Walk Asbury Avenue in February and you'll notice something odd about the block between 6th and 7th Street. Windows go papered over. Contractors' trucks idle at the curb. Old signage comes down before anyone announces what's replacing it. Ashley Gillian, who owns Beehive Studio right on that stretch, described watching it happen from her own shop window this past winter, calling it a season of "old signs came down and paper covered shop windows" while she waited, like everyone else, to find out what was coming.
By May, the answer showed up: Golden Hour moved into the space, and Payton Jewelry, already a familiar name to anyone who shops the Boardwalk, expanded into a bigger Asbury storefront and added bags and boots alongside its jewelry cases. That's not a one-year fluke. Gillian's own account of the block is blunt about the pattern: "the block between 6th and 7th Street has been the new up and coming block for a few years."
That's the part worth sitting with if you already live in Central Ocean City and walk this street more than you shop it. Asbury Avenue doesn't turn over evenly across its six downtown blocks. One stretch does almost all the churning. The rest of the corridor, running from 6th Street down to 18th between the boardwalk and the bay, holds onto the same handful of businesses year after year, some of them for decades. Knowing which is which tells you more about how this part of town actually works than any single storefront opening ever could.
The Hot Corner, And The Blocks It Isn't
The 6th-to-7th block isn't the only place seeing new faces this year, but it's the one where turnover has become a pattern rather than an occasional event. A few blocks south, at 1059 Asbury, Eastward opened in April as a new high-end boutique, taking its place across the street from two neighbors that have been drawing foot traffic for a while, Bungalow Bowls and Bookateria Two. That's a different kind of arrival than what's happening up at 6th and 7th. Eastward is one new shop dropped into an already-settled block. Golden Hour and Payton Jewelry's expansion are the latest entries in a stretch that seems to reinvent a storefront or two nearly every season.
If you've lived here a while, you've probably noticed this without naming it. The 6th-to-7th block is where you check to see what's new. The 700s, 900s, and 1300s are where you go because you already know what you'll find.
The Businesses That Don't Rotate
That second group has its own logic, and it isn't simply about age. At 1340 Asbury, Boyar's Food Market has been building sandwiches and trays of lasagna for well over a century, still run by the family, still doing the same two-months-a-year rush that owner Scott Ping described in blunt, grateful terms: "I used to always tell our children, we live in one of the best places in the world." A few doors from there, Johnny B Goode Ice Cream has been scooping for beachgoers for just past three decades now. Neither business sells anything a boutique down the block could substitute for. You don't switch sandwich counters the way you switch where you buy a sundress.
Further up, at 756 Asbury, the space that spent years as Sun Rose Words and Music didn't get carved up for something unrelated when the retail math on the avenue changed. Three Little Birds moved in carrying most of Sun Rose's original book stock, and the address now holds three retailers under one roof instead of one, but it never stopped being a place downtown residents go looking for a book. And at 944 Asbury, The Spotted Whale took a different approach to staying put: a complete remodel and a reopening as an upscale home goods shop, betting on reinvestment instead of relocation.
None of these four businesses avoided change. They just didn't hand the address to someone else. That's a meaningfully different kind of staying power than simply being old, and it's the real dividing line between the anchor blocks and the churn block. The shops that rotate on 6th-to-7th tend to sell things a shopper's loyalty moves easily between: jewelry, home decor, boutique clothing. The ones that don't rotate mostly sell something you eat, or something you'd have to actively decide to stop needing.
Here's how that split looks laid out block by block:
| Address / Block | Business | What's Notable |
|---|---|---|
| Between 6th & 7th St | Golden Hour, Payton Jewelry (expanded) | New arrivals this spring, in a block that turns over most years |
| 1059 Asbury Ave | Eastward | Opened April 2026, across from Bungalow Bowls and Bookateria Two |
| 756 Asbury Ave | Sun Rose Words and Music / Three Little Birds | Shared space rather than closed |
| 944 Asbury Ave | The Spotted Whale | Reopened after a full remodel |
| 1340 Asbury Ave | Boyar's Food Market | Family-run, over a century in business |
The Season Turns On The Same Weekend
There's a reason the papered windows and the finished storefronts both seem to line up with Memorial Day. Ocean City's official unlocking of the ocean and Business Persons Plunge happens on the beach beside the Music Pier every year, organized jointly by the Ocean City Regional Chamber of Commerce, the city, and the Beach Patrol. This year it landed on May 22, and the mood, weather aside, was upbeat. Mayor Jay Gillian, taking the plunge into a gray, windy ocean, offered the kind of optimism only a shore town mayor could get away with, calling the rough conditions a good sign because "a horrible Memorial Day means a great season."
It's a fitting coincidence, or maybe not a coincidence at all, that the same weekend the city ceremonially reopens the beach is roughly when a winter's worth of quiet renovation on Asbury Avenue gets its reveal. The storefronts that spent January and February behind paper tend to open their doors right around the same week the wooden key turns and the plunge happens. If you want to know what's new downtown, the week after Memorial Day is when you'll actually see it, not the week the paper first went up.
Why This Is Worth Knowing If You Already Live Here
None of this changes anything about buying or selling in Central Ocean City. It's more useful than that, in a smaller way. If you're walking your dog past a papered-over window near 6th and 7th in the dead of winter, you now have a reasonable guess about what happens next: something new, probably retail, probably open by Memorial Day. If you're walking past Boyar's or Johnny B Goode on the same route, you're not wondering anything. Some blocks are where the avenue experiments. Others are where it just keeps doing what's worked for a hundred years.
That's the kind of local knowledge that doesn't show up in a listing description, but it's exactly what makes a downtown corridor feel like a neighborhood instead of just a place to shop when you have out-of-town guests. If you want a fuller picture of what falls inside Central Ocean City's boundaries, from the boardwalk side to the bay, our Central Ocean City neighborhood guide lays it out block by block. And if the housing side of these same blocks interests you, from duplex rental income to who's actually buying in this part of town, we covered that separately in our piece on Central Ocean City's duplex market.
For everything else, from the next storefront to open on Asbury to the home that might put you two blocks from Boyar's, the Cheryl Huber Team has spent decades getting to know this stretch of town one block at a time. Find Your Perfect Shore Home.
