In the 1920s most U.S. states lacked a single state park

Evidence

When Robert Moses began building state parks and parkways during the 1920’s, twenty-nine states didn’t have a single state park; six had only one each. Roads uninterrupted by crossings at grade and set off by landscaping were almost nonexistent. Most proposals for parks outside cities were so limited in scope that, even if they had been adopted, they would have been inadequate. The handful of visionaries who dreamed of large parks were utterly unable to translate their dreams into reality. No one in the nation seemed able to conceive of proposals—and methods of implementing them—equal to the scope and complexity of the problem posed by the need of urban masses for countryside parks and a convenient means of getting to them. New York City residents heading for Long Island’s green hills and ocean beaches, for example, had to make their way, bumper to bumper, along dusty rutted roads the most modern of which were exactly eighteen feet wide. Those who made it to the Island found that the hills and beaches had been monopolized by the robber barons of America, who had bought up its choicest areas with such thoroughness that there was hardly a meadow or strip of beach within driving distance of New York still open to the public. So fierce was their opposition—and so immense their political power—that New York park enthusiasts had stopped thinking of putting parks on Long Island. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 58

Categorization

• XREF: Demand for public parks and greenspace links to the recorded article on trees as infrastructure and public-space history from Lofland’s World of Strangers. — connects to: A centralized state park authority gave disparate park interests one louder funding voice — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 731
• QUESTION: The claim that robber barons bought up Long Island’s shore so thoroughly parks activists gave up warrants checking against accounts of the eventual acquisition battles for Jones Beach and state parks.

Broader Connections

• A centralized state park authority gave disparate park interests one louder funding voice #complicates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 731