By Max Kelly, OCNJDAILY
Ocean City’s historic homes will be showcased on Dec. 6 during the third annual Holiday House Tour, a three-hour, self-guided tour hosted by the community group OCNJ History & Culture.
From 5 to 8 p.m., participants can explore roughly a dozen historic homes and businesses at their own pace. Registered guests will check in at the Scarborough Inn to pick up wristbands and a list of participating sites.
The evening will conclude with a post-tour reception in the historic Flanders Hotel’s Garden Room.
“It feels like a true community event,” said Sne Avichal, a founding board member in the OCNJ History & Culture group and innkeeper at Scarborough Inn. “It’s almost like neighbors are just doing the tour for each other.”
Altogether, 400 tickets were available for the tour and are already nearly sold out. Tickets were marketed to subscribers of the Friends of OCNJ History & Culture newsletter, Avichal said.
The tour proved immensely popular from the start and could easily have exceeded 400 tickets, but the group capped sales because several of the homes are too small to accommodate larger crowds, he explained.
“We had requests for about 2,000 tickets, but we have a capacity problem,” Avichal said. “Some of these houses are a bit small, so we decided to cap it at 400. It’s busy, but it’s not hectic. I think anything more in some of these small homes would get overwhelmed.”
The Coastal Chateau is another historic property that will be showcased on the tour. It operates as a luxury boutique hotel at the corner of Sixth Street and Atlantic Avenue. (Photo courtesy of Sne Avichal)
Avichal said OCNJ History & Culture grew out of a Facebook page called “Ocean City Old Home Lovers,” whose members began gathering for porch parties he hosted at the historic Scarborough Inn. The meetups eventually inspired them to formalize the organization and begin hosting tours.
“After a handful of those porch parties, we got the idea of drumming up interest in old homes by having a holiday home tour,” Avichal said.
He pointed out that many tour-goers are surprised by the amount of historic homes Ocean City has and are often curious about the restoration work and maintenance done by the owners.
“Almost everybody, even people who are born and raised here, said they had no idea that Ocean City had this many homes that were historic,” Avichal said. “There’s a mythology that Ocean City used to have old homes, but they’re all mostly demolished and gone now.”
There are more than 1,300 homes in Ocean City that are at least 100 years old, Avichal noted. He said the majority of the homes featured in the tour are Victorian and Edwardian style, with some others being built in the 1920s and 1930s.
This year’s tour will wrap up with a reception in the Garden Room at the Flanders Hotel, featuring a hot chocolate bar, tea, snacks, and time for participants to interact with fellow historic-home enthusiasts and hosts. The Flanders is another historic landmark in town, built in 1923.
Avichal said OCNJ History & Culture won’t disclose the homes on this year’s tour in advance to prevent people from viewing them beforehand, but some of the businesses include the Scarborough Inn, the Flanders Hotel, Stainton’s, The Shoppes on Asbury inside the former Crown Bank building and the Coastal Chateau Hotel.
Ocean City has an extensive collection of historic homes. (Photo courtesy of Sne Avichal)
