A Seaside Arcadia: Phillips Crab House by Richard W. Walker
In May 1968, I began working as a cook at Phillips Crab House, a rambling faux-Tudor pile occupying an entire block in Ocean City. Opened in 1956 by Shirley and Brice Phillips, whose father owned a seafood-packing plant on Hoopers Island, the crab house expanded like a haphazard Lego project over the next decade as the Phillipses stitched new dining rooms and kitchens onto the original structure. Shirley decorated the restaurant’s dining rooms to her taste, creating a curiously unnautical, dark-wood Victorian in-
terior highlighted by Tiffany-style lamps and repurposed antique sewing machine tables. Somehow, it worked. The year 1968 was truly an annus horribilis. America was reeling. Revolution hung in the air like a cloud of tear gas. The Vietnam war was raging with no end in sight, the surging antiwar movement had taken to the streets and parts of America’s riot-torn cities were in ruins following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in early April. Eight weeks later, antiwar presidential candidate
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