It’s A Barnum and Bailey World

Once the beach was populated by shacks, shack-like shops, open air bars, modest cottages and the occasional grand hotel in the style of “Ragtime.” Even restaurants bore a disquieting resemblance to bait shops, with a shell paved parking lot, sandy plank floors and nets, oars and fake trophy fish on the walls.

Today these homely throwbacks to an earlier era are fading fast. They have been replaced by gargantuan structures. Most of the commercial spaces seem to have been designed by an architect who was the love child of Donald Trump and Scarlett O’Hara. The interior space of most of these shops and restaurants is about as distinguished as the average Costco. It’s the gaudy exterior that proclaims beachiness in no uncertain terms.

Zazzy signs abound. Arched entry ways soar aloft on the scale of the Arc de Triomphe. Non-functional plantation shutters and Tara-esque columns festoon facades as do wide verandas with rocking chairs that are never used, since the temperature during the high season is 102 and the humidity 99 percent. Only lizards venture anywhere outside of a frigid, air-conditioned space.

Instead of crouching low to the ground to ride out high winds, these pharaonic concoctions, that combine tropical pastel touches, antebellum Southern and Vegas, tend to be bank-like cubes worthy of Scrooge McDuck, sand-colored stucco on the outside and lots of wasted space aloft inside. Expensive to cool, one would have thought. But the aim seems to be to make an impression.

Somewhere there is probably a reference work for beach architects that it the equivalent of the piano man’s fake book or the seamstress’s pattern book. It presumably contains every beach-flavored gimmick that can be affixed to any rectilinear object in order to subliminally signal to customers that they are by the sea and on vacation. Surf’s up, y’all. But do drug stores, savings and loans and gyms really need to look like they were designed by Hawaiians?
Thus, the question arises, were the old days superior to all this? Then at least the shacks that were periodically washed or blown away were just shacks. Now, where gimcrack three-room cabins once stood on stilts, you now find million dollar five-bedroom, four-bath McMansions on stilts, but they will be just as gone with the wind when the next big blow arrives.

Besides, the beat-up, weathered, peeling-paint little beach towns and bars, burger joints, fish emporia and actual bait shops were as raffish and windblown as their surroundings. They had the charm of authenticity, of being no more and no less than necessary, of belonging to their time and place.

By contrast, the faux beach-itecture of today is from nowhere and no time in particular. It is generic, off-the-shelf, imitation local color, as unreal as Disney’s Main Street, USA. Inhabiting such a space makes you feel you’ve entered a stage set where, as the old song says, “it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea.”

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