Jonathan Delgado's Weblog

So... about Nantasket Beach... Well, I didn't just say "Oh hey, I've heard of this place and I need somewhere to ride to, why not go?" There was a bit more motivation behind it. Two parts of motivation really.

The first has to do with a friend of mine, Jason. Now Jason doe lots of stuff. More than I could (or should) keep track of. One things that he does is film documentaries. He did one on BBSes (which I have still yet to watch all of... sorry Jason!). He is also somewhere in the process of doing one on arcades. He travels to arcades, films, snaps photos etc etc. Invites me too. Yay, I love arcades. Boo, I usually have some sort of family obligation to fulfill on the days I am invited along. Such is life.

It gets me thinking about arcade though.

I stopped going to arcades in the mid 1990's or so... when the games were starting to be just video games, and they were getting to be pretty tired ones at that. Especially when they were compared to computer and console games. Also, at least in the Boston area, arcades were disappearing. Probably all my fault, me and them computer games.

I started going to arcades though when I was around 5 or 6 years old (early/mid 1970's). I lived in Worcester MA with my dad, and, as best as I can remember, going out for entertainment meant playing pinball with him and some of his friends from school (Whoopie Tech). Pinball in Greek diners. Pinball in small arcades in malls with lots of flashy lights and flared trousers.

When we moved to the suburbs of Boston there were still trips to the arcade, but then it meant Fun and Games (which in high school we put down as "FaGs") in Framingham. Dad played pinball, I started to play more video games as well as the second player up on the ocassional game of pinball.

The best times though were when we would drive down to Nantasket Beach in the summer time in our Rabbit convertible. It was the mid-1980's, so video games were certainly king, but the arcades at Nantasket Beach were just so huge that they seemed to keep everything. Huge warehouse-like expanses with worn wood floors. Tons of old pinball games that still took dimes to play. Old mechanical baseball games. Machines that you could stamp a message into the border of souvenir coins with. Skeeball. Fortune-telling machines. Every kind of arcade game that probably every came out up until then there was an example of. We would spend hours there. Have some dinner from the food stand, get a box of salt water taffy, and then drive home when it was well dark.

What I didn't know then was that I was probably experiencing the final great days of Nantasket Beach with its arcades and amusement park. I remember going there sometime around 1991 or so on motorcycles with my dad, my girlfriend (now wife), and some friends. The arcades were still there, but some of them had shut down. It was no longer one huge continuous strip of arcade after arcade. The amusement park was closed, or on the verge of closing, so that condos could be built with big ocean views instead. I remember getting completely soaked riding back in the rain to top it all off.

This brings us back to the current day. I got to see the fruit born of my last visit to Nantascket Beach some 15 years ago. The condos are there, already looking dated... just another fugly example of the crap that sprang up all along the South Shore in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Only a small hint of what I remember remains of the arcades. Some names are still there, but the guts are gone.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who have connected with all sorts of other places similarly in the past. That place that you went to with your dad and had some meaningful activity the memories of stick with you to this day that has now disappeared, leaving you to wonder if you could ever have anything close to as meaningful somewhere else with your own child in the future that they would be able to look back upon the same way.