Biking, barbecues, and beach days—summer in America

Summer traditions – From the Atlantic City boardwalk built to keep sand off train cars to families cooling off with fire hydrants and blocks of ice, the 20th century left behind vivid snapshots of summer life in America—when air-conditioning was rare, swimsuits evolved fast, and

On a hot day in 1950. a person could feel the era’s limits in the simplest details: no air-conditioning at home to rescue the afternoon. no modern swimsuit cuts to glide through the water. and no easy way to cool down except what people could improvise. Instead. summer meant crowds. contraptions. and traditions that had already been handed down for generations—just with plenty of older technology still in play.

The boardwalk culture that defined many American vacations has deep roots. The first boardwalk in the United States was built in Atlantic City. New Jersey. just five years after the Civil War ended. As Atlantic County’s government describes it. the boardwalk was originally constructed “as a means of keeping sand out of the railroad cars and hotels.” By the 20th century. other summer magnets were also surging. including Coney Island in New York.

Beach life also carried older ideas that were slower to change. The beach was historically considered part of the wilderness, Smithsonian Magazine reported, and thus an undesirable place for humans. It wasn’t until the mid-18th century that Europeans began to speak of the beach’s positive qualities. and interest grew.

Once families arrived, summer meals looked different depending on the decade—but the instinct stayed the same. A couple holding a picnic basket on a beach in the 1950s captured a practice that had been growing alongside outdoor leisure. Research librarian and food historian Lynne Olver told NPR in a 2013 interview that picnic baskets as people know them today began at “the very dawn of the 20th century.” She explained that the largest woven baskets “seem to resemble trunks. ” and that may be where the picnic hamper idea came from.

Sports weren’t confined to fields, either. Women playing baseball at a beach in Miami, Florida, circa 1935 shows how quickly the shoreline became a place to compete. A proto-version of beach volleyball originated in Hawaii, then a US territory, in 1915, according to Sand Court Experts. And the beach ball became a shore-side staple after it was invented in the 1930s.

One key upgrade—making the beach ball practical for mass fun—came in 1938, when a man named Jonathan DeLonge invented the inflatable version of the ubiquitous beach toy. Early beach balls were roughly the size of a hand, Time reported.

Even the clothes changed the rhythm of summer. At the turn of the century, women typically wore knee-length wool dresses. Bathing suits became more tight-fitting amid the development of synthetic materials like nylon and Lastex in the 1930s. Men’s swim trunks got less tight-fitting over time but largely kept their look. while two-pieces and modern bikinis became common for women by the 1960s.

Those shifts came alongside another invention that would eventually change outdoor life: sunscreen. Modern sunscreen is tied to the 1930s and 1940s, and the idea had earlier roots elsewhere. History.com says ancient civilizations protected themselves from the sun using plant extracts and powders. while more modern forms of sun block were invented in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

In the United States. Benjamin Green. a veteran and pharmacist. invented a petroleum jelly-like lotion in the 1940s and later founded Coppertone. But the long march toward standard measurements took time. Franz Greiter created the SPF system in 1962. and his own sunscreen was only SPF 2 at the time. with higher-SPF products taking a few more decades to become common.

Beach travel also expanded in ways that felt unmistakably American by mid-century. Hawaii became a popular vacation spot for beach-lovers. and while tourism was suspended in the Aloha State during World War II. the University of Hawai’i Economic Research Organization reports that Hawaii began to attract sightseers—rather than merchant seamen—in the 1860s. Mark Twain, writing as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union newspaper, visited the archipelago—then called the Sandwich Islands.

For people who couldn’t or didn’t want to leave their city, summer still found a stage. In New York City. a group of friends canoeing around the boating lake at Central Park in 1964 points to the long availability of accessible recreation. The Lake at Central Park first opened to the public in the 1850s. and boating became popular after it was made available in 1860. per the Central Park Conservancy.

Cooling down was its own summer economy—one with an edge of chaos and community mischief. A photo of kids in Harlem cooling off in front of a fire hydrant in 1966 doesn’t just show heat relief. It shows a cultural practice. New Yorkers have a long history of cracking open fire hydrants to cool off in summer. The New York Times cited an article that described fire hydrants as “the lifeline of summer. spewing cooling excitement to all around it.”.

Often, children opened the hydrants themselves with wrenches. The Times reported on a heat wave in 1925 in which “thousands of New Yorkers fled their homes. often with their bedding. to sleep in parks. on beaches. even in the grass by the roadside.” In that same year. children opening fire hydrants became such a nuisance to the fire commissioner that he asked the police to guard them.

The improvisation didn’t stop there. People ate ice cream next to blocks of ice. harking back to the era when ice was harvested for food preservation. The Times reported that in 1896. Theodore Roosevelt—who was police commissioner of New York at the time—handed out ice in alleyways next to tenement homes during a heatwave.

Mechanical cooling existed earlier, but it wasn’t what most households could rely on. The Department of Energy says mechanical air-cooling techniques were used as early as 1902. but they were primarily for commercial use and too large and expensive for American homes. In the 1940s. affordable window units began to be developed. and by the 1960s. central air conditioning became common in many new homes.

Just beyond the heat—through sun and sound—summer also meant music festivals. A 1960 concert featuring the Boston Symphony Orchestra was held at the Berkshire Music Center. now called the Tanglewood Music Center. near Lenox. Massachusetts. The biggest festivals became synonymous with rock and folk music.

Woodstock remains the best-known symbol of that decade’s pull. The Woodstock Music & Art Fair—more commonly shortened to Woodstock—took place over three days in August 1969 in Bethel, New York. The event attracted about 400,000 visitors.

Even leisure that sounds quiet still tells a broader story. Summer has always been a great time for reading. Yet recent data cited by Smithsonian Magazine suggests reading for pleasure has been declining. The magazine. citing a study from the journal iScience. reported that reading for pleasure has been broadly declining since the 1940s. and from 2003 to 2023. the percentage of Americans reading for pleasure dropped about 3% each year—a total drop of 40%.

In the middle of all that, summer still gathered people of all ages outside. A group of men playing cards on a summer afternoon in Boston. Massachusetts. circa 1955. reads like an ordinary moment—because the numbers behind other life changes made ordinary moments feel more valuable. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. the number of Americans aged 65 and older was 10.7 million in 1948. rising to 59.7 million in 2024—an increase of 457%. The labor force participation rate for people aged 65 and older was 27% in 1948. dropped to 10.8% in 1985. and has been increasing in recent years. reaching 19.5% in 2024.

Those shifts didn’t replace summer day trips—they changed who could enjoy them and how. Amusement parks stayed central to the calendar. Coney Island in Brooklyn. New York. has an iconic boardwalk. and between 1880 and World War II. Coney had the largest amusement area in the US. In its heyday, there were three distinct amusement parks: Luna Park (which was revitalized in 2010), Dreamland, and Steeplechase Park.

Employment, too, had its own summer rhythm. At Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, two young women take a break from their jobs, circa 1956. Seasonal spikes and drops were built into the work. Unsurprisingly, amusement park employment saw sharp shifts depending on the season. In 2024, the BLS reported a 23% drop in employment in December compared to July.

During heat waves, Coney Island drew crowds on another scale. A 1924 heat wave brought more than half a million visitors to the beach in one day, the Times reported. A crowd gathered on the beach at Coney Island in July 1940.

No summer tradition in the US seemed complete without ice cream. National Geographic reported that during Prohibition. ice-cream soda was the country’s favorite beverage. with Americans eating 325 million gallons of the frozen treat in 1922 alone. Yet data also suggests change in modern consumption. CNN reported. citing USDA data. that Americans on average ate 18 pounds of ice cream per person in 1986. but just 12 pounds in 2021.

Then came the backyard smoke. Americans enjoyed barbecues in the 20th century, and the backyard grill as we know it evolved over time. History.com reports that the first appeared in California in the 1930s, mostly used by the wealthy. It was Henry Ford who popularized charcoal grills around the same time. George Stephen. who worked at Weber Brothers Metal Works. created the first kettle grill. which became popular in the 1950s and 60s.

Breakfast could even move outdoors. A boy flips pancakes at a summer camp run by the Madison Square Boys Club in New York City. circa 1955. points to a quieter kind of tradition—one organized around community and youth programs. The Madison Square Boys Club was a founding member of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, per the organization.

For many families, summer also meant staying in motion on two wheels. In 1955, a couple rides a tandem bicycle. In 1964, Americans bought 5 million bicycles—double the number purchased a decade before, according to Our Bike Hub. Danish inventor Mikael Pedersen is widely credited with inventing the first publicized tandem bicycle in the late 19th century.

Sports kept showing up on summer schedules and in everyday streets. Basketball in 1971, for instance, signals a shift from niche to national pastime. Basketball went from being a little-known sport at the turn of the century to one of the most popular sports in the US by 2000.

Playgrounds, too, transformed from something uncommon into a fixture. Playgrounds weren’t common in the US before 1900, per Playworld. That changed as the US reached over 5,000 playgrounds by 1924. The trend continued with more built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. and additional play structures built in the 1950s and ’60s.

Summer camps were another mainstay. Slate reported that summer camps were introduced in North America in the 1880s as a product of the “back-to-nature” trend. a movement gaining traction in an increasingly industrialized world. One of the first organized summer camps in America, Camp Chocorua, was located in New Hampshire. Open from 1881 to 1889, the camp was founded by Dartmouth student Ernest Balch, per the Lake Winnipesaukee Museum.

Technology made staying in touch easier, but before email campers relied on snail mail. Two boys writing letters at an American summer camp, circa 1950, fits into the larger story of how mail moved. Throughout the USPS’ history. it has used a handful of methods to deliver mail: steamboats and stagecoaches at first. followed by railroads and automobiles.

Camps ranged widely—from secular youth programs to military academies. Circa 1950, teenagers at a summer camp operated by Admiral Farragut Academy in New Jersey swab the deck of a boat. The Academy operated a summer camp at its campus in Pine Beach, New Jersey. The Garden State school closed in 1994, but the Academy still operates its second campus in St. Petersburg, Florida, according to the academy.

Religious organizations also ran camps. Two girls eat jam at Camp Epworth, a camp in Long Island, New York, operated by a Methodist youth organization. The Epworth League, a Methodist youth association, operated day camps for city children, according to Case Western Reserve University. One of the organization’s camps was located in Jamesport, New York, on Long Island.

And the camping landscape itself was shaped by federal planning. The campgrounds people are familiar with today were established in the 1930s, developed by the National Park Service as “Recreation Demonstration Areas.”

Even after pitching tents, summer didn’t always look like retreat. People who camped also went fishing. Circa 1950, two men fish on a New Hampshire river bank. New Hampshire, which has 944 lakes per the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, remains a go-to destination for fishing enthusiasts.

A simple pattern runs through the century-long images: when technology and infrastructure were less reliable in the heat. summer life relied more on shared spaces—beaches. boardwalks. parks. amusement sites—and on improvisation. from cooling off with fire hydrants to cooling food with harvested ice. By the time window units and central air became common in many homes by the 1960s. many traditions were already deeply familiar. What changed wasn’t the urge to gather. It was the method.

20th century summer America Atlantic City boardwalk Coney Island fire hydrants heat wave 1925 Coppertone sunscreen SPF Franz Greiter Benjamin Green Central Park boating Woodstock 1969 Tanglewood Music Center 1960 air conditioning window units kettle grill picnic baskets beach ball Jonathan DeLonge summer camps Camp Chocorua Palisades Amusement Park employment New Hampshire 944 lakes