Moses turned New York garbage dumps and mud flats into hundreds of parks

Evidence

When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers reshaped every park in the city and then filled the parks with zoos and skating rinks, boathouses and tennis houses, bridle paths and golf courses, 288 tennis courts and 673 baseball diamonds. Under his direction, endless convoys of trucks hauled the city’s garbage into its marshes, and the garbage filled the marshes, was covered with earth and lawn, and became more parks. Long strings of barges brought to the city white sand dredged from the ocean floor and the sand was piled on mud flats to create beaches. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 48

Categorization

• CANDY: The detail that garbage-filled marshes and ocean-floor dredged sand created the city’s public beaches and parks is a compact, vivid bar-conversation fact.
• XREF: connects to: Moses identified 3,500 acres of unused city-owned land near Manhattan — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 707; New York’s donated state parks were neglected and going unused before Moses. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 728; Moses created fifteen thousand acres of new New York land. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 42 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Moses built public works at a time no other city could #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 57