[Avodah] mixed swimming, and allowing walking on the boardwalk

[Meir Shinnar]

me
>  > but there is little basis for forbidding, for example, mixed swimming, and
>  > allowing walking on the boardwalk next to the beach....
RSB
>
>  > Which poskim are mattir walking on the boardwalk next to the beach?
>  >
>  > AISI it is clearly Assur. See Aruch Hashulchan EH 21: 1, 2 & 3.
>  >
>  > SBA
RMM
>  I think R' Shinar was being rhetorical. To prove the point that it
>  isn't swimming per se, but rather the un-tziut-ness (for which mixed
>  swimming is paradigmnatic but lav davka), he pointed out that walking
>  on the boardwalk is as prohibited as the actual swimming.
I wasn't being rhetorical.  The question is, what is halacha lema'ase
psak of most poskim about tzniut and the need to be mafrish.
One could be machmir, as RSBA would want.
On the other hand, at least until quite recently, it was quite the
norm for people - including prominent rashe yeshiva - to walk on the
boardwalk, either in Long Island or in Miami Beach.  This is the nth
iteration (with large n) of this topic - and on one of the earlier
iterations, one of our former chaverim confessed that he knew the
rashe yeshiva who walked on the boardwalk, and never understood it.
This position was given to my father by a prominent (MO) rav, as they
were together in the swimming pool in a hotel at Miami Beach - the rav
would understand the basis for being machmir, but not the basis of
those who walked the boardwalk, where the level of zniut was far worse
than in a hotel swimming pool of elderly Jews...

WRT to RMB's point about changes in swimming attire, while this may be
true of the garb of the 1890s, it was not true of the swimming attire
of the 1920 and for sure 1930s - and people kept coming both to
marienbad, as well as the beaches at Trieste - the swimming attire of
the 1930s was not very different than that at a family friendly pool
or beach today.  (Again, on a previous iteration, someone challenged,
then went to reference books on attire, and confessed that that was so
- and remained that he just couldn't udnerstand how those rabbanim
would do it...)
Meir Shinnar