Jones Beach: Harmony’s baby

Jones Beach State Park turns 78 tomorrow.

The park, which was developed by Robert Moses, then commissioner of the Long Island State Park Commission, was described as a “gigantic exercise in recreational socialism” by the New York Herald Tribune at the time, a sentiment echoed by Gov. Al Smith when he delivered his speech on the beach 78 years ago.

According to an article in American Heritage Travel, Smith said to a crowd of 3,000 at the park that it was through party cooperation that Jones Beach was created. “If it’s anything, it’s socialistic. The Republicans should work hand in hand with the Democrats in the common cause of the welfare of the people of the state,” he said.

From the article:

In truth, the local Republicans, at least, had done exactly that. There had been resistance in the early 1920s, when Smith’s brilliant Yale-educated protégé Robert Moses had informed the sleepy, rural towns of Long Island that they must cede their beaches to the state for the construction of a seaside beach park that would be clean and open and pristine and free of commercial development. But then there had been cooperation and bipartisanship, and the result was “a miracle playground,” as The New York Times described it.

Some 25,000 people visited Jones Beach on its opening day, driving down the brand-new Wantagh Causeway. Just a few years earlier, such a drive would have been impossible. There was no road at all; outside of a skiff or a rowboat, there wasn’t any way to get to the oft-flooded sand spit named after an Irish privateer, Thomas Jones, who had run a whaling operation there in the early 1700s. Jones Island was part of the chain of barrier beaches along the South Shore of Long Island that stretched from the Rockaways to the Hamptons.

Timeless advice for these times?

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