A Beach for the People
Near Jones Beach, New York
When Robert Moses built Jones Beach, he made an explicit argument about who deserved access to the shore. The Long Island coastline of the early twentieth century was not available to ordinary New Yorkers. The shoreline was held by wealthy families with private estates and clubs.
Working people living in dense city neighborhoods had almost no access to the Atlantic beaches that lay far from their apartments. Moses stated his intention plainly. He wanted to build a beach for the people of New York, and he wanted it to be fine enough to stand comparison with the best private facilities money could build.
The choice of Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick for the bathhouses, and a Venetian campanile for the water tower, reflected that intention. He was not building a cheap facility for people who had no choice but to accept whatever they were given. He was building something excellent for people who deserved excellence as much as anyone else.
That vision was genuinely realized in some respects: Jones Beach gave millions of New Yorkers a summer experience that had previously belonged only to the wealthy. In other respects, as scholars have noted, the design choices that made the park car-dependent limited its reach to those who already owned automobiles. The democratic aspiration and the exclusionary effect existed side by side, as they often do in the history of American public space.
