Remembering Crystal Beach In Its Most Magical Times

(Every year for most of the last century, Crystal Beach in Fort Erie was a summer fun place for residents in Niagara, Ontario, Buffalo and beyond. It is gone with the wind now, but this column may help bring a bit of the fun back. Too bad it is gone.)

By William Hogg

“Hey, it’s the twenty-fourth of May, Crystal Beach opens today!”

That was the top news. It was shouted in every schoolyard on both sides of the Niagara. And within a day or two, every Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer around began to pluck up nerve to skip school. Five of us grade six boys (plopped into a class of thirty grade seven girls) finally did it. Pocketing our stashes of nickels and dimes and hopping our bicycles, we raced up the Dominion Road – to adventure and fun – to Crystal Beach. As did the truant officers rattling along behind in their green Nashes, old gray Willy’s-Eights and chrome-plated Buicks.

All other cars, headed in the same direction, bumper to bumper, skimmed by inches from our small boys’ narrow shoulders, all made skinnier by the Great Depression and wartime rationing.

At the park gate we spread out: to the Fun House to be spooked, all ‘softies’ off to the Merry-Go-Round, a ride on the Miniature Train, a whirl on Flying Scooters, and up and away in the Ferris Wheel for a breathtaking view and to get height-acclimatized for – the Cyclone which made you a he-man or made you throw up, whichever came first. And then on to gorging on hotdogs, sugared waffles, candy-apples, air-filled candyfloss, pulled taffy, buttered popcorn. And finally, an ice-cold Loganberry cooled the seething brow on a hot sticky day.

Then we started to notice and talk and josh with other kids: from Buffalo, Welland, Port, all over. All school-skippers. Some extra smart kid always had a real baseball, a regulation hard one, so we played catch, flesh-smacking barehanded, red-handed catch. A look around and, amazing enough, even a few early-budding girls had skipped school too. They hung back, shy at first, watching.

Then came catcalling. Some joined in and were as good as the best of us. Of course the boys got useless as the girls got better. A preview of days to come? Two truant officers (that I knew of, my mom being a teacher) sat smiling on the benches nearby. Mr. Honey beckoned me over, “What will your mother say, Billy?” The eternal guilt trip? “Well, it’s worth it, sir.” And then they left, smiling still, and silent. And as the sun got lower, we did too. A swim at the quarry on the way and then home. Not a word said by parents.

Next day at school Miss Mossip, well beyond retirement age, read us a war story, all about radar, called, Follow The Beam, and then asked, “Did you boys follow the beam yesterday, Billy?” Brave, in front of thirty ‘big’ girls, I smirked, “No, Miss Mossip, we followed the yellow line up the Dominion Road to Crystal Beach. It was like a trip to Oz” So, waved out to the cloakroom, where that wonderful (in retrospect) old lady, tears streaming down her face was totally incapable of giving the strap to any child, sent all five of us Huck Finns down to the front hall to have that very common job very perfunctorily done by the tiny tough, straight-backed principal of school-name fame, Miss (no Ms then) Rose Seaton. Can kids nowadays have that kind of adventure on their own? Crystal Beach is long gone and the Internet strongly beckons. Methinks not. But maybe you know better – please leave a comment.

Fast-forward a half dozen years. A group of boys, still all boys, this time an American-Canadian mix, halfway through a night out bar-hopping on Buffalo’s Niagara Street (taking advantage of the low NY drinking age), head off for the harbour and the Crystal Beach boat. All pushing, shoving, laughing.

There’s music and dancing on board, and thousands of people: African-Americans girls and boys from the corner of Michigan and William, Polish families from Lackawanna, a large gang of young Italian toughs from near the Peace Bridge, angling for a fight, a few ‘real nice kids’ wearing seersucker suits and ties, from Kenmore, being snooty and asking for it. I guess that’s the way we saw each other then, in enclaves, but all together in one big boat. Occasionally, in those days, there were race riots and gang fights on the boat. In the midst of one, I, poor cowering Canadian me, was tossed overboard one calm hot night, and had to swim a mile to shore at Old Fort Erie. I felt like an American invader in the War of 1812.

One wonders, would American Homeland Security and Canada’s Border Guards tolerate such teenage borderline shenanigans nowadays? Somehow, in its own unbeknownst way, the Crystal Beach ballroom, (which the boat in this tale will soon reach) long ago helped to stem the nasty tide of racial and ethnic intolerance, at least in the Buffalo-Niagara border area.

But nothing bad happened that night. All were happy, music was playing, and the moonlight sparkled over a great sweep of Lake Erie. As the Americana and Canadiana passed each other at the halfway point, horns and whistles blew, and everyone cheered together. At the great concrete pier in Crystal Beach, the brightly lit midway beckoned while the Crystal ballroom enticed.

Everyone made a beeline straight for it and the Big Bands, and yet more young people. The enormous dance floor, it was big-big-big-huge, was milling with people of all ages. The rotating faceted crystal globe in the ceiling reflected moving specks of light, like stardust, across their heads and bodies. Stan Kenton held sway, and, despite blaring trombones and trumpets, the mood was set for love, not war. Over there, close to the bandstand were Maeve and Glenn practicing for the Charleston contest slated for later. They won! And proudly pressing through the crowd were Ted, Ray and Charles, ‘standing-in’ as gifted teen union musicians, right up there, in their minds’ eye, with Benny Goodman and Harry James. They always got the girls, at least to dance with. For everyone at the Crystal Beach ballroom, it always was a night to remember.

The last time I visited the park, before it all was torn down and auctioned off in 1989, was with my whole family. All seven of us, our daughter and four sons, and us their mom and dad, went in style. We sailed. Across the Niagara River we went and up the canal, past the International Railway Bridge’s turntable, symbol of freer trade to come, under the souring Peace Bridge, symbol of coming on almost two hundred years of peace. Then, out of Buffalo’s no longer busy harbour, and straight west across the broad open neck of Lake Erie – tacking up into the breeze – to anchor offshore the sweeping sands of Crystal Beach’s blindingly bright beach. It’s still beautiful and uncluttered, almost pristine.

It was an international trip, truly, anyway you look at it.

Chrissy and the big boys swam ashore pushing along their mom and baby Pat in a rubber raft. The skipper swam the raft (no paddles!), back out and battened down our little sailing ship’s hatches. I caught the family up on the midway, taking the same rides (updated?) I’d taken a generation and more before. Then we had a picnic in the small, shady-treed, cool, green-grassed park. (The same I’d played catch in so long before as another kind of skipper.) A sign reads that one of the last of the big bands is to play this very night, Lionel Hampton.

The kids babysat on a bench while mom and dad had an old time nostalgic good time, listening, swaying, tapping and dancing. Then we all went back aboard and sailed wing-on-wing away, with gusting winds and a looming thunderhead behind us, the lights of Buffalo’s skyline a beacon far ahead. Safely back to the USA and finally home to Canada. Raining in torrents. And never a once did we encounter Customs or Coastguard.

Crystal Beach down through all of its years – the whole era, its ambiance – was enough to make the most dysfunctional of families, if only for a day, function. It made happy families happier. It helped broaden teenagers’ viewpoints and probably, in the natural course of ‘loverly’ events, broadened and deepened the gene pool on both sides of the border.

Now, I so easily could wax on and on corny sentimental on my own behalf, but let poet Ed Davis do it for us all with his simple, homey Ode to Crystal Beach:

It’s been one hundred and one years

Since Crystal Beach began.

I find it hard to say goodbye

to such an old and worthy friend.

As I look back in history

and slowly turn the pages,

I hear the laughter and see the smiles

of children of all ages.

The people came from all the world

by boat and train and car.

They came from Tokyo, gay Paris

and even Zanzibar.

The service clubs and factories

that had their picnics there.

And everyone who had such fun

has memories to share.

I’ll not forget the many games

and prizes to be won

The cats, the bottles, the penny-toss

they all were so much fun.

And then I think about the rides

that flipped and tossed and curled,

Like our very own Comet

the greatest “Coaster” in the world.

I recall so many times

the Midway that I walked.

But now it all has ended

The entrance gates are locked.

On the day September fourth,

of nineteen eighty-nine

They closed the park and told us all

that this is the last time.

But, I myself, I don’t believe

Crystal Beach will ever die.

The memories that carry on,

Mean we need not say goodbye.

(William Hogg is a resident of Fort Erie.)