How Fire Island Defeated New York's Most Notorious Urban Planner
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- Robert Moses is the most Notorious city planner in the history of New York. And if he had his way, Fire Island National Seashore would have looked way different than it does today. But it doesn't. This is the story of how Fire Island defeated Robert Moses
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Sources and Resources:
Saving Fire Island from Robert Moses by Christopher Verga
sunypress.edu/...
• Otis Pike Fire Island ...
• Interstate Displacemen...
Images and Music:
Storyblocks
Bay Shore Historical Society
Fire Island Historical Preservation Society
Queens Public Library
NPS
Wikimedia Commons (Peter Shagen, Jim.henderson, Anthony 22, bjoertvedt, Doug Kerr, Fletcher)
AP/John Rooney
New York Times/Meyer Liebowitz
National Archives
Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation Society
New York Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation
Thank you for this. I spent my career protecting the Staten Island Greenbelt, the largest urban forest preserve in the U.S. If Moses had had his way, the forest would have been destroyed by two interstate highways he would have built there. The people united can defeat autocracy!
That man sure loved highways and ruining parks with them. Glad to hear about another L for him. Thanks for your work helping to protect that area - I'm sure the people who enjoy it everyday really appreciate it!
Wrong. It would've stayed the same and just had a highway or two running through it. Anyway, it would've been better to have the Willowbrook Expressway going to South Beach than that kiddie snake pit that was later renamed the "Staten Island Development Center."
@@DTD110865 you hate nature. Got it.
I remember 18:23 18:23 digging holes in the beach to stop cars. Yup I grew up out there.
I think I've commented on this before but it bears repeating: whoever designed that Dune box set deserves the Gulag for all the titles appearing at different heights
I look at it every day and it makes me upset...
I'd love to hear you do a few biography videos. They can be about either the friends or foes (or somewhere in between) of the NPS. But you mentioned Stuart Udall. He's an interesting character, and I'd love to hear your take on him from the perspective of protecting public lands.
It's funny you should mention that. I've had the idea floating around in my head for a National Park Profiles/Conservation Profiles series here on the channel. I'm happy to make something like that if there's an interest from my audience!
Roads in national parks is a balance situation. Denali does it well there is no parking bus only. At the Grand canyon you park somewhere and get a bus to the trail head. I went to Acadia in early July and it was so busy I couldn't access any of it. Five parking spots and a ranger in charge of those five parking spots there all day. I drove the loop road twice looking for a spot and gave up because I didn't want to drive around looking for a place to park. I had to go outside of the national Park to go hiking.
For sure. Access and preservation are the perpetual antagonists when it comes to the NPS. I think it's safe to say Robert Moses' plan for Fire Island went _way_ beyond anything reasonable or acceptable in that regard. His road system would have completely destroyed the park as we know it today.
Ironically, Robert Moses didn't drive. If you'd read The Power Broker, you would know that.
All my homies hate Robert Moses
Lol, Bob better watch his back 🤣
An ennemy of my enemy is my friend. Friend 😊😂
👆
I was about to comment the same thing
Even though his proposed road and the embankment it rested on could've actually protected Fire Island from being breached by the Atlantic Ocean.
Great story about Fire Island, Cameron. Having grown up on Long Island I've been to Jones Beach and Fire Island numerous times. They are the Crown Jewels of Long Island. in spite of the concrete and asphalt. Fire Island National Seashore is a national treasure.
I have one complaint about Fire Island (and Jones Island, and Long Beach, and Rockaway). I oppose the local towns restricting access to the beaches. The south shore beaches belongs to the people of New York not the handful of landowners (currently, mostly wealthy) who maintain their personal playgrounds. This is not unique to New York though. I support a program whereby the state acquires parcels as they come up for sale and the parcels transition from private to public property. States should follow the Oregon model where the shoreline is state owned and accessible to the public.
Keep up the great storytelling.
It didn't make the final cut, but there was actually a study done by the NPS about this. At the time the fight for Fire Island was happening, only about 6% of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were properly owned and the NPS wanted to get this number up to 15%. That was the impetus for National Seashores like Cape Code, Fire Island, Assateague Island, Padre Island, and others. I'd be curious to see what that number is today.
Thanks for watching and supporting the channel!
How has Fire Island National Seashore been doing since Hurricane Sandy? Do you think that inlet would be there? Or would the Ocean Parkway extension have blocked it?
Incredible! I grew up on the south shore of long Island, been to Robert Moses state park countless times and spent summer weekends all over fire Island, and I guarantee you not many people my age (50) know this story of how it became a national seashore, nor how ruthless Robert Moses was .. thank you so much for doing this.
Thanks for watching!
See it's not just civil engineers that are obsessed with roads...
We love to see a win against Robert Moses! Also, if you're taking suggestions, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the Cape Cod National Seashore. I was raised on the Cape and rarely see my local national seashore get any love.
Yes we do! And noted on Cape Cod, I'll add it to my list!
Your videos and channel are so great!! Seriously shocked to not see hundreds of thousands of views on your content. Please keep it up! Look forward to watching every time I see you’ve uploaded. I live 5 miles from the west boundary of Yellowstone, so I’d love to see more content about Yellowstone! Particularly your opinion on wolf re-introduction and the controversy surrounding it.
Thanks so much for your kind words! Comments like this keep me going and I'm in this thing for the long haul. Knowing there's an audience out there for stories like these is incredibly gratifying and I love sharing stories with you all. We're building something pretty cool here and once the algorithm gods smile upon us, I think things will pick up lol!
As for Yellowstone, there will be more stories from there, absolutely! I actually already have a video on the wolf reintroduction if you'd like to check it out as well! It can hold you over until the next Yellowstone video 😂
ruclips.net/video/4_BqQEZQOJw/видео.html
great video as always :) love that you spent some time on urbanism this time, as it really does go hand in hand with conservationism.
Thank you! Couldn't agree more on urbanism. Good planning is good conservation and I stress that as often as I can when I talk about it!
This isn't a defeat of Robert Moses exactly, but Niagara Falls, NY is removing the Robert Moses Parkway. So I'm counting that as a defeat against him, even if it is a bit late.
I will take any win against this man that I can at this point.
@@NationalParkDiariesUnfortunately, it is not a defeat of the Progressive idealism that made Moses a thing in the first place. Ironically, the people now fighting to destroy his legacy are his ideological kin. The Left truly does eat its own.
Any chance you could do a video about Hot Springs National park? It is the only national park around the southern plains area I feel a lot of us down here would love to learn some cool things about it!
You bet - I'll add it to the list!
I’d love to see some Great Lakes content sometime. Not a national park (mostly) but I bet there’s some good stories in there.
Great Lakes are such a blind spot for me. I have lots of stories I'd like to tell from there and I'm hoping to make a trip there soon. It's the one region of the US that I haven't really visited yet. Don't worry though, I will definitely have some Great Lakes vids on here at some point!
Anyone who wants to understand why America is the way it is needs to read the power broker
Moses was, of course, a cartoon villain. He was the inspiration for Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Ironically, Moses, the great proponent of cars, didn't drive. He was an elitist disguised as a fighter for democracy. Those parkways he built to his new car-friendly suburbs were specifically designed to prevent bus traffic, thus preventing people from using public transit from living there. Another defeat for Moses was when Jane Jacobs prevented him from destroying Greenwich Village from his highway building.
In other words, he was the quintessential Democrat, the ultimate anti-MAGA statist, a man who believed that greatness was achieved via top-down central planning, and anything that stood in the way of his plans was an attack against the Greater Good.
Robert Moses will never be defeated until we DESTROY the ideals he represents.
Omg you should do a video on the Old Man Of the Lake in Crater Lake 💙
Good idea!
If you want an example of exactly what would have happened to fire island (just add a lighthouse) look just a little over to Jones beach. That’s a barrier island with a Moses touch. And while as a New Yorker I *like* jones beach, it absolutely is a different place than fire island. It’s probably the best Moses but it’s park development that he made. But it’s also been modified for some decades by the time I first went as a kid. And now there is a better preservation mission there.
Oh, and if you think I’m pro-Moses he designed each of the access parkways to jones beach to have low enough clearance under bridges so public busses could not get on the island. It’s why only in new york parkways aren’t meant for trucks and busses, literally basically a handful of Long Island parkways
Yep, that's the example I used in the video! Looking at it makes me sad - that island is just destroyed now ☹
I read about that. What a horrible, horrible man 😤
I get the criticism of Robert Moses and the Ocean Parkway on Jones Beach Island- but it is a beautiful, almost pristine drive, with none of the commercial development so common along the US east coast barrier islands.
If you found this interesting, please check out 'not just bikes' or 'oh the urbanity'. Both are incredibly interesting. Thanks for the great videos at always :)
Oh, I love my urbanism channels! City Beautiful and City Nerd are also in my rotation.
and Adam Something
Thank you so much for doing this video. Fire Island is very special to me. My family has been going there for three generations. My parents met in Fire Island in the town of Kismet. If Robert Moses had gotten his way my hometown would have been destroyed, my parents would have never met, and I would not exist. I owe my very existence to Fire Island National Seashore. I also think this story and Fire Island’s current car-restrictive status could be a model for other communities fighting to preserve their natural surroundings in a country dominated by cars and development.
maybe, i gotta get to work tho
So glad I got to make this one and that it could be so special for you. Thanks for sharing your story about your relationship with Fire Island - I love hearing things like that and love that this channel can provide a place for those stories to be told. Also, thanks for waiting patiently while I got it produced 😂
More car free parks are good by me!
Rad, I didn't know you took suggestions for videos!!! I highly recommend going down a rabbit hole about or just visiting Chaco Culture National Historical Park. That whole area is stunning and the sheer amount of ruins inside the park is insane. Also it was designated as an International Dark Sky Park, so it has really great opportunities to stargaze since it's so in the middle of nowhere. I went like once and I still think about it to this day, but I'm from the Four Corners area and really love that place. 💕
Thanks for the suggestion! Never been to Chaco myself, but heard so many good things about it and definitely want to visit and do a story one of these days.
Robert Moses is the quintessential Progressive, a highly intelligent, brilliant man given the power to plan all of society from the top down and from the centre outward. Never mind the fact that it is not how cities are built
I've never been to fire island because I was told it got its name due to being covered in poison ivy. Just looked it up to see if that's the case and basically got an answer of... yeah that's definitely a thing people THINK is true.
I just looked it up too - there's so many explanations lol!
Now they just need to preserve the right to use settlable land in ways that would restore itself once it's not being used anymore and without "settlers" cutting down trees.
It would be a great way to give people who need it and can't yet afford more a place to catch up with themselves, change, make plans for themselves, save money and get a start for the rest of their lives.
Got to love how everyone who has "authority" over the type has little faith in them getting on with their lives enough that they practically groom the mentality practically swaying outcomes according to the disruptions instead of the ideals when not interrupted persistently.
Being from Long Island, I still can’t believe they named a state park after him. Not too far away from Jones Beach 🏝️
Yeah, there's a cruel irony about having a state park named after him on the same island he tried to destroy...
@@NationalParkDiaries Maybe because he WASN'T trying to destroy the island.
Fire island didnt want anyone else comming and building houses . Now that they were there they wanted it closed to all others.. how can you hate someone thats been dead for 60 years...
What happened to all the neighborhoods on Fire Island?
They are all completely over developed from ocean to bay with expensive homes
Why... did Robert Moses think a highway would stabilize dunes? I really don't think the wind and sand would care about a road. Maybe just something he said that sounded good to him?
Carlsbad Caverns - underground and diverse.
Good Job
Thank you!
Just imagine hating Robert Moses but having to drive down _Robert Moses Parkway_ every day.
😭
I agree with his philosophy on the automobile, it is synonymous with America and individual liberty. Especially nowadays that one could find a good used Corolla for like 3 grand with like 100k miles on it and take it another 100k rather easily.
Because being stuck in rush hour traffic makes me feel SO FREE!!! 🙄
I definitely agree with Moses on the private automobile being the most “democratic” form of transportation, being able to drive anywhere at anytime. However though, I think that the automobile can only be truly be the freest form of transport by allowing other means of transportation to thrive.
@@IndirectHydroxAnd is that your only argument against cars? Last I remember, only cities tend to have rush-hour traffic, don’t recall ever seeing chronic rush-hour traffic in suburbs.
@@sunshineimperials1600 I live in a cul-de-sac in an affluent suburb that’s about a 10 minute drive away from farms. During rush hour those country roads are like glaciers. The 12-lane freeway that’s 15 minutes from my house (without traffic) is often a parking lot during rush hour, and it only gets worse when it drops down to just 2 lanes in each direction. The surface streets aren’t much better. And if you truly think that gridlock is only a thing in cities, try driving in Northern Virginia on a Friday afternoon.
@@sunshineimperials1600 Actually you do have traffic in suburbs, because you have as much anti-highway fanaticism in suburbs as you have in the cities.
You can’t understand why people like Robert Moses existed with a 21st century perspective. It was a different age with much different thinking than today. Public works projects were a staple of that period, they had to be passed by the legislature. So you can’t completely blame Moses, a lot of others went along with it. It is still an elitist community, the poor are going to Jones Beach not Fire Island.
I'm not so sure, and neither is Robert Caro. Discovering the Eastern section of Robert Moses State Park, you'll find a two lane road that accesses that stretch of beach. Robert Moses looked at the bulldozing performed in Point O'Woods where concrete sidewalks were lay, and he stated that any more building out there would destroy the Island, and people did.
Houses now act as hotels on much of the Island. People built on the primary dunes and in 1964 a hurricane came through and the disaster on Fire Island began.
I have personally had been displaced in 1981 from my home in Brooklyn where BAM wanted to build a park and directed to Housing Preservation and Development, a Moses creation, and suffered greatly by their brutality, but to say Robert Moses "dabbled" in hydroelectrics is misleading at best and inspires me to ignore this report as well meaning and correct politically, but not historically.
Fire Island? Oh my! Is it supposed to be on fire, or is this a product of us also brutally suppressing every ember for the past 110 years?
Hi Fire Island resident here. There are numerous theories about the name but none of them involve wild fire. The coolest theory is that the name came from the fires that pirates used to light on the beach to lore in unsuspecting ships. Another theory is it’s from the burn of the poison Ivy that holds barrier islands like Fire Island together. Most likely is apparently that the name comes from the corruption of the Dutch word for 5.
Helpful link from the NPS for anyone interested: www.nps.gov/fiis/learn/historyculture/fireislandorigin.htm#:~:text=Fire%20Island%20Beach%20appeared%20on,autumn%20or%20its%20fiery%20itch.
Great video. Grew up on the south shore of LI in the 50's60's and 70's.....beautiful place. I remember the fight to keep RM out of there. They did however name a bridge and causeway after him. Sounds like Gates, Zuckmyberg, Winfreed and company are following his playboook in Maui. Leave the places alone.
I found your analysis overly simplistic and one sided. No reasonable person would dispute that Robert Moses did many bad things, that many of those bad things disproportionately hurt poor people and people of color, and that the effects of those bad things persist through today. But he was not the cartoon villain you literally say he is. And the choice of what to do with Fire Island was not the binary decision you suggest between a Jones Beach-type car-centric development and what is there now. And what is there now, however unspoiled and lovely, is very hard for almost everyone to reach. Many of the existing Fire Island communities, such as Ocean Beach, are notorious for enforcing myriad rules that effectively stop almost all visitors who don’t own or rent houses there. Owning or renting a house there is a much higher hurtle today than owning or renting a car. For this reason, today, Fire Island is a place almost exclusively enjoyed only by relatively wealthy people.
Jones Beach may have been designed to serve only those with cars, but it was also designed to protect the sea shore from far more nefarious development. Jones Beach never became some tacky, profit-driven commercial eyesore. Robert Moses prevented that. Without him, it would not have remained in its natural state and could easily have been carved up by private landowners (like the Hamptons) or commercially exploited to ruination (like Coney Island). Neither happened, and we have your purported “cartoon villain” to thank for that. Jones Beach is now accessible a train/bus combination, as well as by bicycle. Millions of people enjoy it. Millions of people cannot enjoy Fire Island, because it is not as accessible, but that’s fine too. Also, Ocean Parkway on Jones Beach is not the monstrous highway you say. It is a four-lane road with a bike path on its north side. Moreover, its construction never “destabilized” the island as you suggest. Indeed, the construction of Jones Beach involved an enormous hand-planted beach grass endeavor that continues to protects Jones Beach from hurricanes to this day.
Robert Moses did do many bad things. But he also did some good things too. Most would say Jones Beach was one of those good things, even if not a perfect thing, and done with some bad intent.
Actually, the reason minority neighborhoods were targeted was purely pragmatic, the cost of that land was often much lower than the cost of land elsewhere. Trying to paint these actions as racist are as dumb as the concepts of "gentrification" and "white flight" today. You must use the lens of the past to examine the past, simple as. Were there racist people? sure, always will be however the point remains that cheap land means it's getting stuff built on it.
Yawn