One man’s park vision eventually produced 45 percent of all US state park acreage
Evidence
But in 1923, after tramping alone for months over sand spits and almost wild tracts of Long Island woodland, Robert Moses mapped out a system of state parks there that would cover forty thousand acres and would be linked together—and to New York City—by broad parkways. And by 1929, Moses had actually built the system he had dreamed of, hacking it out in a series of merciless vendettas against wealth and wealth’s power that became almost a legend—to the public and to public officials and engineers from all over the country who came to Long Island to marvel at his work. When Jones Beach, capstone of the system, opened, it opened to nationwide praise of a unanimity and enthusiasm not to be heard again for a public work until the completion of the Tennessee Valley Authority project a decade later—and the enthusiasm led directly to the creation of scores of state parks in other states, parks built on engineering and philosophic principles that came largely out of the old August Belmont Mansion on Long Island where Robert Moses sat, pounding his palm on what had been Belmont’s dinner table and planning out a system far vaster than Long Island’s for all New York State. Over the decades, the state park movement developed other leaders, but it was always to be in his debt. And there was never to be any doubt that the breadth of his vision kept him unique within its ranks. At the end of his leadership of the New York system, the total acreage of the state parks in the fifty states was 5,799,957. New York State alone had 2,567,256 of those acres—or 45 percent of all the state parks in the country. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 59
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Moses’s park plan shaped park policy across other US states — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 741
Broader Connections
- Moses’s park plan shaped park policy across other US states
#corroborates(0.85) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 741