3,500 acres of guarded city watershed land had sat unused for decades
Evidence
Their newly acquired leisure time and the mobility to use it to conquer space meant, to the urban masses of America, something very particular. The countryside was no longer inaccessible. For millions of New York fathers, thanks to the machine parked near their door, no longer did a Sunday outing have to be to a Bowery beer garden or a hard-surfaced playground framed by the grimy buildings that they saw every day. Suddenly, it could be to grassy meadows beneath expanses of blue sky, perhaps even to white sand and sparkling surf. They could escape the city, and, more important, they could free their children for a time from its clutches; they could take them boating and hiking and camping, could roam with them through fields and forests, sprawl with them eating picnic lunches on blankets. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 633 (
#builds-on, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Mass leisure and the Model T created a mass demand for countryside access — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 633; Moses identified 3,500 acres of unused city-owned land near Manhattan