For more than a century now, the best-known beachside boardwalk in the Wilmington area has been at Carolina Beach.
During the first half of the 20th century, however, Wrightsville Beach also had a boardwalk. Unlike the Carolina Beach Boardwalk, the one at Wrightsville Beach wasn't geared toward tourist commerce and entertainment but was residential in nature.
In fact, it wasn't even referred to as a boardwalk, but had a street name: Ocean Avenue.
According to "Tide and Time: A History of Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina," a 2008 book by Virginia Whiting Kuhn commissioned by the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, Ocean Avenue was an "elevated boardwalk that ran between Birmingham and Augusta streets" between Lumina Avenue and the Atlantic Ocean.
"Homes to the east and west of the boardwalk were connected by individual boardwalks, both standing high on pilings."
Other Wrightsville Beach "side streets" of the day were also essentially boardwalks, Kuhn writes.
Ocean Avenue didn't have any railings, something that made an impression on Wrightsville Beach resident Steve Brown, who grew up going to his grandmother's cottage on Raleigh Street as young child in the late 1940s and early '50s.
"I remember walking on Ocean Avenue and being sure I didn't fall off because it had some elevation to it," Brown said.
Being so close to the ocean, Ocean Avenue was naturally susceptible to damage and was rebuilt more than once.
According to Ray McAllister's 2007 book "Wrightsville Beach: The Luminous Island," a nor'easter in November 1932 "collapsed most of the Ocean Avenue boardwalk into the sea; the rest was declared unsafe."
McAllister described Ocean Avenue as "a 500-yard-long 'street' far from the high water mark and several feet above the surface of the strand."
Even so, Ocean Avenue wasn't ultimately safe from the waves, or from a major 1934 fire that damaged many structures on Wrightsville Beach.
Still, as Kuhn notes, "Neither a rampage of storms nor a devastating fire halted the growth" in Wrightsville Beach of that era, including on Ocean Avenue. "Residents and business owners alike simply rebuilt, bigger and better."
After Ocean Avenue was destroyed once again — in 1954 by Hurricane Hazel, along with all of the houses on its eastern side closest to the ocean — the town and its residents didn't rebuild, consigning the boardwalk to a bygone era of Wrightsville Beach history.
John Staton is the arts and culture reporter for the StarNews. You can reach him at jstaton@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: The Wrightsville Beach Boardwalk? There used to be one long ago.
