Wealthy South Shore landowners spent heavily on dredging rather than risk subdivision

Evidence

When one of their number, Julian T. Davies, died in 1922, they feared that his estate might be bought by some undesirable or, worse, subdivided. A group of them, led by Havemeyer and his brother-in-law, W. Kingsland Macy, decided to turn it into a private club. The obstacles might have deterred less determined men. Davies had owned only 231 acres and most of them were marshland that was covered by water at high tide, so that there was only enough solid land for a nine-hole golf course. To make the second nine, they were told, dredges would have to work for a year to haul up sand and fill in the marshland with it. They set the dredges to work. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the ADDENDUM article on exclusion and the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme of class signaling through estate upkeep; also connects forward to Moses’s eventual engineering of the same region. — connects to: Builders filled wetlands partly because dredged bay-bottom made cheap fill — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 661; Landowners’ resistance made large regional parks seem financially and legally impossible — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 691

Broader Connections

• Builders filled wetlands partly because dredged bay-bottom made cheap fill #corroborates (0.85) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 661
• Landowners’ resistance made large regional parks seem financially and legally impossible #expands (0.75) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 691