Moses reframed pristine emptiness as a canvas awaiting masses of people

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. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 717

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Yale poet who might have ‘thought of Byron’ instead ‘painted in people’ — the transformation of sensibility from aesthetic contemplation to instrumental planning is compressed in two sentences.
• XREF: connects to: Moses invented the idea that parks should host active recreation, not just passive nature — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 710; Being stripped of power freed Moses’s imagination but left it with nowhere to act — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 4666; People instinctively generate noise to assert existence against overwhelming emptiness — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute…, 224 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Being stripped of power freed Moses’s imagination but left it with nowhere to act #expands (0.82) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 4666
• People instinctively generate noise to assert existence against overwhelming emptiness #responds-to (0.75) — George Michelsen Foy, Zero Decibels, 224