The Parkway System That Made Jones Beach Possible

Getting to Jones Beach required Moses to build not just the park itself but a system of roads to reach it. In the nineteen twenties, Long Island had no parkway network. Its roads were local roads, not suited to moving millions of city residents toward a beach destination.

Moses set out to create a new kind of road for a new kind of recreation. The parkways he designed for Long Island were built differently from ordinary highways. They were wide, smooth, and landscaped, lined with trees and plantings rather than commercial development.

Moses restricted them to passenger vehicles, prohibiting trucks and other commercial vehicles, which gave the drives a pastoral quality unusual for roads carrying that much traffic. The Southern State Parkway and the Wantagh State Parkway were the main arteries, feeding traffic south and east toward the Wantagh Causeway, the crossing of the bays and channels south of Wantagh that provided the original vehicle route to Jones Beach Island. The causeway opened in nineteen twenty-nine, making possible the park's opening that August.

Together, the parkway network and the causeway represented a new model for regional transportation planning, one that linked a great city to its recreational hinterland through roads built not for commerce but for leisure. Moses applied the same approach across Long Island in the following decades, creating a parkway system that fundamentally shaped the island's development.