Beaches & Waterways

Going to the beach for fun is a fairly modern idea. For most of history the shore was a place of work, for fishing, shipping and boatbuilding. It was not until the 19th century that city people began to travel to the seaside simply to enjoy it.

The railroad made it possible. Once a train could take a family from the city to the shore in a few hours, resorts grew up along the coast. Atlantic City built its first boardwalk in 1870, partly to keep sand out of the hotels. Coney Island in Brooklyn, reachable by streetcar and steamboat, grew into the most famous amusement area in the country by the early 1900s. Lakes and mountain rivers drew their own crowds, and steamboats carried day trippers up and down every major river.

Bathing costumes are one of the best ways to date a beach photograph. In the 19th century women went into the water in wool dresses, bloomers and stockings, and men wore suits that covered them from neck to knee. Suits got shorter after 1910 and much shorter in the 1920s. There are photographs from the early 1920s of officials measuring the distance between a bathing suit and the knee, which shows how seriously some towns took the rules.

The working waterfront is the other half of this subject. Harbors full of sailing ships and steamers, river landings stacked with cotton bales, canal boats, lighthouses, ferries and fishing fleets all appear. Many of the most beautiful color images of American waterways from around 1900 were made by the Detroit Publishing Company, which made color prints from black and white negatives using a process called photochrom.

Worth noticing on the beach pictures is how dressed up everyone is out of the water. Men stand on the sand in suits and hats, and women carry parasols in long skirts. In the waterfront pictures, look at the river landings and harbor edges. Many of them have been filled in, built over or turned into parks, and the photographs are often the only record of what was there.