BY JANE MARGOLIES
An iconic Robert Moses-designed park on Long Island gets a resilient rethinking.

From the November 2016 Issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine 
 
I?m standing on the boardwalk at Jones Beach State Park in Wantagh, New York, with Faye Harwell, FASLA, a codirector of Rhodeside & Harwell. Our backs to the Atlantic, we look out over a flat expanse that used to be covered by shuffleboard, ping-pong, and tennis courts. Now it?s a mountain of broken-up concrete. By next summer, this will be a rolling naturalistic setting, dotted with a rock-climbing wall, zip line, splash pool, and, yes, a couple of shuffleboard courts, too. It will be the most visible of the many changes taking place at Jones Beach in a $65 million project undertaken by the state?s Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation and guided by a report from Harwell?s firm. Changes are needed. Built by the urban planning czar Robert Moses in 1929 as part of an unprecedented network of parkways and public parks, Jones Beach once was a six-and-a-half-mile-long marvel along the south shore of Long Island. Moses had used dredged sand to connect several small barrier islands, on which he and the landscape architect Clarence Coombs laid out the park using a formal Beaux-Arts plan. Revolving around a water tower and a pedestrian mall, the 2,400-acre park featured fanciful art deco buildings and manicured lawns bordered by clipped hedges. In keeping with Moses?s legendary attention to...