Simms Restaurant, Ocean City, NJ

In 1990, Miriam Simms Piper wrote -

   "My father, Floyd C. Simms, had opened a delicatessen about 1914 on the east side of Asbury Avenue, near 8th Street, in the building that later housed Barrett Printers, next to the bank. The following year, having already begun to add tables and chairs to accommodate his customers, he moved to the boardwalk, renting the comer store of the old Doughty block at 8th Street. In successive summers, as his business grew, he began to absorb and utilize some of Mrs. Doughty's bath-house cubicles, for a price, of course."

"About 1918 a beautiful building at Moorlyn Terrace — an elegant ice cream parlor with oak floors, walls of mirrors, and white and green tiling, art deco windows and hanging light bowls festooned in copper — became available and my father, with mother's urging, went out on a limb to buy this graceful piece of property. By the way, it survived the 1927 fire because of the corrugated iron 'fire wall' of the old Strand Theatre, which stood in the middle of the boardwalk block between; Moorlyn Terrace and 9th Street. The restaurant also survived the fire of about [1937] that destroyed the old Strand but was again contained by the fire walls. (Does anyone remember Mr. Seaman at the organ there?)

That same eventful fall of 1927 my father suffered severe injuries to his leg in an automobile accident on the White Horse Pike and spent the following spring on crutches and supervising the 'rolling forward' of Simms Restaurant to front the new boardwalk built some 150 feet seaward of the old."