Ocean View in the Off-Season: Norfolk's Beach Gets Honest in November
Seven miles of Chesapeake Bay shoreline, a fishing pier, and a neighborhood built by streetcars. When the summer crowds leave, Ocean View belongs to Norfolk again.
Ocean View was a destination before Norfolk finished absorbing it: a streetcar suburb at the end of the line, with an amusement park that drew the whole region to its rides and dance pavilion for most of the twentieth century. The park is long gone. The beach — seven miles of Chesapeake Bay sand along the city's northern edge — never left.
The bay side is Ocean View's whole argument: calmer water than the oceanfront down the shore, sunsets that run the length of the beach, the long Ocean View Fishing Pier reaching into water that holds speckled trout and spot into the fall, and the maritime theater of the bay itself — tankers and container ships standing out past the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, naval traffic sliding along the horizon toward the ocean.
November belongs to the residents: the East Beach and Ocean View Beach Park lawns empty to dog walkers and kite-flyers, the pier's fall fishing stays honest as the water cools, and the neighborhood's cottages and new bay-front houses alike settle into the rhythm of a beach town in its working clothes. Shore Drive's restaurants do their winter trade on locals, which is the truest review a beach strip can get.
The city's investment in the shoreline — dune and beach nourishment, the parks' upkeep — is the unglamorous maintenance that keeps a bay beach a beach. Walk it this month at low tide in a northwest wind: hard light, empty sand, ships on the horizon. Ocean View in November is Norfolk's front porch with the company gone home — and the view, if anything, improves.
