Moses envisioned Jones Beach as a blank canvas requiring only people to fill it

Evidence

Had he been still the poet he had been at Yale, Moses might have looked at this scene and thought of Byron. But now he was thinking of parks. He looked at Jones Beach with eyes that had looked at crowded New York City and had seen a hundred ways of improving it—and he realized that the emptiness of the strand, its endless, untouched vistas, was a clean canvas on which he could draw whatever he chose. And, looking at it that way, he realized that all the landscape needed was the painting in of people to make it a bathing beach, a great bathing beach, a bathing beach such as America had never seen. Moreover, the people, the masses of New York City, were amazingly close. Jones Beach had seemed so cut off from the world, but, he realized with a start, when he stood on its western end he was less than twenty-five miles from Times Square. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 717

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM article on trees as infrastructure and to the theme of powerful single individuals reshaping landscapes, echoes Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower worldbuilding about building from empty land. — connects to: Moses reframed pristine emptiness as a canvas awaiting masses of people — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 717; Moses specified costly luxury facing materials for every Jones Beach structure — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 982

Broader Connections

• Moses reframed pristine emptiness as a canvas awaiting masses of people #expands (0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 717