Robert Moses and the Creation of Jones Beach State Park
Words and Photos by Rich Nardo (@ntvli)
There are few places more identifiable with Long Island than Jones Beach. The 6.5-mile state park, with its white sand beaches and iconic water tower, conjures warm nostalgia for nine decades worth of Long Islanders.
Personally, Jones Beach State Park was the first place I met the Atlantic Ocean, and I still have vivid memories of my cousins coming down from Connecticut for a few days each summer to hang out at Field 6 and grab dinner at Borelli’s Pizzeria in East Meadow. While our family would eventually switched to Robert Moses State Park - and I personally made the change to Long Beach once I hit high school - I can’t drive down Ocean Parkway without being brought back to those early days taking in deep breaths of salty air from the back of my parent’s minivan.
I would imagine similar memories are behind the park’s estimated six million annual visitors, making it the most heavily visited beach on the east coast and a rival to Niagara Falls for most visited spot in the New York State Parks system. Still, the park offers far more than idyllic beach days and a beautiful boardwalk.
People are drawn to the park’s 15,000 capacity amphitheater, Northwell Health at Jones Beach, with its packed summer schedule of top talent and legendary tailgate culture. The fishing pier at Field 10 and handful of productive spots to surfcast bring anglers from all over the island to the park and the holiday light show and Blue Angels demonstration are staples of a lot of people’s annual calendar. In regards to my own relationship with Jones Beach, it’s become one of my favorite places to photograph, particularly in the quieter winter months.
With all the value that Jones Beach has brought to the lives of Long Islanders, it’s almost hard to believe that there was so much resistance when Robert Moses made the realization of his vision for Jones Beach the first major public project of his tenure as president of the Long Island State Park Commission. It took tremendous foresight by the important-yet-controversial man to see the potential of the swampy marshland of Jones Island - even though it sat just two feet above sea level and was regularly submerged during storms or tortured by pulverizing sandstorms when the winds were high.
Moses’ love affair with the area began in 1923, when he was still just an unknown city planner. Reports say that he would spend days alone on the grounds putting his vision together through sketches in a notebook. It would take years of career growth and convincing the right politicians, but persistence paid off and he was eventually be able to break ground on the project. Huge dredgers were brought in to work around the clock bringing sand from the bottom of the bay to the ocean front beaches, raising the ground to twelve feet above sea level.
To deal with the wind, landscape architects were commissioned to plant a beach grass called Ammophila arenaria that had successfully stabilized other Long Island beaches. The roots of this European Beachgrass grow sideways in search of water and are very effective at holding dunes in place to form a barrier against the wind. Thousands of men planted this grass by hand throughout the summer of 1928, but the result was a beach ready for throngs of visitors looking to soak up the sun.
The pièce de résistance came in the form of the Jones Beach water tower that functions as the centerpiece of the entire park. Now known as “The Pencil” or “The Needle” by locals, Moses worked with his architects and engineers to come up with a design inspired by the campanile of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice as opposed to the more conventional “bulbous orb floating above narrow supports with the town’s name scrawled across it” that are popular in the U.S. The final product was as functional as it was ornate - housing a 315,000 gallon tank that draws from three thousand feet deep wells that supplies water to the whole park. Today The Pencil reaches 231 feet and is adorned with Art Deco details around the meeting point of its Ohio sandstone base and the Barbizon Brick that makes up most of the tower. It then returns to sandstone before culminating in the recently restored (2010) pyramid spire at the top.
No detail was spared by Moses in an effort to make the recreational area the first public beach to replicate a resort-like experience for ordinary people and was dubbed a “people’s country club”. The aesthetics were designed to replicate being on an oceanliner - including anchors at the entrance, garbage cans shaped like ship air vents and games like shuffleboard available. Despite a troublesome sandstorm, the opening of the park to the public on August 4th, 1929 was very well received. Then governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, his predecessor, Alfred E. Smith, and Robert Moses himself all spoke glowingly of what the park would mean to Long Island as an excited crowd listened intently. In the ninety years since, Long Island’s enthusiasm for the park has not wavered, making it one of the foundational achievements of the man dubbed “The Power Broker”. He was by no means perfect, but I think most Long Islanders would agree Robert Moses got it right when it came to Jones Beach.
References
The Cultural Landscape Foundation - https://tclf.org/landscapes/jones-beach-state-park
Soft Schools Article “Jones Beach Facts” - http://www.softschools.com/facts/beaches/jones_beach_facts/3372/
LI Pulse Article - http://lipulse.com/2015/05/18/picture-past-2/
Long Island Press Article “Comprehensive Guide to Jones Beach” - https://www.longislandpress.com/2019/06/13/a-comprehensive-guide-to-jones-beach-island/
Preservation Long Island “Jones Beach Report” - https://preservationlongisland.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/pli_reports_Jones-Beach-Report-2004-sm.pdf
NY Times Article “Jones Beach Tower Set for Restoration” - https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/18towerli.html
Jones Beach Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Beach_State_Park
NY Curbed Article on Robert Moses + Jones Beach - https://ny.curbed.com/2017/6/21/15838436/robert-moses-jones-beach-history-new-york-city
Newsday Article “The Secrets of Jones Beach State Park” - https://www.newsday.com/long-island/towns/secrets-of-jones-beach-state-park-1.9071410
Ask any wildlife photographer or explore based on Long Island and they’ll tell you that our home turf does not get nearly the credit it deserves when it comes to species diversity. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that most people think Long Island has a couple of raccoons, a possum here and there, and way too many deer out east and that basically sums it up.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. So for this article, we worked with some of the best wildlife photographers based on Long Island to highlight 10 species that most people might not know we have here.