Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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72 Amazing prices, endless options. LiquorandWineOutlets.com Please Drink Responsibly With thousands of your favorites, you're sure to discover something new every time you stop by one of our 77 stores - and you'll never pay sales tax. Visit liquorandwineoutlets.com before you plan your journey and sign up for our Email Extras to save even more. House, The Central House, and The Ocean View House— all catered to summertime visitors seeking reprieve from hot, crowded cities. Sadly, not one remains today. THE LINE Two of The Willows' most popular attractions still stand: E. W. Hobbs and the Salem Lowe restaurant. The late Buddy Hobbs's family has been selling popcorn, fla- vored popcorn bars, saltwater taffy, and other refresh- ments on "The Line" since the 1890s. Also once found on The Line—a commercial strip of restaurants and amusements—were the Whip, Dodgem Junior bumper cars, and a shooting gallery, all of which are now just distant memories, though the penny arcade continues to draw a crowd. Curiously—and a sign of the times—the building that now sits at the very end of The Line origi- nally housed a carousel powered by a mule tethered to a central pole in the basement. THE FOOD In 1874, thanks to the pioneering efforts of Judge Chase, who opened The Willow House, Restaurant Row gained a footing. Located just beyond a bend in the road, his two-and-a-half-story restaurant overlooked the harbor and served diners for over seven decades. Regrettably, Chase's place burned down in 1952. (The 78-year-old building was gone in a 20-minute midnight blaze.) By 1912, The Willow House had been joined by Ebsen's, Swenbeck's Park Cafe, and three other restau- rants, turning Restaurant Row into a fixture for nearly a century. Its demise was largely the result of a series of fires between 1952 and the mid-1970s. The Willows was once renowned for its shore din- ners, which featured fried fish, lobster, and chowder and could be found at any of the establishments that lined the Row. In 1941, Sallie Belle Cox, a Salem native and "self-proclaimed professor of fish, lobster, and cla- mology," published an article about the fish dinners. A trip to the Salem Willows for a shore dinner inevitably ended at Ebsen's, where Cox learned the secret behind the Row's famous fried fish: Before it was cooked in deep fat, the fish was dipped in "fancy buckeye corn- meal...no batter, no crumbs, no eggs." Perhaps most lauded is E. W. Hobbs, which has been in continuous operation and run by the same family since 1897. When current owner Priscilla Hobbs was a child, she watched her father and grandfather make their acclaimed buttered popcorn on the same century- old equipment that she and her brother, Charlie, use today. "I tell my grandkids to start learning those ma- in-depth PLACES