Spectacular spectacle

OF BOSTON'S 34 harbor islands, Spectacle is the United Nations. When visitors begin arriving next Saturday, they will be greeted by a virtual color guard of representatives from federal, state, and city agencies -- and more. Rangers from the National Park Service and the state Department of Conservation and Recreation will be on hand as will lifeguards and a caretaker from DCR, along with an island manager hired by the non-profit Island Alliance but paid with funds from the City of Boston.

Spectacle is unique among the islands in being nurtured by so many groups, but this has turned out to be a curse as well as a blessing. It is a major reason the park is opening to the public four years late. Glitches in the septic system and squabbles over the responsibility for future maintenance -- issues that also involved the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and the state Highway Department -- dragged on and on, typical of Boston politics.

But now the island is ready to receive guests, and most can expect to find Spectacle spectacular. Its two man-made hills offer panoramic views, the north drumlin rising to a relatively towering 157 feet -- 68 feet higher than Boston Light, two miles farther to the east on Little Brewster Island.

Spectacle itself is close to Boston and will be serviced several times a day by boats running direct from Long Wharf, and also by the inter-island shuttle from Georges Island.

A swimming beach with lifeguard, a marina with comfortable docking facilities, five miles of walking trails, an expansive visitors center, wildflowers and birds, all on 120 rolling acres, offer an extraordinary refuge from the downtown bustle so close by.

Whether because of long-frustrated anticipation, or the promised attractions, expectations are understandably running high. Save the Harbor/Save the Bay spokesman Bruce Berman put it succinctly this week: ``As a boater and as an advocate, I just can't wait."

Like many other harbor islands, Spectacle has a history that probably doesn't even deserve the word checkered. According to carbon dating, Native Americans used the island primarily as a dump for clam shells and fish bones for most of the thousand years before the Pilgrims arrived. Since then it has been a place to quarantine smallpox victims, the home of two resorts that were shut down after gambling and brothels were discovered, a horse-rendering location, and, for three decades ending in 1959, a City of Boston garbage dump. Its current vastly altered state is the result of 3 million cubic yards of dirt and gravel deposited there from the Big Dig.

So Spectacle Island can play an important role in two success stories if agencies from all levels of government can work with each other and with civic groups constructively, instead of bickering, to rescue the harbor islands from their history of neglect and make Massachusetts proud once again to be the Bay State.