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Published: July 13th 2018
Boston residents love to go to the beach. After all, we have an ocean on our doorstep. Today I went to one of the most historic, Revere Beach. Most Boston area residents probably rolled their eyes reading that.
Revere Beach, the oldest public beach in the United States, was once
Boston’s Coney Island. After World War II, a combination of ocean pollution, noise from the nearby airport, and suburban flight made the place a wreck; the beach people chose only when they lacked the means to get anywhere else.
I can reassure readers that I did in fact end up here voluntarily. Thanks to lawsuits in the 1980s, the pollution has finally been cleaned up. The area has seen significant new construction, and people are slowly returning. To attract even more, the local business association holds a
sand sculpting festival every year. It was a pretty fun time, and few outside the area have ever heard of it.
On walking in, I found myself face to face with a non-competition sculpture, an enormous tribute to the Boston Red Sox.
Fenway Park turns a century old this year, and for New Englanders the place is a shrine. The enormous wall of sand had banners for every
Fenway Century
Non-competition tribute to a Boston legendone of the Red Sox seven championships, and big baseball cards for every player honored with a retired number. Intricate and carefully cut, this put regular sand castles to shame.
Compared to the competition sculptures, that one looked almost dull. At this level, these truly were sculptures, created by carefully and precisely chopping material from a raw block. In this case, the block happened to be a mound of sand.
The themes varied all over the place. One featured something that looked like a cross between a crab and a giant worm, inspired by the novel Dune. One was four intricate human heads. Still another featured a model of a fish, inside the model skeleton of another fish. We got an enormous head of Neptune, raising from the sand. One was an intricate set of geometric shapes, over twelve feet high.
Like many sculptures, these featured elements designed to show off technical skill. Smooth surfaces are difficult, so these featured smooth services that curve. All sculptures featured empty voids and holes, most notably the fish skeleton. A number featured incredibly thin sections, pushing the adhesion of the sand to its limits. All of them featured intricate carved
Leto II
A local favorite due to the sculptor being from Revere details, requiring real skill to do well.
For those who arrived early enough, the festival provided the opportunity to see the
sculptors at work. They were putting on the final touches when I got there. Most used better versions of what anyone uses on a beach, pails and shovels. Some used knives and even bare hands.
The festival had a sand sculpting lesson. This was aimed at kids, but at least I got to watch. It started the same way almost everyone starts, by filling a pail with sand and turning it over. That produced a mound of sand with smooth sides and a flat top. What can that be? Nearly anything the sculptor can imagine. In this case, it represented a mountain fortress.
This fortress required steps to the entrance. Like any sculpture created by carving, they were made by removing material. The instructor showed how to use a plastic knife to carefully carve the steps in the mound. It was simple but precise, a small vertical cut, then a matching horizontal cut, and lift a little wedge of sand. Do this over and over and get steps. A similar process cut notches in the top for ramparts,
and so forth.
While this was deliberately simple, the big sculptures used the same techniques, on a much larger and more technically difficult scale. To get anything good, they must be designed as rigorously as any other sculpture, often using drawings, preliminary models, and endless practice.
I had time to kill while judging took place, so I wandered the beach for a while. Revere Beach is wide and shallow, so the water is wading depth for a remarkable distance. Even with the cleanup, however, the water quality is still lower than beaches further away from Boston. I did not go in. The beach is also directly under one of the main approach routes for Logan Airport, which makes for both great plane spotting and unavoidable noise. I suspect Revere Beach will still be a locals beach for quite some time due to these factors.
By this point I wanted dinner. Given where I am, the only appropriate choice was unhealthy comfort food whose recipes haven’t changed in a century. I found what I wanted at a burger shack a block away called the
Banana Boat. The place apparently hasn’t updated their décor in decades. To complete the atmosphere,
Festival band
They knew how to get this crowd to move they even had soft-serve ice cream for desert. Of course the total bill was low, and the lines were atrocious. The quality was questionable too, but that is part of the point.
I got back from dinner in time to hear the winners. The crowd was a bit disappointed that the one entrant from Revere did not get a prize. Afterward, a local band took the stage. They played energetic covers of Top 40 and R&B hits. The crowd ate it up, although the selection was not to my tastes. They sure got people to dance, though! I suspect they get steady bookings of weddings and similar events.
After the concert, the entire crowd tried to move to the beach at once for the closing fireworks. With limited access routes, this had potential for disaster. I dealt with it by walking along the street away along the long row of vendors until I reached an open access point.
The show itself was rather dull by current standards. A barge shot one fireworks after another, one at a time. Most shows shoot multiple at once to create patterns. This one finally did that at the end, the now
Fireworks finale
Best part of the show standard flashing dots with starbursts above. With that, the festival was over. All in all, it was a fun day at the beach; what more can one ask for on a summer weekend?
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Revere Beach
Simply Amazing Art