THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, March 10, 1995 TAG: 9503090178
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 14 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL REED, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Eighty-eight years of memories collapsed under a wrecking machine's claw Monday as the Peppermint Beach Club was razed to make way for a parking lot.
The structure at 15th Street and Atlantic Avenue was the last of the resort's shingle-style buildings to remain standing on a shoreline dominated in the early 1900s by cottages and cottage inns.
Long a watering hole for the fun-loving old and young, the Peppermint once offered premier national musical entertainment such as Fats Domino, Roy Orbison and Joey D and the Starlighters.
In recent years it catered to largely local bands and offered beer, soft drinks and snacks to summertime strollers on the Boardwalk outside its back door.
Time had caught up with the Peppermint. Its long, sloping roof line sagged perceptibly in the middle, and Elkan Lachman, whose family owns controlling interest in it, decided to tear it down.
``That building was about to go,'' Lachman said Tuesday, eyeing the rubble where the structure once stood. ``There were two fires in it in the '50s and it was going down hill.''
The contents of the defunct club were auctioned off Feb. 9, prompting another flood of nostalgia among Beach old-timers who, in the last two years, have seen the demolition of the aging Avamere and Halifax hotels at 26th Street and the Oceanfront, and the Dome, the geodesic structure at 20th Street and Pacific Avenue.
That structure was erected by officials of the old resort town of Virginia Beach as a convention center.
The Dome, like the Peppermint, became renowned for the galaxy of all-star entertainers that passed through its doors in its early years.
Names like Louie Armstrong, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Beach Boys, Ray Charles and Johnny Mathis lit up the Dome marquee in those days.
The Dome too bit the dust to make way for an expansion of an existing parking lot.
The Lachman family also has controlling interest in the Virginia Beach Fishing Pier, just across the Boardwalk from the Peppermint. ILLUSTRATION: After leveling the Peppermint Beach Club on Monday, workers
continued to clean up the debris Tuesday. Time had caught up with
the building at 15th Street and Atlantic Avenue. Its long, sloping
roof line sagged perceptibly in the middle. ``That building was
about to go,'' said Elkan Lachman, whose family owns controlling
interest in it.
Staff photo by
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT
by CNB