Jones Beach
Jones Beach State Park (colloquially, “Jones Beach”) is a state park of the U.S. state of New York. It is located in southern Nassau County, in the hamlet of Wantagh, on Jones Beach Island, a barrier island linked to Long Island by the Meadowbrook State Parkway, Wantagh State Parkway and Ocean Parkway (Long Island).
The park is renowned for its excellent beaches, 10 mi in length, facing the open Atlantic Ocean and furnishes one of the most popular summer recreational locations for the New York metropolitan area. It is the most popular and heavily visited beach on the East Coast, with an estimated six million visitors per year.
Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, an outdoor arena in the park, is a popular musical concert venue. The park also has a 2 mi long boardwalk. It once featured dining and catering facilities that are popular sites for private parties and weddings; these have been shut down.
The park was created during the administration of Robert Moses as President of the Long Island State Park Commission (for which he wrote the legislation in 1923) as part of the development of state parks and parkways on Long Island. Moses’ first major public project, Jones Beach State Park, is considered to be one of the most beautiful parks in the world[citation needed], free from housing developers and private clubs, and instead is open for the general public. Several homes on High Hill Beach were barged further down the island to West Gilgo Beach to make room for the park. When Moses’ group first surveyed Jones Island, it was swampy and only two feet above sea level. The island would frequently become completely submerged during storms.
To create the park, huge dredgers worked day and night to bring up sand from under the ocean, eventually bringing the island to twelve feet above sea school. Another problem that followed was the wind – the beach sand would blow horribly, making the workers miserable, and making the use of the beach as a recreational facility unlikely. The builders discovered that the secret to beach stability was the beach grass, whose roots would grow sideways and hold dunes in place, forming a barrier to the wind. In the summer of 1928 thousands of men worked on the beach planting the grass by hand. Built in the 1920s, many of its buildings and facilities feature Art Deco architecture. In the center of a traffic circle that he planned as a terminus for the Wantagh State Parkway, Moses ordered the construction of an Italianate-style water tower to serve as a central feature of the park. The park opened to the public on August 4, 1929, along with the causeway that provided automobile access from the mainland of Long Island. The causeway was the first section in what was to become the Wantagh State Parkway.