NEW YORK: New Promised Land

To one man on Long Island, the hurricane which devastated Fire Island and the continuing strip of seabeach that runs as far east as Southampton (TIME, Oct. 3) spelled Opportunity as well as Catastrophe. He was husky, dark-haired, immensely energetic Robert Moses.

A Republican, he is friendly with both Mayor LaGuardia’s Fusion administration in New York City and the Democratic State administration, both of which he serves (as president of the Long Island State Park Commission and City Park Commissioner). No friend, however, of Franklin Roosevelt and Harold Ickes with whose money he built the Triborough Bridge, Mr. Moses is a favorite with Greater New Yorkers. In the last 17 years he has, almost singlehanded, obtained for them more and better parks and parkways than they had obtained in 50 years previous.

These include: the great Jones Beach (where 130,000 bathers can throw horseshoes, pitch-putt-golf, listen to opera, row their babies on South Oyster Bay or diaper them in a room specially set aside, and “build their bodies” under free instruction facilities); Jacob Riis Park (which has the world’s largest one-unit parking space —14,000 cars); Orchard Beach on Pelham Bay (where 100,000 bathers can cavort on 6,600,000 cu. yd. of ocean sand of which 2,500,000 was hauled from Rockaway); Bethpage Park (where the near-rich can play polo and all can play golf on four 18-hole courses for $1 and $2 greens fees); seven other public golf courses; 161 City tennis courts; 250 City playgrounds; 233 miles of motor parkways. Due to his efforts, Greater New York, long backward, has probably the biggest, most elaborate recreation facilities of any U. S. city, and many of them are self-supported by moderate fees for bathing, parking, charcoal at the fireplaces provided for picnickers.* Mr. Moses has long had in mind making a public promised land of Long Island’s whole south shore. Owners and renters opposed him, preferring their beaches to remain wildly beautiful, to keep city hordes from encroaching further on country privacy. Now, with their summer homes smashed to flinders, with even their beach, real estate so devastated that many an owner thought of letting it go in default of taxes, this opposition was silenced. Last week Park-Builder Moses urged upon the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors a sweeping plan which combined security for landowners with beauty and utility for the general public.

Give him two years and $15,500,000 (of which Suffolk County need raise only $10,500,000), said Mr. Moses, and he would (see map):

1) Construct a 43-mile bulkhead motor highway, part parkway, part boulevard well above high-tide line the length of the sandspit from Fire Island State Park to Southampton.

2) Dredge sand for this roadbed so as to make a new boat channel in the lee of the sandspit straight through Great South, Moriches and Shinnecock Bays (like a channel already dredged from Fire Island Inlet west to Jones Inlet).

3) Create three new State park areas along this ocean parkway.

4) Connect the main island to the parkway with four new bridges.

Mr. Moses’ most potent argument was that unless something is done quickly to rebuild that storm-shorn coast, one more big blow may wipe out the protecting beach strip altogether, the ocean will roll straight into the bays, ruin the shellfish industry (clams, oysters, scallops), fishing (weaks, flounders), duck shooting, sailing, sheltered bathing. From the county’s point of view, unless the beach properties are promptly salvaged, the county tax rolls may suffer a prodigious lopping. Unwilling to let impetuous Mr. Moses talk them into his spacious scheme too rapidly, the Suffolk supervisors last week voted $15,000 for a preliminary survey.

* Mr. Moses was named last week, along with Virginia’s Senator Carter Glass, to receive a 1938 Roosevelt Medal (“distinguished service in the administration of public office”—in memory of Roosevelt I). In his citation Mr. Moses’ work was described as having “a touch of the humanity of Jacob Riis, the constructive genius of General Goethals and the grandiosity of Louis XIV.”