The Coquina Bandshell: Stone Born in the Sea
Near Daytona, Florida
The oceanfront amphitheater at the north end of Daytona Beach's boardwalk is made of stone that the ocean itself created. Coquina is a sedimentary rock formed from millions of compressed shellfish fragments, mostly tiny Donax clams, cemented together by dissolved calcium carbonate during the Pleistocene epoch, between twelve thousand and two and a half million years ago. The name is Spanish for tiny shell. It is soft enough to cut with a handsaw when quarried, but it hardens when exposed to air, which made it one of the most useful building materials available on the Florida coast before concrete.
The Daytona Beach Bandshell was built by Works Progress Administration workers beginning in nineteen thirty-six and completed in nineteen thirty-seven, quarried from coquina rock deposits in neighboring Flagler County and hauled south. The architect was Alan MacDonough, the same man who would design the Streamline Hotel two years later. The design is Late Gothic Revival, which is a startling choice for a beach amphitheater but which gives the structure its cathedral-scale curved shell behind the stage. At the time of its construction, it was said to be the largest bandshell of its kind in the world.
The shell holds about five thousand people on its lawn, and through the decades it has held everything from big band orchestras to wrestling matches to the spring break concerts of the nineteen eighties and nineties, when MTV broadcast Red Hot Chili Peppers and R.E.M. shows from this stage to college students packed shoulder to shoulder across the sand.
Daytona Beach drew as many as three hundred fifty thousand students during the peak spring break years of the mid-nineteen eighties. Then city officials calculated that the crowd was costing more to police and clean up than it was earning in taxes, and Daytona quietly let that chapter close.
The bandshell still hosts free events. The coquina has not moved.
