Why Nobody Wants to Visit New York's Greatest Beach Anymore: Jones Beach, NY

Jones Beach, New York, did not exist as usable land until Robert Moses decided it should. In the early 1920s, this stretch of Long Island's south shore was still salt marsh and open sandbar, barely above the waterline at high tide — but unlike the North Shore, where private estates already lined the water, ordinary New Yorkers had no shoreline of their own. As the newly appointed president of the Long Island State Park Commission, Moses picked this ground anyway. Dredgers spent years pumping sand up from the bay floor, raising the island roughly twelve feet before a single building went up, and when state funding for the project ran dry, Moses borrowed $20,000 from his own mother rather than stop the work. Jones Beach opened on August 24, 1929. But a beach built entirely from dredged sand and borrowed money was never going to stand on its own — it would need constant upkeep, endless crowds, and infrastructure built to carry both, for as long as the island was meant to last. That infrastructure is still standing. The 188-foot water tower Herbert Magoon designed in 1927 still rises over the Wantagh Causeway before the ocean or the parking fields ever come into view, its brick weathered to a color between rust and gold. The causeway beneath it still carries more cars than it was ever built for, much as it did the summer it opened, and the ocean is still there, past both of them. This is the story of how Robert Moses raised New York's greatest public beach out of open water and borrowed money — and how the island he built by hand has had to carry the weight of that ambition ever since. A full history documentary about Jones Beach, New York — from Robert Moses's 1929 creation of the beach to the water tower and causeway that still stand over it today. Copyright & Fair Use Disclaimer • This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary created for commentary, criticism and research. • Some archival photos and footage are used under the principles of Fair Use (Section 107, U.S. Copyright Act) for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.