The Land That Kept Getting Rebuilt

Revere Beach carries the title "first public beach in the United States," opened July 12, 1896, with the Metropolitan Park Commission formally taking over management that October 1. That much is well documented and often repeated. Less repeated is what happened afterward at the beach's own north end, where the Wonderland district has been demolished and rebuilt for a different purpose three separate times in under 120 years — and the beach itself was created by the same kind of government land action that its most recent chapter revisited.

Taking the Land Back, 1896

Before 1896, the shore now known as Revere Beach was lined with private bathhouses and beach-related structures, packed in close because the Boston, Revere Beach & Lynn Railroad — the "Narrow Gauge," running since 1875 — ran its tracks near the high-tide mark. The Metropolitan Park Commission's landscape architect, Charles Eliot, redesigned the shorefront by physically relocating the railroad off the beach to the alignment the MBTA Blue Line still uses today, and by clearing hundreds of those private structures. An estimated 45,000 people showed up on opening day to a reservation of 84 acres running just over three miles along Massachusetts Bay. The beach that resulted was, in a direct sense, land taken from private operators and redistributed for free public use.

Act One: A Fairground That Lasted Four Seasons

The beach's north end became the site of Wonderland Amusement Park in 1906. It imported a Shoot-the-Chutes water ride salvaged from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, along with a Scenic Railway and other rides typical of the trolley-park boom then sweeping the Northeast. The business model assumed streetcar and railroad access would keep delivering paying crowds indefinitely. The Panic of 1907 — a national banking crisis triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market — cut off the credit seasonal amusement operators needed to survive winter, and Wonderland went bankrupt within two years. It limped through reduced seasons before closing for good after 1910.

South of Wonderland, the beach built a second amusement icon in 1925: the Cyclone, a wooden roller coaster designed by Frederick Church and built by Harry Traver's Traver Engineering for $125,000. At 100 feet tall, it was the world's tallest roller coaster, a title it held until 1964, when Mexico City's Montaña Rusa surpassed it. The Cyclone burned in 1969, burned again more severely afterward, and was finally demolished in 1974. A blizzard in February 1978 finished the job on what remained of the amusement district, tearing out the seawall and sidewalks along with the last standing structures. The beach did not reopen in a fully revitalized form until May 1992 — and what backed it this time was condominium towers, not dance halls.

Act Two: Seventy-Five Years of Dog Racing

Sources disagree on exactly which ground came next. Wonderland Greyhound Park's own history holds that it was built on the amusement park's old footprint, converted first to a bicycle track after the park failed; Wikipedia's separate entry on the amusement park instead places the greyhound track across Route 1A from the bulk of Wonderland Park, whose own site is today the Wonderland Marketplace Mall. What's certain is that on June 12, 1935, Wonderland Greyhound Park opened in the district, running live dog races longer than the amusement park and the track's own next chapter combined: 75 years. Greyhound racing was legal, licensed, and taxed in Massachusetts for most of the twentieth century. That changed in November 2008, when Massachusetts voters approved a statewide ballot measure banning the sport over animal-welfare concerns. Live racing at Wonderland ended in September 2009. The track survived one more year on simulcast wagering from other states' tracks until Governor Deval Patrick vetoed a gaming bill that would have added slot machines and kept simulcast-only operation profitable. Wonderland Greyhound Park closed permanently on August 19, 2010.

Act Three: Eminent Domain, Again

Demolition of the track began in 2017, and the lot sat empty for years. In November 2022, the City of Revere used eminent domain — the government's power to seize private property for public use, with compensation — to take the parcel for a new Revere High School. The former track owner did not accept the number quietly: a lawsuit followed, arguing the city's $29.5 million valuation was roughly a third of the land's real worth, which the owner put closer to $100 million. That dispute was still working through the courts when construction broke ground in August 2025.

What the Repetition Means

Historical "firsts" are common among American beaches and often contested by rival claimants elsewhere. Rarer is a single beach district that cycled through three uses over more than a century for three different purposes, financed three different ways, and ended three different ways: bankruptcy from a national financial panic, a statewide ballot ban, and a municipal condemnation still being fought in court. The dog track and the school share one parcel; the fairground's relationship to that same ground is less settled — the track's own history claims it was built there, while the amusement park's own record places it across the road, on ground that is today a shopping mall. What's certain is that no grandstand from 1935 is visible at the 2025 school site rising in its place. What persisted was the district itself and the public's habit of deciding, roughly once a generation, that the ground should become something else entirely.

The irony is that the beach's founding act and its most recent chapter are structurally the same event. In 1896 the state cleared private bathhouses to build a beach the public still uses for free. In 2022 the state cleared a private greyhound track to build a school the public will use for free. One is celebrated as a National Historic Landmark, a designation the beach received on May 27, 2003. The other is still being argued over in a courtroom. Whether the second seizure gets the same verdict from history as the first is not yet settled — the litigation over what the land was actually worth was still open as construction proceeded in 2025.

What a visitor sees today reflects the disappearance more than the persistence. There is no fairground, no dog track, and — apart from a construction fence — no obvious marker of any of this on the ground. The MBTA's Wonderland station, still bearing the name of a park that closed in 1910, is the closest thing to a monument the site has left.

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