Sea Swallows Last House Of Scam-Tastic Cedar Island, VA Island Development - Grist
Richard F. Hall will land in the history books, if he makes it at all, alongside dreamers and hucksters who sold swampland in Florida and on parched mesa tops in New Mexico. Hall was the developer who tried to build a beach town on Cedar Island, a patch of wind- and wave-tossed sand off the Virginia coast.
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Once, Cedar was touted as the mid-Atlantic’s next premier beach resort. “Ocean City, Virginia,” it was dubbed in a glowing, 1950s sales brochure published by developer Richard F. Hall. “The new Chesapeake Bay Bridge now nearing completion brings the great cities of Washington and Baltimore within pleasant driving distance,” Hall wrote in 1951.
He envisioned a bridge to the island from the Accomack County mainland and a highway running the length of Cedar. Without either one, Hall sold some 2,000 lots … The bridge and the highway never materialized. Still, Hall’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, and her developer husband, sold more land on the island in the 1980s, even as the houses that people built there washed, one by one, into the sea.
Those who had the means moved their vacation homes away from the advancing surf. A few of them hung on for decades. But now comes the news that the sea has swallowed the last house standing on Cedar Island.
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http://grist.org/climate-energy/sea-swallows-the-last-house-in-doomed-virginia-beach-town/
