From a geographic perspective, Highway 50 either begins or ends in Ocean City, Maryland, converse with its west-coast counterpart, Sacramento, California. In both cases, the highway’s termini have wandered over the years. The highway functionally terminated in Annapolis, Maryland until 1948, when the route took advantage of the 1942 construction of the Harry W. Kelly Memorial Bridge to open to an Atlantic coastal connection. On the west coast, the State of California used the 1936 construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge to extend the highway all the way to San Francisco until 1964, when a state-wide highway number realignment re-established 50’s Sacramento terminus as the extended route was redundant with other highways.
The resort promenade of Ocean City began as an isolated fishing village on the barrier spit of Fenwick Island, accessible only by stage coach and ferry. Opening its first motel in 1875, Ocean City’s remote nature allowed for a novel experiment in entrepreneurship for the era; by 1926 women owned or operated most of the city’s businesses including two thirds of the island’s resort hotels. Billing itself as the “ladies resort to the ocean,” Ocean City’s natural setting made it a desirable respite for tourists willing to make the trek from an increasingly urbanized Eastern Seaboard.
As the highway network expanded, the addition of the massive Chesapeake Bay Bridge in 1952 and Highway 50’s subsequent routing across it led to Ocean City’s “discovery” by residents of nearby Baltimore and Washington D.C. The gross influx of urban tourists quickly diluted Ocean City’s remote character in a sea of familiar franchise uniformity. Ocean City’s main thoroughfare, once largely the domain of independent women entrepreneurs, is today populated by a laundry list of corporate homogeneity: Dunkin’ Donuts, Cinnabon, Starbucks, Econo Lodge, and Hooters on the Boardwalk.
Learn more about Ocean City’s history at the Ocean City Lifesaver’s Museum.