Jones Beach: The Beach Robert Moses Built for the People
Near Jones Beach, New York
Jones Beach State Park spreads across a narrow barrier island off the southern shore of Long Island, separated from the mainland by the calm waters of Great South Bay. It stretches nearly seven miles along the open Atlantic, and on the busiest summer weekends it draws hundreds of thousands of visitors. But Jones Beach is not a natural beach in any meaningful sense.
It was engineered, in one of the most ambitious public works projects of the nineteen twenties, by a man who believed that ordinary New Yorkers deserved access to a great beach, and who drove that belief with a force that rarely accepted the word no. The man was Robert Moses. In the nineteen twenties Moses was President of the Long Island State Park Commission, an appointed position with no salary but extraordinary influence.
He observed that the beaches of Long Island were largely inaccessible to the working people of New York City. The private estates and clubs of the wealthy held the shoreline. The poor and the middle class could not reach the barrier islands because there were no roads, no causeways, and no bridges to carry them there.
Moses set out to change that. What would become Jones Beach was, when Moses first surveyed it, a flat, swampy strip barely two feet above sea level, routinely submerged in Atlantic storms. Moses arranged for enormous dredges to pump millions of cubic yards of sand from the bay bottom and deposit them on the island, raising it to twelve feet above sea level.
Thousands of workers planted beach grass by hand in the summer of nineteen twenty eight to hold the new dunes against the coastal wind. A causeway was built across the bay. The park opened on August fourth, nineteen twenty nine.
In its first month it drew three hundred fifty thousand visitors. By the end of that first season nearly one and a half million people had come. Nothing quite like it had been built before in the United States, and Jones Beach became the model for public beach parks across the country.
For its buildings, Moses chose Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick, two of the most expensive construction materials of the day. The water tower he placed at the center of the park was modeled on a campanile in Venice. He was not building something cheap for people who deserved nothing better.
He was building something that could hold its head up.
