Same old Revere Beach

On Monday afternoon, the handsome promenade was jammed with every conceivable variety of personage. Huge, rambling families gathered on the stone wall, leaning over pizza boxes, chomping on folded-over slices. Old-timers sat in folding chairs with their backs to the sea and sand, faces tilted to the sun, chests leathery brown. Teenaged boys with pants pulled low stood watching giggling girls parade in bikini tops or teeter on high heels. One language yielded to another every few feet: Russian, Spanish, Reverian English.

There were Haitian kids under a shelter, Bangladeshi Muslims by the bandstand, Brazilians at the volleyball nets.

What Revere Beach has in common with Brazil comes down to just one thing: "The sun is the same," said Nivea Carbonara, 28, who has come here every summer weekend for 10 years. Still, she said, "You can always find friends here."

Planes slid low and slow down the beach on their way to Logan. Cars rolled in the opposite direction, windows down, stereos doof-doofing hip-hop, rock, or reggae.

It was heaven.

It usually is. Mornings at Revere Beach belong to the locals who have been coming here for decades. On sunny mornings, a bunch of long-timers park themselves on the benches outside the Jack Satter elderly housing complex, a few doors up from Kelly's Roast Beef. They were there yesterday around 9, enduring an icy wind.

"We all exercise, then we sit down here and defeat the purpose," said Doreen Weinberg, pointing at a tray of cookies beside Anna Curtin. Sometimes there are 25 men and women here. Curtin brings enough of her delicious, orangey biscotti and fruit-filled cookies for all of them.

"Hey, here comes the chick magnet!" Weinberg said. That would be Bill O'Brien, a grinning, gray-haired member of the Social Security set. He took his spot by Weinberg to shoot the breeze and watch the parade.

A few of these locals think today's Revere Beach doesn't come close to the one they knew in the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, the place was thronged with crowds drawn to the giant amusement park on the water, and the two-for-a-quarter hot dogs at Joe & Nemo's. They worry the beach is unsafe now, teeming with the kinds of kids who were arrested on that Tuesday in April when 3,000 Boston school students staged a skip day and one got stabbed. After that, local politicians were apoplectic, demanding that metal detectors be placed at the T stop.

That's the kind of reaction that has beach boosters - trying to attract more people to its summer kite festivals, free movies, and farmers' markets - tearing out their hair, and with good reason. The beach is safe, State Police say. Thousands of kids descended on the promenade on the 93-degree day and only six were arrested - two for public drinking. That's pretty good going, given the size of the crowd.

It's true that the beachgoers disgorged by the Blue Line at Wonderland don't look much like the mostly white crowds that hung out here decades ago. But they come for the same reasons people always have. It's accessible, cheap, and comfortable.

"Other beaches aren't like this," said Christine Williams, a UMass-Boston pre-med student hanging out in the shade with a dozen friends from The Community Charter School of Cambridge. Most of them were Haitian, like she.

"People are grumpy at other places. They don't want to share their space."

America's first public beach is one of the few places around here that is immune to the tribalism that plagues most everywhere else. It belongs to everyone. It's as great as it ever was.

Or, as the already-tan, 50-year beach veteran Ralph Francis put it from his perch near the bathhouse: "Same stuff, different era."

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at abraham@globe.com.