BERLIN– From an outsider’s perspective, Berlin can seem like a town built inside of a snow globe.
Are the shop and restaurant owners that line Main Street – who perpetually shake your hand and ask how your day was – really that friendly? Just many bathtub and high heel races, fiddler’s conventions and Victorian jubilees, music festivals, art strolls and free concerts on the lawn can a town of a few thousand possibly sustain? What, exactly, makes America’s coolest small town seem so – for lack of a better word – cool?
There isn’t really a singular answer – or a singular architect behind modern-day Berlin – but the story that is most-often repeated suggests several people working together over a period of decades brought the town back from the edge of extiction.
Berlin, a name that came, possibly by accident, from a popular inn formerly located on Burley Street, was once the peach capital of the world and home to a thriving railroad hub.
“Harrison’s Nurseries were the world’s largest peach nursery business in the 1920’s,” said Calvin B. Taylor House Museum curator Susan Taylor. “They had over 3,000 acres all over the shore with these nurseries. They raised all types of peaches and fruit trees and evergreens and shipped all over the world.”
Phillips Cannery was active in the 1940’s and 50’s. Union Station, which once stood near the Berlin library, fed two major railroads. “Drummers,” or businessmen sent in to drum up business, were ubiquitous.
When a peach blight struck the town in the 1960’s, the agricultural industry dried up and land and business owners, including the Harrisons, began moving to Ocean City to invest in hotels and the booming tourism industry.
The Atlantic Hotel, the crown jewel of the town, fell into disrepair. The railroad ceased to run and the drummers fell silent. Main Street became a virtual ghost town.
“There was a lot of empty storefronts when I was younger,” Taylor said. “If you lived in Berlin you’d go to church and get groceries and go to the post office, and that was pretty much what you did. You had the big grocery store and the old Acme building … there were a couple of clothing places like Style Guide, but most of the shopping was done elsewhere, in Salisbury.”
“Families and farmers would come in on Friday nights, go to the bank and cash their check, and go to the grocery store and the drug store and the clothing store,” said Patty Falck, owner of Ta-Da. “Everything was there, but it was there for locals – it wasn’t geared towards tourists at all.
“There was a huge difference between Berlin and Ocean City,” Falck continued. “People did not know about us. I remember the first time my husband talked about building in town, I said, ‘there’s no way in hell I’m going to live in Berlin.’”
At the same time, Ocean City was the epitome of opportunity.
“In the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s you could put money in Ocean City and you had to be one of the worst businessmen in the world to lose money,” Mayor Gee Williams said.
By the late 1970’s Berlin was facing what Williams called, “a near-death experience.”
“There were more stores that were closed or boarded up on Main Street than were open,” he said. “The town knew it was in trouble. The population actually dropped in Berlin between 1960 and 1970 while the rest of the country was exploding with population. It was unheard of.”
Charles “Buddy” Jenkins, owner of Jolly Roger Amusement Parks, said the town had collapsed.
“It was down to about 1,200 or 1,500 people – today it’s over 4,000,” he said. “It collapsed because of the bypass around it, just like all the other areas collapsed.
“In the center of town you had an old, magnificent hotel in the Atlantic Hotel that, in its day, had been a wonderful place,” Jenkins continued. “It was rodent infested – there was a homeless man or two living in there, and whole town was down, down, down. People couldn’t find a way to make a living; shops and stores were vacant.”
“It ended up being nothing but derelicts and drunks, basically, sleeping in the hallways,” Falck said. “And then a group of businessmen came along and said, ‘okay, we need to do something.’ It was the movers and shakers of Berlin. They put the money up for a full renovation. Ed Hammond, who passed away a few years ago, and his former wife, who were our local historians – they were the ones who were very particular about what went into the hotel and getting it back to what it looked like.”
Jenkins was part of the movement of ten local businessmen who joined together to purchase and rehabilitate the town, beginning with the Atlantic Hotel.
“We poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore it,” he said. “We restored it to its natural historic ability; we got a historical architect, we got a historical designation, and we had to maintain it the same way.”
Slowly, a sense of hope and purpose began to creep back into the town.
“Little by little you began to see people that were affected by that degree of optimism,” Jenkins said. “They had their share of failures and success – some of the shops that they originally thought might work had to change what they were selling – but little, by little, by little that grew and grew, and self-confidence came back, and more people said, ‘I want to come and try that.’”
The revival of the Atlantic Hotel led to a town-wide restoration movement. Historic buildings that had fallen into disrepair, including the Renaissance Building and the Taylor House, were given a new life.
“The Atlantic Hotel was the beginning of that,” Taylor said. “It seems like once things got going a lot of things took off. We started as a foundation in November of 1981, and at that time nobody had been in the house for a while. The town was thinking of tearing it down and bulldozing all the trees.
“In the 1970s it had been the style to tear things down, and then everything switched over,” Taylor continued. We were lucky to have a group of Berlin businessmen that were able work on that switch.”
At the same time, a different kind of business began popping up in Berlin. Terry Sexton’s Treasure Chest – once a 5 and 10 Cent Store – was the first of its kind. Then Debbie Frene turned the old IGA Grocery store into Victorian Charm, and Kate Patton resurrected the Globe Theater. Businesses that were the antithesis of the cookie-cutter chain stores that had once dominated Main Street laid the groundwork for dozens of shops and restaurants that would follow in their footsteps.
Falck – who had once balked at the idea of owning a business in Berlin – opened Ta-da inside her husband’s construction office just off Main Street.
“I came in one day in November and said, ‘I have good news and bad; the good news is I want to open up a business – the bad news is I want to do it here in your office, and the worst news is I want to do it in 30 days,’” Falck said. “And in 30 days we moved him to the back of the building and I took the two small front rooms and painted my heart out and opened a business.
“It was a struggle,” Falck continued. “I was back there for 13 years and I was promoting myself like crazy because people don’t get off the main street. But little by little we started seeing more things coming along.”
A little more than decade after the restoration movement began, movie studios started taking notice of Berlin. Thousands of people lined the street for the chance to be an extra in “Runaway Bride” in the late 1990’s. “Tuck Everlasting” followed a few years later.
Then, an outgoing mayor with a positive attitude and a part-time economic development director took the town to the next level.
“The biggest change was probably Gee Williams and Michael Day,” Falck said. “I know when Michael first came into town there were two people that wanted to fire him before he was even given a chance. Thank goodness no one paid attention to that and they let him proceed. Quietly he did what he needed to do.”
Day found grant money, convinced businesses to pool their resources to promote the town as a unit, and initiated a SWOT analysis with merchants, examining the town’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
“The exercise was to get everybody on the same page, working in the same direction and start pulling things together,” he said. “At that time the chamber and the town and the merchant’s association was pretty much up in the air, but I think that’s when we started working together and having a direction that we all wanted to go in.
“The events had started by then, but it was still a little fractured,” Day continued. “We started having merchant meetings at the Globe every week until I wore them down and made them start following directions. They finally said, ‘can we stop meeting every week?’ and I said, ‘if you start following the plan.’”
Berlin officially earned a Main Street designation in 2008. Day was hired full time the following year.
“When we were offered the designation of a Main Street it came with a financial package if the town government agreed to match it, and the town government did,” Sexton said. “I feel like that was one of the first times in a long time that the town government was doing something for the businesses. That’s what sparked a lot of interest from everybody, because we were going to have this new designation – the town was going to be working with us – and we would have some money to get some projects done that we had been wanting to do for years but didn’t have the money for it.”
“Terry said she would be the chair of the program, and she did a fabulous job of keeping everybody on track and doing it right,” Day said.
Day helped secure facade grants through community legacy programs, bringing in money to further restore the downtown. Berlin was officially designated as an Arts and Entertainment District.
“It gave a little more pride for the property owners,” Day said. “Some of them had a stake downtown but they weren’t downtown – they were absentee owners. Those grants made them realize they wanted to fix their buildings up, and I think that’s when the Berlin pride started happening.”
Around that time, Williams called another merchant meeting, this time pitching a concept he called “community capitalism.”
“No one had to sign a commitment; no one was forced to do anything, but by just talking about it roughly five years ago – what would happen if all the businesses started supporting each other?” Williams said. “I’ve lived here most of my life. For as long as I could remember, no matter what kind of business it was on Main Street, most people worried about how much the neighbor next door made. If they made $100 more or $20 more that day – or if they had three more customers. I said, ‘this is small thinking. Why don’t we try the idea that if you can’t help somebody and you don’t have what they’re looking for and you’ve done everything reasonable to help them, see if somebody else in town can help them, so when they leave town their needs have been met.’ Plus, I think they’ll probably remember you more than the person they bought from. And almost everybody agreed.”
Roughly 30 business owners were in attendance during the meeting.
“I said to them, ‘I hope you realize you have just added 30 – at least – people to your business. And guess what? It’s not costing you a damned dime,’” Williams said. “The concept became known as ‘everybody act as a concierge to everyone else.’ And believe me, they took it to heart.”
Several new events were created that both celebrated Berlin’s heritage and appealed to tourists who had become accustomed to ignoring the town during the drive to Ocean City.
“When we were researching one of our current exhibits we read 50 years of newspapers just to see what kinds of different things were going on, and one thing we found was the Harrisons used to have this big festival for the peaches, and that’s how we got the Peach Festival going again,” Taylor said. “We wanted to bring back one of those old festival events. They had thousands of people come and they had a big picnic on the lawn of the Harrison House, had horticultural society meetings, and talked about the peach crop. That’s what we started with.”
Most agree the town’s success was a long time coming.
“I don’t know if it was an epiphany moment or not, or whether it was the realization that a group working together was going to be much more successful than individual shops trying it on its own, especially when you’re in a small town like that,” Falck said.
“It’s been a long progression,” said Day. “It certainly wasn’t all me in the start. It was when the businessmen started Renaissance Plaza and then did the hotel restoration. But nine years ago is when I think it started picking up a lot of steam and the snowballs really started to grow.”
“It happened because the community came together instead of like a lot of places where everybody turned cutthroat and it was every man for himself,” Williams said. “Here it’s ‘what’s best for the family first.’ And if you agree with that you will succeed here, you will be happy here and you will have a lot to look forward to.”
Decades of work and cooperation went into making Berlin cool again, and many of the key players insist the town is still in it for the long haul.
“To this day we still have people that say, ‘I’ve been going to Ocean City for 20 years and I’ve never been to Berlin unti, now,’ which is mind boggling,” Falck said. “It still does happen. We still have room to grow.”
“We have a lot of people who come who don’t know about the (“Coolest Small Town”) designation but just heard about the town, and as somebody at one point said, that’s what made us the coolest,” said Sexton. “We were already cool because people were talking about us before we got the designation, but this is a wonderful tool to be able to go forward.
“Ninety-eight percent of the people that come to Berlin come back, because they like what we have to offer,” Sexton continued. “As long as we keep the momentum going and keep the Main Street what it is, I think people will continue to come.”
Cooperation – from the 10 businessmen who helped restore the Atlantic, to the dozens that helped put the town’s Main Street in the national spotlight – will more than likely be an essential component of future success.
“I’ve always thought, I can advertise my store and people will come for what I have – we can do our individual things – but if you want to advertise Berlin more people will come for the town than they will for one store,” Frene said.
Are the shop and restaurant owners that line Main Street – who perpetually shake your hand and ask how your day was – really that friendly? Just many bathtub and high heel races, fiddler’s conventions and Victorian jubilees, music festivals, art strolls and free concerts on the lawn can a town of a few thousand possibly sustain? What, exactly, makes America’s coolest small town seem so – for lack of a better word – cool?
There isn’t really a singular answer – or a singular architect behind modern-day Berlin – but the story that is most-often repeated suggests several people working together over a period of decades brought the town back from the edge of extiction.
Berlin, a name that came, possibly by accident, from a popular inn formerly located on Burley Street, was once the peach capital of the world and home to a thriving railroad hub.
“Harrison’s Nurseries were the world’s largest peach nursery business in the 1920’s,” said Calvin B. Taylor House Museum curator Susan Taylor. “They had over 3,000 acres all over the shore with these nurseries. They raised all types of peaches and fruit trees and evergreens and shipped all over the world.”
Phillips Cannery was active in the 1940’s and 50’s. Union Station, which once stood near the Berlin library, fed two major railroads. “Drummers,” or businessmen sent in to drum up business, were ubiquitous.
When a peach blight struck the town in the 1960’s, the agricultural industry dried up and land and business owners, including the Harrisons, began moving to Ocean City to invest in hotels and the booming tourism industry.
The Atlantic Hotel, the crown jewel of the town, fell into disrepair. The railroad ceased to run and the drummers fell silent. Main Street became a virtual ghost town.
“There was a lot of empty storefronts when I was younger,” Taylor said. “If you lived in Berlin you’d go to church and get groceries and go to the post office, and that was pretty much what you did. You had the big grocery store and the old Acme building … there were a couple of clothing places like Style Guide, but most of the shopping was done elsewhere, in Salisbury.”
“Families and farmers would come in on Friday nights, go to the bank and cash their check, and go to the grocery store and the drug store and the clothing store,” said Patty Falck, owner of Ta-Da. “Everything was there, but it was there for locals – it wasn’t geared towards tourists at all.
“There was a huge difference between Berlin and Ocean City,” Falck continued. “People did not know about us. I remember the first time my husband talked about building in town, I said, ‘there’s no way in hell I’m going to live in Berlin.’”
At the same time, Ocean City was the epitome of opportunity.
“In the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s you could put money in Ocean City and you had to be one of the worst businessmen in the world to lose money,” Mayor Gee Williams said.
By the late 1970’s Berlin was facing what Williams called, “a near-death experience.”
“There were more stores that were closed or boarded up on Main Street than were open,” he said. “The town knew it was in trouble. The population actually dropped in Berlin between 1960 and 1970 while the rest of the country was exploding with population. It was unheard of.”
Charles “Buddy” Jenkins, owner of Jolly Roger Amusement Parks, said the town had collapsed.
“It was down to about 1,200 or 1,500 people – today it’s over 4,000,” he said. “It collapsed because of the bypass around it, just like all the other areas collapsed.
“In the center of town you had an old, magnificent hotel in the Atlantic Hotel that, in its day, had been a wonderful place,” Jenkins continued. “It was rodent infested – there was a homeless man or two living in there, and whole town was down, down, down. People couldn’t find a way to make a living; shops and stores were vacant.”
“It ended up being nothing but derelicts and drunks, basically, sleeping in the hallways,” Falck said. “And then a group of businessmen came along and said, ‘okay, we need to do something.’ It was the movers and shakers of Berlin. They put the money up for a full renovation. Ed Hammond, who passed away a few years ago, and his former wife, who were our local historians – they were the ones who were very particular about what went into the hotel and getting it back to what it looked like.”
Jenkins was part of the movement of ten local businessmen who joined together to purchase and rehabilitate the town, beginning with the Atlantic Hotel.
“We poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore it,” he said. “We restored it to its natural historic ability; we got a historical architect, we got a historical designation, and we had to maintain it the same way.”
Slowly, a sense of hope and purpose began to creep back into the town.
“Little by little you began to see people that were affected by that degree of optimism,” Jenkins said. “They had their share of failures and success – some of the shops that they originally thought might work had to change what they were selling – but little, by little, by little that grew and grew, and self-confidence came back, and more people said, ‘I want to come and try that.’”
The revival of the Atlantic Hotel led to a town-wide restoration movement. Historic buildings that had fallen into disrepair, including the Renaissance Building and the Taylor House, were given a new life.
“The Atlantic Hotel was the beginning of that,” Taylor said. “It seems like once things got going a lot of things took off. We started as a foundation in November of 1981, and at that time nobody had been in the house for a while. The town was thinking of tearing it down and bulldozing all the trees.
“In the 1970s it had been the style to tear things down, and then everything switched over,” Taylor continued. We were lucky to have a group of Berlin businessmen that were able work on that switch.”
At the same time, a different kind of business began popping up in Berlin. Terry Sexton’s Treasure Chest – once a 5 and 10 Cent Store – was the first of its kind. Then Debbie Frene turned the old IGA Grocery store into Victorian Charm, and Kate Patton resurrected the Globe Theater. Businesses that were the antithesis of the cookie-cutter chain stores that had once dominated Main Street laid the groundwork for dozens of shops and restaurants that would follow in their footsteps.
Falck – who had once balked at the idea of owning a business in Berlin – opened Ta-da inside her husband’s construction office just off Main Street.
“I came in one day in November and said, ‘I have good news and bad; the good news is I want to open up a business – the bad news is I want to do it here in your office, and the worst news is I want to do it in 30 days,’” Falck said. “And in 30 days we moved him to the back of the building and I took the two small front rooms and painted my heart out and opened a business.
“It was a struggle,” Falck continued. “I was back there for 13 years and I was promoting myself like crazy because people don’t get off the main street. But little by little we started seeing more things coming along.”
A little more than decade after the restoration movement began, movie studios started taking notice of Berlin. Thousands of people lined the street for the chance to be an extra in “Runaway Bride” in the late 1990’s. “Tuck Everlasting” followed a few years later.
Then, an outgoing mayor with a positive attitude and a part-time economic development director took the town to the next level.
“The biggest change was probably Gee Williams and Michael Day,” Falck said. “I know when Michael first came into town there were two people that wanted to fire him before he was even given a chance. Thank goodness no one paid attention to that and they let him proceed. Quietly he did what he needed to do.”
Day found grant money, convinced businesses to pool their resources to promote the town as a unit, and initiated a SWOT analysis with merchants, examining the town’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
“The exercise was to get everybody on the same page, working in the same direction and start pulling things together,” he said. “At that time the chamber and the town and the merchant’s association was pretty much up in the air, but I think that’s when we started working together and having a direction that we all wanted to go in.
“The events had started by then, but it was still a little fractured,” Day continued. “We started having merchant meetings at the Globe every week until I wore them down and made them start following directions. They finally said, ‘can we stop meeting every week?’ and I said, ‘if you start following the plan.’”
Berlin officially earned a Main Street designation in 2008. Day was hired full time the following year.
“When we were offered the designation of a Main Street it came with a financial package if the town government agreed to match it, and the town government did,” Sexton said. “I feel like that was one of the first times in a long time that the town government was doing something for the businesses. That’s what sparked a lot of interest from everybody, because we were going to have this new designation – the town was going to be working with us – and we would have some money to get some projects done that we had been wanting to do for years but didn’t have the money for it.”
“Terry said she would be the chair of the program, and she did a fabulous job of keeping everybody on track and doing it right,” Day said.
Day helped secure facade grants through community legacy programs, bringing in money to further restore the downtown. Berlin was officially designated as an Arts and Entertainment District.
“It gave a little more pride for the property owners,” Day said. “Some of them had a stake downtown but they weren’t downtown – they were absentee owners. Those grants made them realize they wanted to fix their buildings up, and I think that’s when the Berlin pride started happening.”
Around that time, Williams called another merchant meeting, this time pitching a concept he called “community capitalism.”
“No one had to sign a commitment; no one was forced to do anything, but by just talking about it roughly five years ago – what would happen if all the businesses started supporting each other?” Williams said. “I’ve lived here most of my life. For as long as I could remember, no matter what kind of business it was on Main Street, most people worried about how much the neighbor next door made. If they made $100 more or $20 more that day – or if they had three more customers. I said, ‘this is small thinking. Why don’t we try the idea that if you can’t help somebody and you don’t have what they’re looking for and you’ve done everything reasonable to help them, see if somebody else in town can help them, so when they leave town their needs have been met.’ Plus, I think they’ll probably remember you more than the person they bought from. And almost everybody agreed.”
Roughly 30 business owners were in attendance during the meeting.
“I said to them, ‘I hope you realize you have just added 30 – at least – people to your business. And guess what? It’s not costing you a damned dime,’” Williams said. “The concept became known as ‘everybody act as a concierge to everyone else.’ And believe me, they took it to heart.”
Several new events were created that both celebrated Berlin’s heritage and appealed to tourists who had become accustomed to ignoring the town during the drive to Ocean City.
“When we were researching one of our current exhibits we read 50 years of newspapers just to see what kinds of different things were going on, and one thing we found was the Harrisons used to have this big festival for the peaches, and that’s how we got the Peach Festival going again,” Taylor said. “We wanted to bring back one of those old festival events. They had thousands of people come and they had a big picnic on the lawn of the Harrison House, had horticultural society meetings, and talked about the peach crop. That’s what we started with.”
Most agree the town’s success was a long time coming.
“I don’t know if it was an epiphany moment or not, or whether it was the realization that a group working together was going to be much more successful than individual shops trying it on its own, especially when you’re in a small town like that,” Falck said.
“It’s been a long progression,” said Day. “It certainly wasn’t all me in the start. It was when the businessmen started Renaissance Plaza and then did the hotel restoration. But nine years ago is when I think it started picking up a lot of steam and the snowballs really started to grow.”
“It happened because the community came together instead of like a lot of places where everybody turned cutthroat and it was every man for himself,” Williams said. “Here it’s ‘what’s best for the family first.’ And if you agree with that you will succeed here, you will be happy here and you will have a lot to look forward to.”
Decades of work and cooperation went into making Berlin cool again, and many of the key players insist the town is still in it for the long haul.
“To this day we still have people that say, ‘I’ve been going to Ocean City for 20 years and I’ve never been to Berlin unti, now,’ which is mind boggling,” Falck said. “It still does happen. We still have room to grow.”
“We have a lot of people who come who don’t know about the (“Coolest Small Town”) designation but just heard about the town, and as somebody at one point said, that’s what made us the coolest,” said Sexton. “We were already cool because people were talking about us before we got the designation, but this is a wonderful tool to be able to go forward.
“Ninety-eight percent of the people that come to Berlin come back, because they like what we have to offer,” Sexton continued. “As long as we keep the momentum going and keep the Main Street what it is, I think people will continue to come.”
Cooperation – from the 10 businessmen who helped restore the Atlantic, to the dozens that helped put the town’s Main Street in the national spotlight – will more than likely be an essential component of future success.
“I’ve always thought, I can advertise my store and people will come for what I have – we can do our individual things – but if you want to advertise Berlin more people will come for the town than they will for one store,” Frene said.