#363 The Sunny Saga of Jones Beach

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Places & Travel, History, Documentary, Society & Culture

4.7 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2021

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our new mini-series Road Trip to Long Island featuring tales of historic sites outside of New York City. In the next leg of our journey, we visit Jones Beach State Park, the popular beach paradise created by Robert Moseson Long Island's South Shore. Well before he transformed New York City with expressways and bridges, Moses was an idealistic public servant working for new governor Al Smith. In 1924 he became president of the Long Island State Parks Commission, tasked with creating new state parks for public enjoyment and the preservation of the region's natural beauty. But preserving, in the mind of Moses, often meant radical reinvention. The new Jones Beach featured glamorous bathhouses, proper athletic recreations (no roller coasters here!), an endless boardwalk and even new sand, anchored to the coast with newly grown beach grass. Sometimes called 'the American Riviera', Jones Beach made Moses' reputation and became one of the most popular beach fronts on the East Coast. But more than that, Moses and the Jones Beach project transformed the fate of Long Island's highways (or should we say parkways). PLUS: Greg and Tom hit the road to give you a tour of Jones Beach up close -- from one end of the boardwalk to the other! AND The overpass bridges of Southern State Parkway. Did Moses develop them with low clearance to prevent buses (i.e. transportation for low income families) from coming to Jones Beach? boweryboyshistory.com Get a Bowery Boys tee-shirt from our official Tee Public store! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Bowry Boys Episode 363.
0:03.0	The story of Jones Beach.
0:05.0	Son, fun, and Robert Moses.
0:08.0	Hey, it's The Bowry Boys.
0:10.0	Hey!
0:11.0	Support for The Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:14.0	Join us for as little as $1 a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:23.0	Hi there, welcome to The Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:26.0	And I'm Tom Myers. And today, we're happy to be bringing you along on the second installment of our road trip to Long Island.
0:35.0	Yes, in our last show, part one, we've visited the spectacular mansions of Long Island's Northern Coast.
0:43.0	It's Gold Coast, made internationally famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby.
0:51.0	Today, however, we are heading to the southern shore. Greg, we're going to take one of those parkways south to one of the country's most spectacular public beaches, Jones Beach, which opened to the public in 1929.
1:06.0	Millions flock to Jones Beach each summer from all over the metropolitan area.
1:12.0	And it's much more than just a beach or a collection of beaches. It offers a wide range of recreational activities, along with an outdoor theater that seats thousands of spectators.
1:25.0	And includes a moat and a floating stage.
1:30.0	But Jones Beach didn't just happen. It took years of planning and construction and engineering to create this magnificent space.
1:40.0	And it took the imagination and the leadership of a truly gifted parks commissioner, a young man named Robert Moses.
1:48.0	Jones Beach exists as it does today. In fact, because of Robert Moses, he built it, he promoted it, and oversaw its operation and expansion for decades.
2:00.0	Jones Beach was his baby.
2:03.0	So today we'll be telling that story, the creation of Jones Beach, and then we'll be hopping in the car and heading to the beach ourselves to stroll its two mile boardwalk.
2:14.0	And discuss some of its most notable features.
2:17.0	Yes, so Packer Swimsuit and a towel as we dig through the sunny saga of Jones Beach.
	...

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