Century-old landmark building demolished in Ocean City

OCEAN CITY, Md. – After years of neglect, a century-plus old building standing near Talbot Street and Baltimore Avenue in the heart of Ocean City is coming down.

“It’s a building that most people in Downtown Ocean City has loved, but also didn’t realize at the time that it had these structural issues that had been going on for many years apparently,” said the Ocean City Development Corporation Executive Director, Glenn Irwin.

The owner Larry Payne said it seems a former landlord removed crucial parts of the building that held it together like beams and posts making it almost impossible to restore.

“The floors were sagging,” said Payne.

“It was just so bad between that and the roof leaks where everything was rotten, and it just didn’t make sense anymore to try and save it,” said Payne.

Payne said he grew up in Ocean City, and it only made sense to buy this building that carries some of his most cherished memories.

The owner said the moment the building was available he bought it almost immediately without knowing about all of its quirks.

“It has a lot of meaning to me,” said Payne.

“Unfortunately, we spent maybe 60 or 70,000 in demoing the inside by hand trying to save what we could, but after uncovering everything, there were so many structural issues,” said Payne.

That is when the owner called out to the Ocean City Development Corporation for help, but the costs to improve the structure made it difficult to the save the building sealing its fate.

“We’ve restored over 200 buildings in the downtown through our facade improvement program,” said Irwin.

“This would have required a lot more than that, and that probably would have been resources well beyond what we could have done ourselves,” said Irwin.

The owner said he hopes to build a replica of the building with a new restaurant in order to keep a part of the town’s history alive.