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Moonstone Beach was known for sun and buns. A look back at the end of RI's last nude beach
It's unclear when exactly Moonstone Beach became a haven for nude sunbathers.
According to various reports, the stretch of sandy beach located between the beaches in the South Kingstown villages of Matunuck and Green Hill gained popularity in the 1970s and remained so into the late 1980s. Then, by the end of the century, the sun and buns would start coming to a halt.
It was no joke when on April 1, 1988, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began erecting a mile-long, 4-foot-high fence along Moonstone Beach to enclose nesting piping plovers and least terns until Aug. 31.
According to Providence Journal archives, the fence closed off New England's only nude beach and South Kingstown's Town Beach during the nesting season. All that remained was a 50-foot right-of-way controlled by South Kingstown, and under the terms of the closing, which was announced earlier in 1988, the public still would be allowed on Moonstone Beach below the mean high water line – the average height of high tide – which is well below the sections of the beach where people sit.
The fence left bathers with a narrow strip between the fence and the water.
The decision to close most of the beach was made in the hopes of increasing the population of piping plovers by allowing them more room to nest and feed. Plovers, a shore bird that nests in the same soft sand that attracts sunbathers, became protected under the federal Endangered Species Act in 1986.
Only two pairs of plovers had migrated from the south in 1985 to nest at Moonstone, and eight of their eggs were destroyed by predators drawn by refuse left by beach-goers, a representative of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.
With the fence plan in place, the town also banned nudity within 200 feet of the town beach at Moonstone Beach in 1988.
The efforts proved semi-successful, with seven baby plovers surviving at Moonstone during the summer of 1989.
As the plan to protect the plovers was being hatched, nudists protested the decision, claiming at times that the Fish and Wildlife Service was overstepping its authority because it opposed nude sunbathing – a charge that was denied by service officials.
A letter-writing effort in June 1988 appealed to reopen the beach. An attempt to challenge the fence through a court injunction that summer also failed.
In fall 1989, members of the New England Naturist Association announced plans for sit-ins and other protest actions the following summer. In December 1989, fully clothed members of the New England Naturist Association picketed the local headquarters of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the hope that public pressure would force the agency to reopen the beach the following summer.
While those efforts proved unsuccessful, the association was able to find some relief when, in 1990, they leased a 350-foot beach adjacent to Moonstone. Association President Joseph R. DiPippo said that since the beach opened that July, they had averaged 150 people a day during the week and 250 to 300 people a day on the weekend. That beach would remain in use until 1992.
In 1993, the association purchased property in South Kingstown near the Charlestown border. That move came after another effort in 1993 by the association to lease a 32-acre peninsula on the Ninigret Pond side of the Ninigret State Conservation Area for nude sunbathing, but it was unable to get a local zoning permit.
That would remain in use for two summers until the Rhode Island Supreme Court dealt a blow to the New England Naturist Association when it ruled that the clothing-optional beach violated the town's zoning regulations. The court's ruling had nothing to do with issues of nudity, but rather with a local law requiring that the beach, as a recreational facility, receive a special exception from the town's Zoning Board to operate.
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown was New England's last nude beach
