Exclusion created a spectacle villagers openly enjoyed watching city families suffer

Evidence

The more persistent, who determined to head east until they discovered someplace to swim or picnic, found the road becoming worse and worse. They would see Long Island villagers sitting on the fences and laughing at the families who, because of engine overheating or in a desperate try at a piece of grass, pulled off the road. The line of cars was so solid, the radiator of one almost touching the tailgate of the one before it, that, once out of the line, it was hard for a car to get back in—and it was fun, the villagers said, to watch them try. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 674

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The village laughter at trapped city families on Sunday is a sharp miniature of class-conflict-as-daily-performance; pairs naturally with the status-signaling strand of the immodesty article.
• XREF: connects to: Moses’s vision of Long Island converted Whitman’s poetry into park reports — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 749