The Low Overpasses: A Disputed History
Near Jones Beach, New York
Along the parkways leading to Jones Beach, the overpasses are unusually low. The bridges on the Southern State Parkway are low enough for passenger cars but not for full-sized city buses. That difference has been at the center of one of the most debated questions in American urban planning history: was it intentional?
Robert Caro, in his landmark nineteen seventy four biography of Robert Moses titled The Power Broker, argued that the low bridges were built deliberately. Caro reported that Moses ordered them built to that height to prevent city buses from reaching the park, thereby keeping poor and non-white New Yorkers, who depended on public transit, away from Jones Beach. Caro's source was Sidney Shapiro, an aide to Moses.
The story entered history books and became one of the most cited examples of racist infrastructure design. More recent scholars have challenged the account. Some argue that parkways of that era routinely excluded commercial vehicles and buses on general principles of parkway design, and that the low clearances were not unusual for the time or the road type.
Whatever the intent, the effect was clear: for most of Jones Beach's early history, the park was reachable only by car. Who could afford an automobile in nineteen twenty nine was itself a question with a definite racial and economic answer.
