Ohio’s Put-In-Bay gearing up for Memorial Day visitors

Owner of multiple stores on the Lake Erie island is preparing for tourism’s return.

The island community of Put-In-Bay, Ohio, is ready for Memorial Day Weekend visitors, after many weeks of not allowing visitors on the island. The Lake Erie community located on South Bass Island, about 35 miles from Toledo, Ohio, is a popular summer tourist destination known for its shopping, lodging, dining and water recreation.

Many visitors take a ferry to get to and from this and neighboring islands, but during Ohio’s Stay at Home Order, only residents, property owners, essential businesses and service providers were allowed to come to the island. The order started March 24. It wasn’t until May 11 that Put-In-Bay started allowing visitors.

Home Port, a nautical gift store in Put-In-Bay, Ohio, was able to stay open as an essential business during Ohio's Stay at Home Order because it is connected to Island Hardware, the community's only hardware store.

Chris Cooper is co-owner of several stores on the island, including its only hardware store, Island Hardware. He also is co-owner of Home Port, a gift store that focuses on nautical home decor. Because Home Port was connected to the hardware store, considered an essential business, it did not close like much other retail on the island. But with no tourists allowed on the island, traffic was noticeably down.

“We were never really closed because we were deemed essential, but there really was no gift shopping during that time,” he said.

Island Hardware and Home Port began offering curbside pickup and delivery to customers on the island and limited customers inside the store to 20 at a time. The staff is also required to wear masks.

Because of the slow store traffic during the island closure, Cooper decided to put Home Port’s gift selection online. He created www.compasscoastal.com and the results exceeded his expectations.

“It has worked. We were kind of amazed to see the sales coming through on it,” he says, adding, “It’s always something we’ve wanted to do so the closure kind of forced us to do it.”

The COVID-19 pandemic also affected merchandise coming into the stores. Some orders were delayed while some were intentionally put on hold. Suppliers were willing to work with Cooper on the timing of shipments.

“Now that things are open, we’ve told them all to go ahead and send,” he says.

Resortwear store, Dock 421, will open its doors for the first time this season on Memorial Day weekend in Put-In-Bay. The island recently opened back up to tourism and the store has brought on limited staff and is open reduced hours.

Copper is co-owner of three other stores on the island that will open to tourists on Memorial Day weekend: Dock 421, a resortwear shop; The Little Store, a jewelry store; and Happy Holidays, a souvenir Christmas ornament store. They are separate from the hardware store and their storefronts look like part of a seaside village, according to Cooper. Only a limited number of staff have been called back to work at these stores and hours will be restricted to start.

“There’s still a lot of unknown to it,” Cooper says about reopening. “It could be a large amount of people coming to the island or it could be no one comes.”

Either way, the stores will be prepared.

“We’re getting all the gift shops ready. If there are people, we want to be ready for them,” he says.

An announcement put forth by town officials stated, “Our island community is slowly reopening Put-in-Bay, Ohio. It is our promise to do everything we can to make everyone’s visit safe, family friendly and fun.”

Promoting Ohio tourism will be important for Cooper’s stores as people start coming out to the island again. TourismOhio, a state agency promoting tourism in the state, selected The Little Store to be featured in an upcoming commercial promoting Ohio tourism.

“They came in and wanted to shoot an ad to show how Ohio is getting through the pandemic and that there are still local, small businesses [to support],” Cooper says.

The commercial shoot took about an hour and the camera crews got pictures of staff holding signs and wearing masks. The commercial will air in either the Toledo or Cleveland markets.

“It was really a neat experience,” says Cooper.

So far, according to Cooper, there have not been any COVID-19 cases on the island. According to local reports, the island has no doctors, medical facilities and evacuation options are limited so an outbreak of coronavirus there could be difficult to manage.