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THE AMERICAN MONTHLY REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



REVERE BEACH, BEFORE THE METROPOLITAN PARK COMMISSION TOOK IT. 



(All the usual cheap and tawdry features developed under private management.) 



along the shore, and the sands between the 

 track and the water were jammed by an ugly 

 huddle of dingy and decrepit bath, fish, and 

 boarding houses. Their owners, eager to 

 utilize every inch of space, had built so far 

 out that at two-thirds tide the public was 

 cut off from the water, and could pass up or 

 down only by walking upon the railroad 

 tracks, where trains were running every ten 

 minutes. Women and children shunned the 

 rough crowd. 



The commission removed the buildings, 

 107 in number, from the shore front, re- 

 quired the railroad to place its tracks at the 

 rear of the village, and substituted an eighty- 

 foot macadam highway. It erected and 

 maintains a bathhouse used by 142,942 per- 

 sons last year, which has accommodated 7 1 7 1 

 in one day. The beach attendance, stimu- 

 lated both by good police protection and by 

 private amusement enterprises, has grown 

 from 500,000 to 5,000,000 annually. The 

 pleasures of the shore must be wholesome, as 

 a two-hundred-thousand-a-day crowd has 

 frequently required not one arrest. This is 

 clearly not due to police laxity, as women and 

 children feel so safe as to constitute half the 

 attendance. When a shower comes, the police 

 are less given to scurrying for doorways, 

 more likely to be found rounding up helpless 

 broods of children for tired mothers. 



v ou still find at Revere the tawdriness of 



all great resorts of its type. The merry-go- 

 round man may have his organ, in deference 

 to some back eddy of Boston culture, play 

 " Ai'da," or " Faust," but he feels that he 

 must assist the imagination by setting up 

 manikins of Washington and Roosevelt to 

 beat the cymbals. The hotel-keeper would 

 not be satisfied with a piazza railing of sim- 

 ple straight posts, but must have his rails 

 belly out into fat ovals to satisfy his love for 

 the beautiful. 



It was with cockney impudence that all 

 sorts of such excrescences jostled in between 

 sea and shore at old Revere, thus crowding old 

 ocean out of sight and hearing, as if their 

 tinsel were more fascinating than the ro- 

 mance of rolling surf and sounding sea. 

 They took their cue from the faces of the 

 loungers, which at any of our great shore 

 resorts will turn their eyes from ocean's eter- 

 nities to the boardwalk for some common- 

 place reproduction of Broadway or Wash- 

 ington street. But now at Revere the State's 

 fiat has at least ordered all this tinsel of 

 man's device to its place behind the great 

 shore boulevard, and has restored unbroken 

 to the eye of him who would see, a match- 

 less crescent of silver sands and whirling 

 surf. 



The river banks and river life handled by 

 the Park Commission have also had their 

 vicissitudes. Fine estates in older days often 



