Quotable: Beach Strip

Tuesday 20 November 2012

"My father said that when he was a boy in the 1950s, excursion boats steamed across the bay from the city during the summer, carrying people to the beach strip amusement park, where picnic tables were set among trees near the shore and kids played on a safe, sandy beach. No one we knew went to Florida in the winter or to the northern lakes int he summer. No one we knew could afford it. Everything they needed for fun was on the beach strip. I suspect many of the old people who live on the strip today were once kids who rode the excursion boats to the amusement park back then, giddy with anticipation for rides on the merry-go-round, the ponies, the Octopus, and the Ferris wheel. The rides are gone, but the people remain, maybe because their goal as children was to always be near those long-gone amusements on the strip, and living here in rented rooms and peeling-paint cottages is the only ambition they truly achieved in their lives.
— John Lawrence Reynolds, Beach Strip

Photos courtesy of the Hamilton Public Library, Local History & Archives

2 comments:

  1. It's a shame places like the beach strip no longer exist. I remember as a boy some of the simple things we did and places we went. Most no longer exist in the States either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My parents had a business on the beach strip called the Texan? anyone remember it? I was very young and for some reason we have no pictures of it.

    ReplyDelete

 
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