Living in the North End
The North End of Ocean City runs from North Street, where The Gardens begins, south to about Sixth Street where Ocean City High School sits. It is the widest range of housing anywhere on the island inside one boundary — Victorian cottages, duplexes, condo buildings, weekly rental multi-families and beachfront, sometimes on the same block. It is also the one part of town where the boardwalk ends rather than defines things. North of Sixth Street the boards stop, the crowds thin out, and the island turns residential.
This is where Ocean City began. In September 1879 four Methodist ministers — Ezra B. Lake, James Lake, S. Wesley Lake and William Burrell — met under a cedar tree at Sixth and Asbury and agreed to build a Christian seaside resort on what was then called Peck's Beach. That tree is preserved today inside the Ocean City Tabernacle, and the Tabernacle stands on the block between Fifth and Sixth Streets, Asbury and Wesley, where the original 1881 auditorium was built. The Association began selling lots in May of 1880 in the northern part of the island, centered on the camp meeting ground. Every other lot between Fifth and Sixth Street, ocean to bay, was set aside as parkland — which is why that strip is still green on the zoning map a hundred and forty-odd years later.
The result is that the North End holds the island's historic core. The Ocean City Residential Historic District — 169 properties across roughly forty-five acres, bounded loosely by Third and Eighth Streets and Central and Ocean Avenues — went onto the National Register in 2003. The stock is Queen Anne, Folk Victorian, Gothic Revival and Italianate from the 1880s and 1890s, with Colonial Revival and Craftsman filling in the last lots by the late 1920s. Scotch Hall at 435 Wesley Avenue, built in 1881 and once owned by Ezra Lake, is one of the key contributing properties. Buying into the district in the 1880s meant agreeing to the Association's moral code, and forfeiting the property if you broke it. Nothing else on this coast has that concentration of nineteenth-century houses still standing and still lived in.
Then there are the Places. Cutting across the North End are short streets named Park, Brighton, St. Charles, St. James, Pennlyn, Stenton, Plymouth, Delancey, Walton, Lincoln and Pelham, alongside Corinthian and Wayne Avenues. Read that list out loud and you are reading Philadelphia — Delancey Place, Corinthian Avenue, Stenton, Penllyn, Pelham. The people who built this end of the island came down from the city and named the streets after home. The Places are mostly one block deep, mostly duplex and small multi-family, and they are the classic Ocean City weekly rental product: two units, one owner, one week at a time, generation after generation.
The zoning here is more varied than anywhere else in town, and it matters when you buy. Single-family districts sit a block from multi-family districts, with commercial and shore-planned nodes worked in around Atlantic Avenue and the Places. The practical effect is that two houses four hundred feet apart can have completely different futures — one can be rebuilt as a duplex and one cannot. Condo product runs the full range too: 500 Bay on the bay side at Fifth, Brighton Place and Pennlyn Place on the streets they are named for. The entry into Ocean City ownership is often here, and so is the beachfront.
Now the honest part. The North End is the erosion end of the island. It faces Great Egg Harbor Inlet, it takes the worst of the northeasters, and after a run of storms in 2025 some north end beaches were closed outright. What offsets it is that this stretch gets more attention than any other: Ocean City has partnered with the Army Corps of Engineers on beach and dune restoration since 1992, sand is dredged from a borrow area off the inlet and pumped back onto these beaches on a recurring cycle, and the jetties at Fifth and Seventh Streets hold the rebuilt beach in place. Buying up here means accepting that the beach in front of you is a maintained beach. It also means the widest sand on the island in the years right after a rebuild.
A quiet marker of how much this shoreline has moved: the restored United States Life-Saving Station at Fourth Street and Atlantic Avenue was built in the 1880s close to the water and now sits roughly a quarter mile back from it. The station is still standing and still one of the best things to walk to up here. Past it, the island narrows toward the inlet and the Ocean City–Longport Bridge, which is the back way off the island and the reason north end owners get to Margate and Longport in ten minutes while everyone else queues for the causeway.
Schools sit right on the southern boundary. Ocean City School District runs all three of its schools on the island, and Ocean City High School — which also takes students from Longport across the inlet — is at Sixth Street, walkable from most of the North End. Add the Asbury Avenue downtown a few blocks south, the historic churches along the West and Bay Avenue blocks, and the classic beach bungalows tucked through the numbered streets, and you have the part of Ocean City that functions as an actual neighborhood in February. For the front row see beachfront, and for buildings across the whole island start with the full Ocean City condo market.
