Jones Beach mattered more to Moses than any other park project

Evidence

Forty years later, Robert Moses would remember how he had felt in 1925 when he heard the Hempstead referendum results. “It looked like we’d lost Jones Beach,” he would recall. “It looked absolutely hopeless.” More than with any other single project, his dreams had been tied up with Jones Beach. And so had his sense of urgency. He had been hearing with increasing frequency rumors that real estate developers were making deals with Doughty’s machine to have the town turn over the land to them for private development. In his mind’s eye, he could see those vast stretches of untouched sand covered with shabby bungalows. He knew there would never be another opportunity to create a great beach so close to New York City. “You know,” he would recall, “if we lost Deer Range, it would have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. But if we had lost Jones Beach…” His voice would trail off. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 900

Categorization

• QUESTION: Moses feared developers would pave the beach with bungalows — yet this is the man later renowned for public beaches. Worth chasing how his early identity as public-parks champion formed.
• XREF: connects to: 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’s personal love of Long Island’s South Shore motivated his later park building #expands (0.82) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 696