just a prime location on the Eastern Seaboard,” says the Chesapeake Beach mayor Gerald Donovan. “You have the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay, you’re in the country, and Washington, Baltimore, and Annapolis are less than an hour away.”
Donovan also owns one of the town’s most prominent enterprises, the Rod ’N’ Reel. Actually a complex of bayside amenities, its main building houses the Rod ’N’ Reel fine seafood restaurant, which offers a bevy of specials—seafood buffet (Friday), lobster lure (Wednesday), weekend breakfast buffets—as well as virtually every form of gambling still legal in Maryland: Keno, video poker, pull-tab machines, and bingo four nights a week. Nearby are the complex’s beachside Boardwalk Café, with outdoor seating for drinks and crabs, and Smokey Joe’s, a chicken and ribs joint.
But fishing is the headliner attraction of Chesapeake Beach, which claims the largest charter fishing fleet in the Bay. Shawn Pruitt skippers the Never-E-Nuff, a forty-foot Bay-built “fishing machine” that berths in Chesapeake Beach from April 20 (first day of rockfish season) through November. “We go right into the Bay, about twenty miles north or twenty miles south. You can catch rockfish, bluefish, flounder, croaker, black drum,” says Pruitt. “We have about a 50-50 mix of novices and experienced fishermen.” The Rod ’N’ Reel books the Never-E-Nuff and some thirty other private charter boats for $390 for six-hour trips (up to six people), $540 for eight-hour trips; day or evening headboat cruises cost $37 per person, plus $6.25 rod rental.
During the summer, the hottest spot in town is the Chesapeake Beach Water Park, a kid-filled, ersatz tropical setting for eight water slides, fountains, waterfalls, a water volleyball court, and slow-moving tubing river. And fossil hunting at the stretch of sand officially called Bay Front Park but known to locals as Brownie’s Beach is a year-round pastime. People do swim here, but many more forage for fossils—like snaggletooth shark teeth, porpoise ears, and whale vertebrae—and shells. (Neophyte hunters can examine specimens of what they might find in the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum.) From Bay Front Park/Brownie’s Beach, you can walk the Chesapeake Beach boardwalk up the shoreline most of the way back to town. (The only free beach around these parts, Brownie’s is a bit hard to find: Take Route 261 exactly .6 mile south from the Chesapeake Beach bridge and look for an unmarked parking area on the left—east—side.)
North Beach, a mile up the coast, fancies itself a kind of village-sized “Cheers” populated with quirky characters who somehow manage to agreeably co-exist. “We have an eclectic mix of eccentric people, from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich,” says Sue Burton, co-owner of Coffee, Tea & Whimsey, a café/gift shop where “Whimsey” is both a description of the merchandise and the name of the house dog.
Even though property values have climbed steeply of late—with near-Bay cottages going for upwards of $350,000 and fixer-uppers away from the beach in the $150,000 to $180,000 range—North Beach retains its small-town charm. Burton’s favorite it’s-the-kind- of-town-where story is about what happened when a beloved local reprobate called Junior had his house condemned. A bunch of the townspeople pitched in to build Junior a new house and, says Burton, “We had a big party to watch his old house get demolished, with the town providing champagne and doughnuts.”
While modern townhomes wall off most Bayside footage in Chesapeake Beach, the North Beach waterfront remains wide open, with a popular public beach, a 550-foot fishing pier, and a half-mile boardwalk. But this is no Atlantic City-style boardwalk with rolling chairs and saltwater taffy stands. In fact, there’s no commerce whatsoever, just a long stretch of wood with platforms jutting over the water offering views of Calvert Cliffs to the south and, on clear days, Tilghman Island across the Bay.
The main event on North Beach’s calendar is Bayfest, a waterfront festival of arts and crafts and seafood and antique cars that each year (on the weekend of August 23-24 this year) entices up to 20,000 visitors. Throughout the year, the corner of 7th Street and Bay Avenue is the hub of the shopping district. One block has three antiques stores in a row—multiple dealers at the Chesapeake Antique Center, formal furniture at Willetta’s Antiques, and “everything from fossils to fine arts” at Nice & Fleazy, whose proprietor Dale Thomas has been around long enough to recall the town’s no-glory days. “When I opened the store thirty-one years ago, North Beach was dark—there were just half a dozen businesses in town. But it was a wonderful place to be in the antiques business because when the well-to-do people moved away, they’d sell me all this brass and wicker from their cottages.”
Around the corner, Flyin’ Fish, etc./Get Guated deviates from the standard Chesapeake-area commercial script with bright-colored merchandise from the Caribbean and Guatemala, including fiery sauces to handmade pottery and Barbadian bathing suits. “We figure we’re the only store in the country that sells some of the merchandise we carry,” says owner Ed Cross.
Fishing, shelling, dining, shopping: The comeback kids of the western Chesapeake seem to have it all—with the notable exception of overnight lodging. At this point, the only place to stay in either town is Bay Views, a romantic waterfront B&B with a sultry tropical motif but only two guestrooms. But that situation is about to change.
Next April, the Rod ’N’ Reel will open the bayside Chesapeake Beach Hotel and Spa where all seventy-two rooms will have
balconies with Bay views and the suites will have fireplaces and Jacuzzis. “This is going to be a boutique, unique, first-class facility,” says Donovan, who has engaged the Merit Hotel Group, owner of the distinguished Kent Manor Inn on Kent Island, to manage the property.
Its North Beach counterpart will open in 2005. “It will be an approximately seventy-room seaside inn in a style reminiscent of the hotels that were located in North Beach and Chesapeake in the early part of the twentieth century,” says Frazer.
But no one plans to change or improve the Bay presence and small-town ambience that makes Twin Beaches seem much farther than twenty miles from the Washington Beltway. “It has everything a small town can offer—fishing, crabbing, exploring, history. Life is more casual here. It’s taken me a while to slow down,” says Betty Quigley, a Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum docent who moved here permanently six years ago after part-timing for thirty years. “And the Bay changes every day. To see that morning sun come up every day…that makes it ideal.”
Theodore Fischer writes from his home in Silver Spring, Md.
Locals’ Guide To Chesapeake Beach and North Beach
Where to behold a Chesapeake Bay sunrise:
Pull up one of the benches behind the flagpole at Chesapeake Bay Veteran’s Memorial Park and enjoy an invigorating view of water, water everywhere. Chesapeake Beach and Bayside roads (Rtes. 260 & 261), Chesapeake Beach
Best Crab Joint:
Abner’s Crab House, a butcher-paper-on-the-tables Maryland hard-shell haven with outdoor tables overlooking Fishing Creek. 3748 Harbor Rd., Chesapeake Beach, 301-855-6705 or 410-257-3689
Catch-your-own or cook-it-yourself:
You can buy anything you need to catch anything in the mid-Bay area at Tyler’s Tackle Shop—and go next door to Tyler’s Crab House if you don’t have time to try. Chesapeake Beach and Bayside roads (Rtes. 260 & 261), Chesapeake Beach, 410-257-6610
Stogies, brews, and town gossip:
Bikers rub elbows with local business people—and the mayor—at Thursday’s Bar and Grill. 9200 Bay Ave., North Beach, 410-286-8695
Old photos and square meals:
Operating at the same location under the same management since 1936, Wesley Stinnett’s Restaurant and Bar serves “down home cookin’ at real fair prices” amid sepia-toned town photos and runs a drive-through liquor store on the side. 8617 Bayside Rd., Chesapeake Beach, 410-257-6100 or 301-855-8366
Flex some mussels:
Order mussels any of four ways—Thai, Provencal, Margherita (with tequila), and tomato-and-goat-cheese—at Neptune’s Seafood Pub, 1st St. and Chesapeake Ave., North Beach, 410-257-7899
Meet the town cat:
Keep an eye out for a friendly tabby named Elvis Pussley, a mainly black feline with a few white hairs, on or near the North Beach boardwalk.
Contacts
Town of Chesapeake Beach
410-257-2230
http://www.chesapeake-beach.md.us
Town of North Beach
8916 Chesapeake Ave.
301-855-6681 or 410-257-9618
http://www.nbeachmd.com
Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum
Rte. 261 & Mears Ave., Chesapeake Beach
410-257-3892
May-Sept. daily, 1-4 p.m.
Weekends only April and Oct.
Rod ’N’ Reel
Rte. 261 & Mears Ave., Chesapeake Beach
301-855-8351
http://www.rodnreelinc.com
Smokey Joe’s Grill
Rte. 261 & Mears Ave., Chesapeake Beach
301-855-3089
Rod ’N’ Reel Charter Captains
Rte. 261 & Mears Ave., Chesapeake Beach
301-855-8450
http://www.rodnreelinc.com
Chesapeake Beach Water Park
4079 Gordon Stinnett Ave., Chesapeake Beach
301-855-3803
Open Memorial Day to first day of school
Coffee, Tea & Whimsey
9122B Bay Ave., North Beach
410-286-0000
http://www.nbeachmd.com/whimsey.html
Chesapeake Antique Center
4133 7th St., North Beach
410-257-3153
Willetta’s Antiques
7th St. & Bay Ave., North Beach
301-855-3412
Nice & Fleazy
7th St. & Bay Ave., North Beach
301-855-5066, 410-257-3044
Flyin’ Fish, Etc./Get Guated
9100 Bay Ave., #103, North Beach
410-286-5543
Bay Views Bed & Breakfast
9131 Atlantic Ave., North Beach
410-257-1000 http://www.bayviewsbb.com
