On the beach: Part 1, the padlock
Now and then the smallest incident may in its way force the weightiest philosophical issues. Our story begins with the placing of a padlock and a decidedly un-neighborly sign:
A locked gate blocked access from Melville Walk to the beach in the Crow Point section of
Before it ends, we will visit the Supreme Court and detour back two centuries and across the
HINGHAM — For generations, families in the Crow Point section overlooking
)
Public beaches are among the greatest of local prized treasures, for their leveling expanse. Each person who runs into the freezing ocean and gazes in teeth-chattering fascination at the endless rolling ocean thinks himself, for that frigidly exhilarating moment, lord of the seas. The beach is by definition fenceless, the ocean open to all, and the stroller can walk for miles and miles, his own moist sandy footprints claiming the foamy littoral as if each of us were Robinson Crusoe.
Then the Stimsons arrived.
Robert Stimson, a financial analyst, and his wife, Cynthia, bought a plot of land on Melville Walk, tore down a 1920s cottage, and built a $1.3 million, 5,700-square-foot house.
Even before they moved in, a battle started to brew.
The Stimsons, who own Melville Walk with two other families, wanted to restrict access, allowing only abutters and a handful of locals to walk down it to the beach. They also wanted to ban alcohol, bonfires, and parking on Melville Walk.
A small beach, a small walk.
The arriving Stimsons thus exercised several of the normal prerogatives associated with property ownership: controlling who can come on their property, and who can cross it.
And they wanted legal protection if anyone were to drown or get hurt.
Now this last point mixes two ideas: (1) that the Stimsons could be liable for what happened on public property – which suggests a penumbra of legal liability and hence the strong whiffs of implicit ownership over a public beach, and (2) that because of this, they had the right to impose conditions seeking to transfer, or at the very least share, that liability.
For what it’s worth, neither premise seems terribly plausible to me, and had I been a neighbor confronted with this demand, I might well have reacted as the Stimsons’ neighbors did:
The two sides could not come to an agreement. Neighbors threatened to sue.
In June 2004, with their house just completed, the Stimsons put up a fence — a waist-high, wooden barrier with a “No Trespassing” sign — that blocks Melville Walk, a grassy pathway to the strand that locals call Little Beach.
You can’t swim here.
A month later, when the Stimsons moved in, 17 neighbors were waiting for them on the beach, holding a silent vigil. Robert Stimson called police, and when the cruisers arrived and officers dispersed the crowd, neighbors yelled: “Go back to
From my perspective, Mr. Stimson’s reaction, even with a crowd taunt, is all wrong. If you are facing people who disagree with you, and particularly if their disagreement is visceral and clearly sincere, no matter how wrong you may think their reasoning, always go meet them on their ground, and have a dialog.
I did this once, in 1988, when I was picketed by the Massachusetts Tenants Organization (MTO) for sponsoring litigation challenging the constitutionality of a law:
A few days before Christmas, 1988, a WBZ radio reporter showed up in [my pre-Recap company’s] offices with the news I was about to be picketed by the Massachusetts Tenants Organization.
If you do it, you should stand up for it. When their delegation demanded that I come down to the street to speak with their whole membership and hear their demands, down I went onto pedestrian Summer Street amid the fat drifting snowflakes.
There were about a dozen. They had tacky hyperbolic flyers, hand-lettered but obviously scripted signs, handwritten notes of their speeches, and a bullhorn they passed around. A couple of them broke down crying as they read their speeches. I felt bad for them.
As they were speaking, an MTO organizer leaned over and said sotto voce, “You’ve got a lot of guts coming down here.” They had probably expected a fat cat with a big cigar and a tinted windshield in the Mercedes he drove out of the underground parking garage. Instead they got their gangly brother who came out and argued with them.
When they were done, I explained very carefully that we had no interest in evicting anyone, that the answer lay with the federal government, and that I was willing to make common cause with them to go to
Next day, the Boston Globe reported it.
The Stimsons’ encounter was more unnerving:
The Stimsons say the beach vigil on the night they moved in was a turning point in the battle.
Robert Stimson said it frightened his children. “I call it the `move-in massacre,’ ” he said.
[James] Kane said, “We just wanted to make a statement that we want to use the beach.”
The Stimsons’ summoning of the police, and their evident intransigence over their view of their property rights, led to the expected event:
Two months later, James Kane, 66, a retired teacher, and his wife, Irene, 67, a receptionist, who had enjoyed boating off the beach for 33 years, sued the Stimsons in Land Court, asserting that the neighbors’ long history of beach use entitles them to access.
The battle has engulfed this quiet section of
“This is how wars start,” Cynthia Stimson, 43, said yesterday, fighting tears outside
She said that in some respects, the battle is less about beach rights and more about who belongs in Crow Point.
“If you haven’t been here for 50 years, they hate you,” she said. “They hate new people. They hate young people. They hate people whose house is bigger than theirs.”
I do feel bad for Ms. Stimson, although her conclusion (xenophobia) is not supported by the evidence. She fired the first shot, didn’t she?
“Stand your ground. Don’t fire unless fired upon. But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”
It turns out that the issue of beach-right access is surprisingly broad and has led to some very significant eminent domain litigation:
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
