Making Room for a New Hotel in Its Midst

Chesapeake Beach Adapts to 72-Unit Facility Amid Rumors and Complaints

Terri Todd has become a spectacle.

She is watched by guests of the new hotel next door as they lounge on their balconies above the bay overlooking her house's waterfront deck in the town of Chesapeake Beach.

"It's just not the same as it used to be," said Todd, who has lived in her two-story clapboard house for five years.

Since it opened in March, the 72-room Chesapeake Beach Hotel -- built by Gerald Donovan, the town's mayor and one of its leading businessmen -- has generated a lot of chatter among townspeople. They have kept track of the traffic, worried about noise and exchanged rumors of gambling coming to Chesapeake Beach, a small town that once was a popular getaway for people living in Washington and Baltimore.

But Donovan said that's normal.

"I think that with anything that's new there's always a learning curve," he said.

The hotel will be joined on the local skyline this fall by the town's first high-rise -- the seven-story "Horizons on the Bay" condominium building just off the waterfront.

Chesapeake Beach, population 3,000, has not had a real hotel since the Belvedere closed in 1923, when the town was still in its heyday as a resort and gambling center. Some neighbors and local officials worry that the new hotel will bring in slot machines if they are legalized in Maryland.

"Everyone knows it was built for gambling," said Pat "Irish" Mahoney, a Town Council member and sometime Donovan critic. "The only way the hotel is going to succeed is if Mayor Donovan gets gambling down here."

Neighbors have raised concerns about noise, occasional trespassers and lights from the hotel and its parking lot, and some have called the hotel with complaints.

"A lot of people are mad because it blocks the bay view," said Kathy Miller, 44, as she watered her lawn a few houses away from the hotel. "There's light pollution, so you can't see the stars well at night."

But mainly, residents are afraid of gambling. "There's not much reason to come to the hotel if there's isn't gambling," said Barbara Fairchild, 68, another neighbor. That sentiment has persisted in town as the hotel was being planned and constructed over the past few years.

Throughout the process, Donovan has rejected such speculation, insisting that the new building fills a key need in the community: a hotel where visiting relatives can stay.

"There was never any consideration given to any form of gambling ever being put in the hotel," he said. "That's the unknown fear, and people like to spread those kind of unfounded rumors."