No American public park in 1922 approached Jones Beach’s planned scale.

Evidence

One of the famous architects standing around Moses said, “Are you crazy?” The others knew what the architect meant. As one was later to put it: “It was the scale of the thing—nothing on a scale like this had ever been done in public recreation in America. Here we were on an absolutely deserted sand bar—there was no way even to get there but by boat—and here was this guy drawing X’s on the back of an envelope and talking about bathhouses like palaces and parking lots that held ten thousand cars. Why, I don’t think there was a parking lot for ten thousand cars anywhere in America. And landscaping? Landscaping on a sand bar? We weren’t even sure anything would grow on a sand bar. We thought he was nuts.” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 979