Firsthand experience of actual land transformed Moses’s modest park plans into a vast vision.

Evidence

By the end of the summer of 1923, Moses knew that his plans for Long Island had been far too small. Now he wanted not just a state park on Jones Beach but another one, which would include the unmapped six hundred acres, across the inlet on Fire Island. He wanted state parks on the South Shore not just at the Taylor Estate but in Hampton Bays and at Montauk Point. He wanted parks on the Sound not just at Sunken Meadow but at Wildwood, Lloyd Neck and Orient Point. And he wanted two in the center of the Island, at the Belmont and Yoakum estates. He wanted forty thousand acres of parks. He wanted not just a parkway along the South Shore and one along the North Shore but a parkway connecting them far out on Long Island so that families from New York City could drive out on one, loop around and drive home on the other without retracing their path. He wanted another parkway—he wanted two more parkways—linking both the northern and southern parkways with two causeways running to Jones Beach. He wanted still another parkway linking them with Fire Island. He wanted 124 miles of parkways. And he wanted the parkways to be broader and more beautiful than any roads the world had ever seen, landscaped as private parks are landscaped so that they would be in themselves parks, “ribbon parks,” so that even as people drove to parks, they would be driving through parks. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 755

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of ‘ribbon parks’ — parkways designed so the drive itself is the park.
• XREF: connects to: Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 700; Moses’s personal love of Long Island’s South Shore motivated his later park building — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 696

Broader Connections

• Moses transferred his vision of unused space from Manhattan to Long Island #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 700
• Moses’s personal love of Long Island’s South Shore motivated his later park building #corroborates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 696