Just before 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday in August, Lisa Soriano waited patiently near the entrance to Britt’s Donuts, a Carolina Beach Boardwalk fixture since 1939.
 
The doors wouldn’t open until 8:30 a.m., but Soriano, a Charlotte resident, didn’t want to take the chance of an even longer wait, especially after what she’d seen the day before when she rode her bicycle to the boardwalk.
 
“I was expecting a little bit of a line since they’re only open three days,” she said. “But it went around the building.”
 
Long lines are nothing new for Britt’s Donuts (shown right, photo by Logan Burke), which has garnered state and national attention for the popularity of its croissant-like, melt-in-your-mouth doughnuts, and the boardwalk in general has a long history of attracting locals and visitors. It’s a vintage piece of the area’s tourism industry, with a boardwalk in some form drawing people to Carolina Beach since 1887.
 
These days, the board part of the Carolina Beach Boardwalk stretches from a pay parking lot, where a motel used to be before Hurricane Florence led to its demolition, to a hotel that’s considered a catalyst for the rejuvenation of the historic landmark. The stores, restaurants and entertainment venues flank a paved area next to the raised boards.
 
The boardwalk hasn’t always been family-friendly or friendly at all to some, having gone through segregation, fires and a period of violent crime.
 
Vacant stores and properties in various states of disrepair littered the area in the 1980s, and bars moved in until there were 16 in two blocks, explained Elaine Henson, local historian and president of the Federal Point Historic Preservation Society. Federal Point was a peninsula until the 1930s when the federal government created the Intracoastal Waterway.
 
At one bar, the Long Branch Saloon, a fight broke out over a pool game and ended with one man being stabbed to death. Two more deaths followed.
 
“I would say that 1993 was the lowest point,” Henson said. “When you’ve got 16 bars, and two bars have topless dancers and another bar had three people killed in one year’s time – I mean, you can’t get much lower than that.”
 
As a historian, Henson acknowledges but doesn’t see the past as a hurdle. From the mid-1990s into the new century, residents and town officials began forming the building blocks that would lead to a successful reawakening of the landmark. Town zoning changed so there wouldn’t be so many bars clumped together.
 
Around 2003, when Duke Hagestrom and his family opened a bike rental shop before taking over The Fudgeboat in 2005, the boardwalk was still a little rough, but they took a leap of faith that things would change.

A boardwalk makeover push got rolling with the help of Hagestrom and then-mayor Dan Wilcox. In 2009, Henson said, the carnival rides that had disappeared in 1978 came back.
“It was the icing on the cake,” she wrote, in one of seven President’s Letter articles on the boardwalk, for the preservation society. “The family atmosphere was back.”
 
A $1.5 million boardwalk makeover took place in 2013.
 
“When the town renovated the classic boardwalk … they added showers, swings and other amenities to encourage more activity while retaining the classic vintage boardwalk feel that made it famous,” said Kim Hufham, president and CEO of the New Hanover County Tourism Development Authority, doing business as Wilmington and Beaches CVB.
 


“Perhaps the biggest shot in the arm,” Henson said, “was the announcement of the new Courtyard by Marriott hotel to be built on the boardwalk. It came at the perfect time and provided a catalyst for future development.”
 
Crews completed construction of the hotel in 2016. Then a Hampton Inn joined the mix.
 
“In recent years the Carolina Beach Boardwalk has become a centerpiece for the town’s tourism,” Hufham said. “It’s not only a place where visitors can shop and dine; during normal summer months the town brings in pop-up amusements and rides, and the Pleasure Island Chamber of Commerce hosts weekly concerts, fireworks and other special events.”
 
The boardwalk also usually has events outside the typical tourist season, including hosting visits with Santa and other holiday-themed amusements, Hufham said.
 
“In general, we’ve seen the boardwalk create tremendous foot traffic, and it’s the heart of our community really,” Hagestrom said. “It’s the central business district. We have our strip along [U.S]421, but if you ask anybody what’s our front porch or our living room for our community, it would be the boardwalk where we welcome everybody. … It flows right from the beach right into all the little mostly mom-and-pop shops that just kick and scream every year to try and stay afloat.”
 
The summer season events that drew a lot of foot traffic, including fireworks, had to be canceled in 2020 because of efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, and the arcade is closed.
 
“With this virus thing, it hasn’t been quite as many people down here, and the entertainment on the boardwalk was stopped this year because of the virus,” said Bobby Nivens, who owns Britt’s Donuts. “The main attraction is still there, of course – the boardwalk. People love to go out and walk up and down the boardwalk; a lot of shops are still open. There’s a few of them that had to close, but most of them are still open. It’s just not quite as busy at nighttime as it was.”
 
Still, the area’s beach towns, including Carolina Beach, saw a huge bump in May, June and July in the number of people occupying hotels and short-term rentals.
 
Tourism officials hoped the trend would continue into late summer and the fall crossover season. June's numbers, the latest available as of the beginning of September, showed Carolina Beach up 23%, Kure up more than 19% and Wrightsville Beach up nearly 7% in room occupancy tax figures compared to June 2019.
 
Besides Britt’s Donuts, another constant for the boardwalk is change.
 
Nearby projects have included, and will likely include in the future, mixed-use buildings with condominiums over restaurants and retail.
 
“It may change some,” Nivens said. “The land’s gotten so valuable, and people like building up over them and putting shops underneath.”
 
Hagestrom said, “You’re going to always go for the highest and best use of your property ... they’re going to want to maximize the value of it.”
 
But parking is an issue, he said. “You have to decide between retail or parking. You can’t park on the second level. Once upon a time, everybody talked about how the boardwalk would all go to the second level and there’d be parking underneath, retail above it and condos, what-have-you, above but that’s really never come to fruition. Most people have maintained keeping the retail on the bottom.”
 
The Fudgeboat’s building, 107 Carolina Beach Ave. N., is one of the few structures on the boardwalk that dates back to the 1930s, and it has just undergone remodeling. Hagestrom owns The Fudgeboat and Krazy Kones with his wife, Tracee, and his mother-in-law, Lou Belo, otherwise known as The Fudge Lady.


 
“The project at The Fudgeboat this year was quite a bit to bite off. We are content to enjoy the remodel,” Duke Hagestrom said. “We did always say if there was another project for the future of The Fudgeboat, it would involve putting something above it like a condo.”
 
Whatever the future holds for the boardwalk in Carolina Beach, Henson, who used to give walking history tours of the landmark before COVID-19, said she knows one thing.
 
“It’s had a very interesting history, but if you look back on it, you see how it grew and changed,” Henson said. “If it’s going to survive, it’s going to have to continue to grow and change.”