ELLICOTT CITY, Md. | Clinging atop a clothing store counter, Kitty Morgan watched in horror as a torrent ripped through Ellicott City’s historic Main Street.
Within hours, Ms. Morgan had no home and no job — both washed away in the midsummer devastation.
Six months later she celebrated the opening of her own “hippie shop,” Summer of Love, just three doors down from where she had escaped the flash flood.
“I always say, Ellicott City is like its own rainbow after the flood,” Ms. Morgan says. “It always comes back.”
Her new store is one of more than 70 businesses that have opened since July’s deluge, which left two people dead and many buildings severely damaged.
A photographer and self-described child of the ’60s, Ms. Morgan had been home on a break from pursuing an acting career in New York when the flood hit. Before last summer she had not planned on becoming a full-time business owner.
While in town she had worked at Zebop, the beloved hippie clothing store that inspired her own, and was living in one of the building’s second-floor apartments. After storm damage shuttered Zebop, she sought to salvage the free-spirited community the shop had brought to Main Street.
“I basically put my entire life on hold so that Ellicott City wouldn’t be without this,” Ms. Morgan says. “Because they loved it so much, and I loved it long before I ever worked there. I loved it as a customer, I loved it as a worker, and now I love it as a shop owner.”
Summer of Love sits at the low end of Main Street, close to the Patapsco River, where the worst of the floodwaters converged. Just outside its elaborately decorated display window, construction noise reverberates through vacant buildings, and visitors peer into the boarded-up storefronts of gutted shops and restaurants.
“It’s still depressing to walk through,” says Kim Pyle, who spends many of her afternoons shopping for antiques with her family on Main Street. “We tried to come back a few months ago, but it was too sad. It still feels like a ghost town.”
Founded 245 years ago, Ellicott City sits about 40 miles northwest of Washington, D.C., nestled between steep granite formations. This town of 66,000 has been prone to flooding for years — especially Main Street. Longtime residents and business owners have weathered several floods, but none as destructive as last summer’s since Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972.
For Sally Tennant, reopening her 36-year-old pottery and gift shop, Discoveries, has been grueling. Her store — one of the quirky charmers that define the shopping district — opened again in November, a feat she said would not have been possible without the help of volunteers.
“It was chaotic, and if it weren’t for them, we wouldn’t be open,” she said. “It’d probably be open in the next year or two if I’d had to do it by myself. But it probably would’ve killed me before I ever got it finished.”
Julia Sanger will reopen her artisan foods store, Park Ridge Trading Co., on Feb. 25. It first opened in June, less than two months before the flood, and its second opening feels like “a fresh start on top of a fresh start,” she said.
“When I think about where we were at this time last year, we’re still in that same place,” she said, standing among newly stocked displays of gourmet olive oil, spices and kitchenwares.
She and other store owners have found silver linings in the devastation, as merchants, residents and volunteers rallied together to rebuild Ellicott City.
“It’s kind of restored my faith in humanity — just the absolute generosity of people,” Ms. Sanger said.
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