Jones Beach Today: Concerts, Storms, and Renourishment
Near Jones Beach, New York
Jones Beach State Park has never stopped being among the most visited public beaches on the East Coast, but it has changed with the decades. The Marine Theater that Guy Lombardo filled with summer musical spectaculars evolved, in the nineteen eighties and beyond, into a major rock and pop concert venue drawing major touring artists to its waterfront stage. Today the amphitheater holds fifteen thousand people and operates through the summer season as one of the region's principal outdoor entertainment venues.
The island itself presents an ongoing engineering challenge. Barrier islands erode. Major Atlantic storms, hurricanes, and the annual battering of winter nor'easters strip sand from the beach and require periodic renourishment to maintain the broad white strand that visitors expect.
The park periodically pumps new sand from offshore deposits back onto the beach, continuing the process of human management that Moses himself began in nineteen twenty eight when he first raised the island from two feet above sea level to twelve. Today the park encompasses nearly twenty five hundred acres and draws more than five million visitors in a busy summer season. It remains what Moses intended from the beginning: a vast public facility on the ocean, built and maintained at a level of investment normally reserved for private resorts, available to anyone who can make it across the causeway.
