Jones Beach State Park
New York
The most visited beach on the East Coast is standing on sand that engineers pumped up from the bottom of a bay.
Before Jones Beach was a beach, it was a swamp. When Robert Moses' surveyors walked Jones Island in the nineteen twenties, the ground sat about two feet above sea level. Storms put the whole place underwater on a regular basis. So dredgers went to work pulling sand off the bay bottom and piling it on the island until the land stood twelve feet up. Then came the second problem. The sand was fine and silver and it blew everywhere. It made the workers miserable, and it made the idea of a pleasant day at the shore look ridiculous. Landscape architects were sent to study beaches on Long Island that stayed put. They came back with a grass whose roots spread sideways looking for water, locking the dunes down and blocking the wind. In the summer of nineteen twenty-eight, thousands of men knelt on that beach and planted the grass by hand. Today about six million people a year visit.
This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
When Moses' group first surveyed Jones Island in the 1920s, it was swampy and only two feet (0.61 m) above sea level; the island was frequently submerged during storms.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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