by Mary Reid Barrow

The “Party House” that David Costenbader and his pals built on the Lynnhaven River was the centerpiece of an idyllic childhood not seen often these days.

Fishing, duck hunting, waterskiing, swimming at the “swimming hole” and best of all partying at the Party House were all part of his growing up in the 50s.

“Our summers were spent on the river,” he said. “We had boats—like being in heaven really—no problems, no crime, no drugs.”

A retired commercial real estate agent, David reminisced about the good old days recently at Westminster-Canterbury where he and wife Nadine have lived for several years.

In 1952 his family moved from Norfolk to a home on the Lynnhaven River at the end of Little Neck Road. David was 11 and Virginia Beach Boulevard, a three lane road.

“There was always something to do, day or night,” David said.

He and his pals dug clams and trapped muskrats to sell to make gas and oil money for the little 25-horsepower motors on their boats.

The idea of the Party House was conceived after David and his friend Reese Smith set out to build a duck blind on the shallow water of a sandbar near his home on the Western Branch across from Witchduck Point.

“We wanted a luxurious blind,” David said, with a chuckle. “But we built it too big to bush with pine.”

Duck blinds are concealed with greenery to hide the hunters and the boys found it would take way too many pine boughs to cover the mansion of a blind they had built.

So, David and another friend Henry Thompson continued building, adding steps and a roof top deck. On the first floor they built a bar and the party house was born.

“We found an old Coca Cola cooler and put it under the bar,” he said. “It would hold plenty of drinks, a case of beer, whatever you want!”

“We even had a bathroom under the steps,” he added, “because we could never get any girls to come out to party without one. Of course it had direct plumbing.”

The party house gained quite a reputation around the river, he added. But they had only one noteworthy problem.

He climbed up the steps one dark night and a snake bit his hand, but they couldn’t see the snake before it fell into the water. He called his father from a house on shore nearby.

There was no hospital in Virginia Beach then, only a clinic. His father called the police to say he was heading to the Norfolk hospital with a snake bite victim. Motorcycle police met them on Virginia Beach Boulevard and sped ahead of them, leading them into town!

When they reached Norfolk, David had not had a reaction to the bite, and the doctor decided it wasn’t a poisonous snake bite. He sent David home with a tetanus shot.

The days of the Party House ended when David and friends had graduated from college and weren’t around much to enjoy it. “We had grown up and realized that someone might get hurt fooling around on the old structure,” he said.

The guys first called the fire department to alert them that there would be a harmless fire on the river. “Then we threw gasoline on it and burned it up in a bonfire,” David explained.

The Party House went out in a blaze of glory, but the memories remain. “We couldn’t have had a more ideal place to grow up,” he said.