Let us now praise. . . Pleasure Bay
In a new column, our correspondent begins a quest for the underappreciated - at an urban beach
(Globe Staff/File Photo / John Tlumacki)
Memorial Day traditionally acts upon this city like a kind of gigantic centrifuge, plucking citizens from their homes and strewing them, with honks and curses, up and down the busy coastal roads. Outward, outward, presses the force, driving you -- the daytripper -- willy-nilly before it, until you come to rest at last a few feet from the ocean, dazed and stripped of your clothes. You're at Singing Beach, or Crane Beach, or Horseneck. The sand is warm. You smile; you seem to have reached the happy limit of things. What a genius you were to get out of Boston.
Or were you? What if by simply turning inward, into the heart of your own city, you could find all the beach you need? Steady yourself, restless excursion-maker. Look inside. Do I sound like the Dalai Lama? Very well -- I sound like the Dalai Lama. There's a spiritual lesson in here somewhere. Open your inner eye. And behold a 170-acre lagoon of serenity, salty as you like, with sands as clean as... well, fairly clean. I refer, of course, to South Boston's Pleasure Bay.
Yes, it has a name like a 1970s gay nightclub, but this place is all-access. Pull up into one of the many spaces, flop out of your car, and you're there. The span of golden light, the breath of the ocean: instant beach. Created in the 1950s, under the auspices of State Senate President John E. Powers, it nestles in one of the northernmost crannies of Dorchester Bay, at the edge of Boston Harbor. Most of it is sandy shoreline, and a dike running from Castle Island to the tip of a stone causeway encloses it in a walkable loop nicknamed the Sugar Bowl. Bostonians love this loop; they come tearing out of Southie on inline skates, or plodding with dogs and children, to taste its iodine breezes. The water in the bowl is tidal, but only just -- a sort of bourgeoisification of the tide has taken place, as the spillways of the dike regulate the sea's inflow and outflow. There are no waves, for example, and the water advances a little, recedes a little, as if neutrally observing the conventions.
It's swimmable now, but it wasn't always. To the northeast, the alien pods of the revamped Deer Island Treatment Plant remind the visitor that he is close, here, to the city's digestive system. Until 1991, the old plant discharged sludge directly into the harbor, a cloudy band of it being clearly visible from the air; now a 9½-mile undersea outfall tunnel carries effluent away from the bay. Are you wrinkling your nose? Don't. A sewage plant, properly appreciated, is as grand as a cathedral.
Besides, these heavy signs of man are part of the magic of Pleasure Bay. Admiral Farragut, in statue form, surveys the prospect from the middle of a nearby rotary, his binoculars lowered and an expression of complacent ferocity on his face. On his left, the blue gantry cranes of the harbor squat hugely on the horizon. Beyond them, Logan -- the air fills periodically with the thick chord of a descending airplane, its landing gear already down. These incoming monsters are a fierce source of joy to watching children: the beach is so directly in their flight path that as they approach they seem to be not moving, but only getting bigger, and louder, enlarging supernaturally across the field of vision.
The beach itself is low-pressure and democratic -- all ages, all races, all shapes, all types. Most of its habitués are local, or local-ish; they've made no massive investment of time or gas to get there (it takes a mere 20 minutes by car from Brookline) and they are breathing freely. They come, they go, no biggie; the limping, overloaded familial procession from beach to parking lot, with Dad swearing and the baby crying, is not a feature of Pleasure Bay. An edict banning dogs between May 1 and Sept. 30 is universally ignored. In 2007 a Globe editorial lamented the lack of "programming" at the beach -- concerts and recreational events and the like -- even making the scandalous suggestion that an increase in such activities might be funded by charging visitors for parking.
Nothing of the sort has happened, thank God, and unless I mistake the atmosphere down there, nothing will. Municipal oversight of the scene seems to be benign and aesthetic; plenty of trash cans, and the flower beds by the war memorial are well taken care of. You don't want to miss the war memorial, incidentally. On one side, the sons of Southie who gave their lives in World War II -- the Cavanaughs and Crowleys, the Mooneys and Morans -- and on the other a marvelous apothegm from General Omar Bradley: "Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death." I was pondering it the other day, while a man on the beach flung a stick into the water and his dog floundered after it. Scared half to death -- hard to imagine, on a blissful afternoon at this elegant intersection of man and nature. The dog swam back, stick in mouth, eyebrows raised in the swimming-dog manner, and its owner applauded powerfully.
James Parker writes regularly for Ideas and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. 
