A world in a grain of sand*

We rose at the crack of dawn and motored over to Revere Beach before breakfast to beat the crowd and dodge the soul-deadening Musak that would later drown out the soothing seaside sounds at the New England Sand Sculpting Festival, an All-American community-based program produced by the Revere Beach Partnership. RBP was established in 2001 with the guidance and technical support of Save the Habor/Save the Bay to clean up and revitalize the nation's first public swimming beach:

The goal was to establish a non-profit group to build financial and political support on behalf of Revere Beach in order to preserve its historic character and unique natural features.

"You aren't going to get any pictures from there. You're facing into the sun. You should go to the other side," volunteered this "helpful" old geezer, who took the liberty of instructing us in the fine points of framing a shot. He couldn't have guessed that our photographic eye was focussed not on the sand sculpture that he had come to gawk at, but rather, on him and especially his wife in their totally awesome beach duds. They called to mind members of the leisure class as portrayed in many a New Yorker cartoon of yore. Not exactly what you would expect to see on what used to be called "the people's beach." Officially opened in 1896, it was used mostly by the working class and immigrants, who trolleyed out from the city on the narrow-gauge Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad, not only for the sand and surf, but most especially for the amusements, including the now long-gone Cyclone, one of the largest and "most extreme" roller coasters of its day. Nineteenth-century trolley parks, built along or at the ends of streetcar lines, were "created by the streetcar companies to give people a reason to use their services on weekends," but twenty years after the trolley first arrived here in 1875, "nearly three miles of private seacoast land on what is now Revere Beach Reservation" were purchased by the Metropolitan Park Commission (renamed the Metropolitan District Commission in 1919 and now the Department of Conservation and Recreation) as part of the "the first regional organization of public open space in the United States . . . internationally recognized as a model for multi-jurisdictional park systems designed to encourage public appreciation of open space." With the public/private efforts of the Revere Beach Partnership to clean up and revitalize the area bearing fruit, the movement has come full circle:

A renewed commitment to conserve and protect natural resources emerged in Massachusetts and across the country, beginning in the early 1970's. Again, the MDC's focus experienced a shift and returned toward its original mission, open-space preservation, improvement and acquisition.

We hadn't been down Revere Beach for years and were delighted with the clean, white sand and general orderliness that had emerged in our absence. The blue frontloader with sifting trailer, above, was one of three similar pieces of equipment plying every inch of the crescent-shaped strand. Following the beach's late-19th and early-20th-century glory days, things had gone from bad to worse:

The beach began to deteriorate in the 1950s, and by the early 1970s had become a strip of honky tonk bars and abandoned buildings. The "Great Blizzard of '78" proved to be the final death knell for the "old" Revere Beach, as many of the remaining businesses, amusements, pavilions and sidewalks and much of the sea wall were all destroyed.

Of course not everyone is happy with the onward-and-upward movement of the area. Some of the old shorefront restaurants like the original, eat-in-the-rough Kelly's Roast Beef (Large roast beef sandwich with "soft, pink, thin-sliced" meat "piled high on a butter-toasted, sesame-seed bun," above) are being gentrified out of business as boardwalks replace parking places near the beach, making access problematic for longtime fans who aren't keen on parking minutes away and trekking on foot to their former haunts. Here's the gist of it from an imail conversation with our sis this evening:

We: It's getting a little too gentrified . . . Most of the old cheesy places are gone.

She: I know. The same thing is brewing at Salisbury Beach. They want to bring in the guy who designed Quincy Market.

We: Uh, oh. There goes the neighborhood.

The claylike sand used in the sculptures is "quarried out of Hudson, New Hampshire, and trucked here," explains event organizer Sean Fitzpatrick:

The sand has a higher silt content than regular beach sand, which allows the individual grains of sand to stick together better.

Tuck, whose gothicky sand castles, shaped with his signature credit card as carving tool, have wowed 'em from the pink sands of Bermuda to the nude beach of St. Bart's, dipped his hand into the demonstration pile and pronounced it A-1. Professional sculptress, above, uses her hands to remove everything that doesn't look like an octopus from the centerpiece "Pirates of Revere Group Carve."

It was low tide when we arrived at the shore, and down near the water's edge a parallel universe opened up, where tiny saltwater snails (contrast with our "Siren Sports" walking shoes for relative size) were carving cryptic sculptures of their own in the water-logged sand.

Down at sand level, the intrepid gastropod (from Gk. gaster [gen. gastros] "stomach" + pous [gen. podos] "foot") was wielding its muscular yellow foot to navigate the intertidal no-man's-land. We're not sure what the local gulls were pecking at as they foraged for breakfast, but it did occur to us that a fresh, plump snail might be the Dunkin' Donut Munchkin of the Laridad favorite-foods list.

*Blogpost title taken from William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence."

Comments

[goomp]

Great photos and a most interesting history. Good things can be overdone. Preservation to save beauty is a great thing but not if the preservation deprives all but the elite the opportunity to enjoy. As an example, elimination of corporate controlled forests leads to huge forest fires and wasted resources.

[Jill]

I haven't been to Revere Beach in years, so I'm delighted to hear it's doing so well. Though if Kelly's leaves, it won't be the same

[Teddy]

great pictures. I have got to Revere Beach 5-10 times a year since I was a kid. I have not heard any rumors of Kelly's leaving though.

[Roy Lofquist]

Dear Sisu,

Thank you. I rode the Cyclone! Late forties. Most poignant memories are the merry go round, the bumper cars and the foot-long steamed hot dogs on steamed buns.

Regards,
Roy

[hnav]

Wow !

such amazing works in the sand, all to be lost in time...

love the shot of your shoes with snails trail.

will i ever get to a beach again in my lifetime?

seems so far away...