Why Are People Flocking to the Beaches?

And on the third day He "took together in one place the waters that are under the sky and He named the dry land Earth and the waters Seas"  (Genesis as quoted by Pier Augusto Brecchio in Man and Water)

Frenando Saenz Pedrosa, painting 

Easy access to the beaches was such a high priority for then Governor William Donald Schaefer of Maryland that he made "Reach the Beach" a signature piece of his transportation agenda changing the landscape of the Eastern Shore with freeway style divided highways and bypasses around the historic towns. Access road 158 to North Carolina's Outer Banks turns into a parking lot every Saturday when the beach rentals lining up on the shoreline turn. Finding parking near the beaches of Coronado Island or La Jolla in the San Diego area is as impossible as finding a seat in New York's subway during rush-hour.

With the summer vacation season and the annual migration towards the ocean fronts in full swing the question arises: Why do people do this, flocking to beaches like Canada geese flying south when winter comes? When and where did the beach vacation begin and why?

Victorian beach goers

Beach going doesn't seem to have been a pastime in the Middle Ages even though reports from antiquity about ancient snorkelers shows that men has braved the ocean for a long time, even though initially not for leisure or re-charge but to earn a living. Those Greek snorkelers went for sponges, an activity turned into entertainment in Florida's Tarpon Springs.

The very earliest snorkelers were thought to be sponge farmers on the Grecian island of Crete some 5,000 years ago who used hollow tubes to allow breathing while they kept their faces in the water to free-dive for sponges. (History of Snorkeling).

The oceans have inspired imagination and fascination through the ages with a mix of fear and attraction. With the modern vacation the fear has generally subsided with only the occasional shark, rip-tide, or hurricane sending a powerful reminder that the sea can , indeed be menacing.

Seabath Brighton and Brighton Pier

The Smithsonian explains current day beach mania in a 2016 essay by Daniela Blei with Vocotorian England. The the whole thing started , she argues with health concerns. The idea of restorative power of the salty sea air took hold in the mid-18th century. She writes "Physicians prescribed a plunge into chilly waters to invigorate and enliven. The first seaside resort opened on England’s eastern shore in the tiny town of Scarborough near York. Other coastal communities followed, catering to a growing clientele of sea bathers seeking treatment for a number of conditions: melancholy, rickets, leprosy, gout, impotence, tubercular infections, menstrual problems and “hysteria". Behind the healing power of the ocean stood the foul air of the industrial revolution which had polluted cities to a point where British cities were no longer centers of culture but mere cesspools of production. The concept of the sea as a cure spread from Britain across Europe and the world. The contributing editor of the Victorian Web seems to agree with Blei when she writes:

The Victorians loved to be beside the seaside. In a sense, they created it, as a great escape from the factories and cities which they had helped to build and in which many of them toiled for fifty-one weeks of the year. They took their new train-lines as close to the sea as they could, and made the trips down to and along the bays by horse-buses.

Augusto Brecchio painting  Man and Water

The Victorian Web quotes this music hall song from 1907:

Oh I do like to be beside the seaside,
I do like to be beside the sea,
I do like to stroll along the prom, prom, prom
Where the brass bands play
Tiddly-on-pom-pom!

So just let me be beside the seaside,
I'll be beside myself with glee;
And there's lots of girls beside,
I should like to be beside,
Beside the seaside, beside the sea. — Music hall song by John A. Glover-Kind (1880-1918)

Bayshore Park, Millers Island, MD (Kilduff)

Beach as a counterpoint to the work-week was also a product of mass transportation: The mention of the English train lines evokes a similar practice in Baltimore where the #26 streetcar line went out to Bayshore Park on Millers Island on the Chesapeake Bay. Of course, New York's Coney Island is a more famous example that persists to this day, D,N, F and Q trains will get you there while Bayshore Park and its later substitutes Pleasure Island and Hart Miller island fell victim to people using cars or hopping on a plane to get to the beach. The same is true for the grand British sea resorts of Bournemouth, Brighton and Blackpool who are only shadows of their glorious past because barely holding up against the competition of Italian, French, Spanish and Greek beaches easily reached by plane or through a fast chunnel ride in the Euro Express trains.

The Mediterranean beach resorts also make the practical explanation that the beaches were places of refuge from dirty industrial cities a bit suspicious because it doesn't capture the spiritual relationship that people have developed with the ocean going much further back than Scarbourough, Brighton or Bournemouth. Even the mere pleasure of a warm space during the cold season predates the English seabath. For the wealthy and the daring the French Cote d'Azure had been a wintertime attraction for as far back as 1763 when Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett wrote about Nice in his travels in France and Italy. Nice would become the destination of choice for the entire European aristocracy after Queen Victoria had traveled there regularly for her winter vacations. This would make the British seabaths  and their later American resort cousins merely affordable, local imitations of the Cote D'Azure with its palaces and casinos.

Caspar David Friederich: Wanderer at the Sea

There is also a philosophical side to the beach as an uncertain demarcation between land and sea that goes as far back as Genesis and has its correspondence in evolution. Writers and artists of the Romantic period  at the turn of the 19th century added emotion and wonder to the act of strolling along the beach or watching the tide turn.

“Unlike the countryside,” “the beach is not so much a place of return as a place of new beginnings. . .It is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, an abstraction.”Jean-Didier Urbain, professor of sociology at the University of Paris-Descartes 

Blei quotes Rachel Carson's book "The Sea Around us" who expresses a similar sentiment: 

“The boundary between sea and land is the most fleeting and transitory feature of the earth and teh sea is forever repeating its encroachments on the continents” (R. Carson)

The oceans have beckoned explorers, they have allowed transport of unknown spices and tea and coffee to colonial powers and enabled the terrible trade of slavery. For centuries seafaring nations had significant advantages over those devoid of navigable seaports.

The Dutch ":Golden Age" 1673

Today, proximity to the seas isn't just a matter of spiritual, entertainment, or health inclinations but is a global economic engine. Fifty percent of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of an ocean. Coastal populations are still increasing. The movement to the coast is well known to the United States where the center of the country has emptied out in favor of coastal states for decades. Waterfront properties are among the most valuable in the world but the irony is that the same societal forces that made the coasts so desirable also turned them into highly vulnerable habitats threatened by rising sea-levels, hurricanes or groundwater salination (as in Florida).

The human migration to the waterfronts has increased risks many-fold not only by raising the potential impact of a catastrophe but by actively contribution to the causes of it. The beaches are now not just summer resorts but have become yearlong recreation areas promising the active lifestyle the post-work society demands. It will require enormous ingenuity and creativity of urban designers, planners, architects and engineers to respond to this condition with sustainable and resilient solutions.

Sandlot, pop-up installation downtown Baltimore

So far, neither a depleted ozone layer and the resulting heightened risk of skin cancer from sun bathing nor the threat of floods have put a sizable dent in the attraction of the sea for a vacation or for permanent habitation.  

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA


Smithsonian
Waterfront Paper 2013
The weird origins of going to the beach (Washington Post 2016)
History of Watersports
"Hack your Urban Waterfront" (Archetizer 6/17)

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