We spent Sunday morning introducing SteelyKid to one of my favorite places in the world, Jones Beach on Long Island. She was ok with the water until an unexpected wave sideswiped us and splashed her in the face, but enjoyed the sand quite a bit. And I got to swim in the ocean and body-surf on some reasonably good waves. I was too busy swimming to remember to snap cell phone pictures of SteelyKid at play, so you'll just have to use your imagination.
A lot of liberal-ish bloggers will invoke the name of the city planner Robert Moses as practically a curse-- he's blamed for enabling "car culture" and a host of other modern American urban problems. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, when I first encountered it, as my primary association with the name is as the easternmost part of Jones Beach, because he was the one who arranged for all that land to be set aside as a park.
And, having been to a number of other, more developed beaches on the Atlantic Coast, I'm just about inclined to forgive him everything else for the sake of that. He was a stone bastard in a lot of ways, but making sure that that stretch of beach is relatively untouched and free of development is a great good deed in my book. Yeah, the services in the park could be better (though the fries we had at lunch Sunday were surprisingly good, once we finally got them), but at least it's a public park, not a chopped-up stretch of exclusive hotel properties, or tacky boardwalk trash emporia. You can go there, and swim and enjoy the sun and the sand in relative peace and quiet.
So, anyway, keep that in mind the next time someone curses his name. Even bad guys do god things sometimes.
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One of the really great things that happened in Oregon was the 1967 Oregon Beach bill which ceded open access to the Oregon coast to the public up to the vegetation line. It allows unfettered access and prohibits almost all development of the beach.
"Even bad guys do god"
amusing typo... Moses might approve
The rumored flip side of that story is that he had the causeway out to the beach (which bears his name) to have girders too low for busses to pass, thereby keeping out the unwashed masses who didn't have access to cars.
There were good and bad aspects to Moses' work. The early work on parks was brilliant, finding the land, getting it converted to parkland (sometimes twisting the law rather badly to do so - today he could go to jail for some of the methods he used to acquire Jones beach against the will of the local inhabitants) and the design of the parks. Though he ran for governor as a republican in 1934, he was quite the liberal hero then and for some time to come.
Moses was also the mastermind behind half the bridges in New York City as well as a lot of the highways. He played an oversized role in the development of the region's transportation system. It's easy to complain about all those roads and bridges now, but they were and still are the city's life line.