The lost beaches

Part 2

by Jason Gay with Sarah McNaught

Safe swimming at the Boston beaches? Less than a decade ago, it seemed like an impossibility -- a foolish enterprise for daredevils, lunatics, and assorted bravehearts like South Boston's L Street Brownies, whose brazen plunges into Boston Harbor on New Year's Day are celebrated media events.

Because for more than a generation, Boston Harbor was essentially a cesspool. Drainage pipes pumped raw sewage into the ocean. Illegal dumpings went undetected and laws went unenforced. Fecal coliform and other contaminant counts soared. Instead of a precious resource, the city's water became a toxic cocktail, not to mention a national embarrassment (see Dukakis, Michael).

Pollution stripped the harbor of marine life and turned the public off to the beaches. Swimmers at Dorchester's Tenean Beach remember backstroking past rusted chemical barrels and the occasional water rat. Drainage pipes, which collected runoff from city streets and were sometimes located just steps from beaches, flushed a steady stream of pollutants into the harbor.

"Ten years ago, there were condoms, tampons, even syringes on the beaches and near the [drainage] pipes." says Bruce Berman, Baywatch director of the nonprofit Save the Harbor/Save the Bay program. "This was known as a harbor of shame. And we deserved that title."

Conditions on dry land weren't much better. The tide deposited a steady heap of trash, the sand was grubby, and public beaches overflowed with debris from beer bottles to vacuum cleaners and shopping carts. The surroundings decayed as well -- boardwalks were neglected, bathhouses rotted with age, and graffiti abounded.

The demise of the city beaches was a tragedy that wrecked a long tradition of summer escape. For more than half of this century, Boston's shores were packed on summer days, full of visitors from urban enclaves and surrounding suburbs. You don't need to have gray hair to remember city summers when it was hard to find a place to park a beach umbrella -- a time when city waters teemed with swimmers.

But over the course of 20 years, Boston's beaches devolved from grand urban getaways to dirty, unseemly places to be avoided. The water became murkier, the beaches grew dirtier, and more middle-class vacationers fled to destinations outside the city, like the North Shore, New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod. The people who were left behind -- usually the poor and minorities -- watched the coastline continue to crumble.

"The beaches were left to people with no access to the political clout to keep them maintained," says Vivien Li, executive director of the Boston Harbor Association. Indeed, when people who live near a beach cannot swim in its water, they experience a high level of civic frustration. A resource is wasted.

But even when city leaders and environmentalists lend their clout, that's not always enough to clean up the water. If people can't swim safely, the beach is a failure.

Consider Quincy's Wollaston Beach, which remains in the worst shape of all the Boston-area beaches. The water often exceeds EPA standards for fecal coliform and enteroccocus contaminants, and beach closings are frequent.

Some people suspect Wollaston's pollutants are the combined result of shoddy drainage systems, illegal sewer connections, and the nearby Nut Island wastewater treatment plant. But no one is exactly sure. In Wollaston, all they are sure of is that 1997 is another summer of missed opportunity. And residents are aggravated.

"I moved here from New Hampshire so I could be closer to my job, and my girls could have a real summer life on the beach," says David Colintonio, 37, a construction worker. "I bought a house right in Wollaston, just a few houses away from the beach, without realizing how bad it was."

Cindy McCarthy, 26, a cocktail waitress, works nights with her fiancé, John Cocannon. Though they usually nap when they come to the beach, the couple wouldn't mind jumping in the ocean every once in a while. But the constant closings at Wollaston have left her numb and angry.

"Basically, it's pissing me off," McCarthy says.

Part 3

Jason Gay and Sarah McNaught can be reached at jgay[a]phx.com and smcnaught[a]phx.com, respectively.