A complete timeline of Moses’s 40-year campaign against the South Shore barrier beaches, the communities that beat him, and the property-value consequences that followed
Compiled May 4, 2026 from primary sources (Caro, The Power Broker; Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities Jones Beach Report 2004; Christopher Verga, Saving Fire Island from Robert Moses; Fire Island Association archive; NPS Fire Island National Seashore history; NYT archive 1925–1964; Redfin/Zillow market data 2026).
TL;DR — what actually happened
The “JFK Preserve” next to Jones Beach is not something John F. Kennedy bought, donated, or fought for. He never owned the land. He had no personal connection to it.
The real genesis is a 1925 act of municipal defiance. Robert Moses, brand new president of the Long Island State Park Commission, demanded the Towns of Hempstead, Oyster Bay, and Babylon hand over their entire South Shore barrier beaches so he could turn them into state parks and parkways. Babylon refused. Oyster Bay’s citizens formed a “Save Our Beaches Committee” with thousands of members and killed the proposition before it ever reached a ballot. Hempstead voted it down 12,106 to 4,200.
Moses then went around the democratic process. He cut a corruption deal with Nassau County’s Republican boss G. Wilbur Doughty, traded parkway-route foreknowledge to insiders so they could buy land along the route at speculation prices, and resubmitted the same proposition to Hempstead in November 1926. The 3-to-1 defeat magically became a 3-to-1 win. Hempstead handed over the western 2,413 acres. That land became Jones Beach State Park (opened 1929).
Oyster Bay never caved. It eventually transferred a small eastern slice (which became Gilgo State Park) but kept the middle of its barrier strip — the parcel we today call Tobay Beach (recreational) and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary (550-acre wetlands behind it).
The Town of Oyster Bay informally protected the wetlands for decades. WPA crews did fire-prevention and landscaping work there in the 1930s. In 1959 the Town formally designated it a sanctuary. On December 7, 1960, Town Supervisor John J. Burns and State Conservation Commissioner Harold G. Wilm signed a 500-acre preservation agreement (NYT, Dec 8, 1960). After Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, Oyster Bay renamed the sanctuary in his honor — symbolically aligning their 1925 anti-Moses stand with Kennedy’s federal “national seashore” doctrine, which had just (1961–1964) produced Cape Cod National Seashore, Padre Island National Seashore, and Fire Island National Seashore — the legal instrument that finally killed Moses’s plan to bulldoze a four-lane elevated parkway down the entire 32-mile length of Fire Island.
So the public narrative (“JFK preserve”) is sentimental cover. The actual story is a 40-year resistance war waged by Long Island townspeople against Robert Moses, with the federal Kennedy-era Interior Department arriving as the cavalry in the final act.
The full timeline
Phase 1 — Moses arrives, the towns refuse (1924–1926)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 1924 | Robert Moses, age 35, appointed President of the new Long Island State Park Commission and Chairman of the State Council of Parks under Governor Al Smith. |
| 1924 (first week) | Moses identifies 600 unmapped acres of new sand on Fire Island’s western end (Coast Guard Station discovery), persuades Commerce Secretary Hoover to release them, quadrupling state-park acreage on Long Island in a single week. This 200+600 acre nucleus becomes Fire Island State Park (later Robert Moses State Park). |
| July 17, 1924 | Moses appears at Babylon town hall and demands a referendum to transfer the township’s barrier beach to the state. The board (elected by baymen who feared loss of clamming/fishing rights to the bay bottoms) stares him down. Within two months every Suffolk County governing board, chamber of commerce, and civic association has lined up against him. Judge James B. Cooper of the Babylon Leader declares the project has “as much chance of carrying as a Great South Bay clam has of growing teeth.” |
| 1924–1925 | Moses turns to Oyster Bay. Citizens immediately form a “Save Our Beaches Committee.” Membership reaches the thousands within days. The proposition is killed before it ever reaches the ballot. (Caro, The Power Broker; PLI Jones Beach Report 2004 footnote 19.) |
| November 1925 | Moses, in desperation, gets the Hempstead proposition onto the ballot via Nassau GOP boss G. Wilbur Doughty. Voters reject 12,106 to 4,200 — a 3-to-1 defeat. At year-end Moses has parks “nowhere but on the map of his imagination.” |
| December 11, 1925 | Moses announces “future planning for Jones Beach will be conducted in conjunction with a delegation from Hempstead Township” — and the chair of that delegation is Assemblyman Thomas A. McWhinney, the same machine politician Moses had personally castigated as “the creature of the machine” in his earlier reform days. The corruption pact is now public. Insiders get foreknowledge of the Meadowbrook Parkway route so they can buy land cheap and resell at parkway-construction prices. |
| December 21, 1925 | Suffolk County Board of Supervisors asks the Legislature to abolish the Long Island State Park Commission. Nassau County, having been bought, declines to concur. The two-county opposition front collapses. |
| November 1926 | Moses resubmits the same Hempstead proposition with cosmetic revisions. The 3-to-1 defeat becomes a 3-to-1 win: 18,872 to 5,076 in favor. Hempstead cedes “all right, title, interest, and jurisdiction” to Jones Beach. |
| 1927 | Babylon and Oyster Bay finally transfer some lands. Oyster Bay only gives up its eastern slice (which becomes Gilgo State Park in Babylon). It keeps the middle of the barrier — today’s Tobay Beach and JFK Sanctuary. Wantagh Causeway construction begins. |
Phase 2 — Jones Beach as the demonstration (1927–1939)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1927–1928 | 40 million cubic yards of fine-grain sand pumped from the ocean floor; Moses raises the entire park area and 17 miles of causeway by 14 feet. |
| August 4, 1929 | Jones Beach State Park opens. Wantagh Causeway and East Bathhouse complete. 4 miles of ocean surf, 0.5 miles of calmer bay water. Already at capacity in year two. |
| 1931 | West Bathhouse, Marine Dining Room, Central Mall, and Water Tower complete. Hempstead conveys Short Beach (2 more miles, west) and a second causeway right-of-way. |
| 1929–1939 | The “initial period of construction” — 13 of the park’s 23 structures still standing today date from this decade. Federal Works Progress Administration labor (1935+) augments state funds. |
| Throughout 1930s | WPA crews also do fire-prevention and landscaping at the Tobay bird sanctuary — already an informal preserve on Town of Oyster Bay land, decades before its 1959 formalization. |
Phase 3 — The Fire Island bait-and-switch begins (1938–1962)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 21, 1938 | The Great New England Hurricane (the “Long Island Express”) devastates Fire Island. Moses uses the disaster as the rationale to revive his Ocean Parkway extension — a 32-mile elevated four-lane road down the entire length of Fire Island. He pitches it as a “dune-preserving parkway” that will protect island homes from future storms. The 1938 push fails primarily on cost-to-taxpayer grounds. |
| September 9, 1938 (12 days before the hurricane) | Robert Cushman Murphy publishes a Suffolk County News warning that a Fire Island highway would destroy the Sunken Forest — a rare maritime holly forest east of Point O’Woods. This is the first organized conservation argument against the Moses parkway plan. |
| 1950s | Fire Island real-estate boom. Car-free idyll attracts artists, gay communities (Cherry Grove, Fire Island Pines), middle-class beach-bungalow buyers from NYC. Communities multiply to 17 distinct hamlets, each with its own identity. |
| 1952 | Wildlife Preserves Inc. and The Nature Conservancy launch a fundraising campaign to assemble the 50-acre Sunken Forest tract privately. |
| 1959 | Town of Oyster Bay formally designates the Tobay Pond Wildlife Sanctuary (Patch, birding-hotspot sources). |
| December 7, 1960 | Town Supervisor John J. Burns and State Conservation Commissioner Harold G. Wilm sign the 500-acre Tobay sanctuary preservation agreement. State pays $22,000 install cost; state and town share maintenance. Service road, parking area, 50-foot bird-watching tower planned for spring 1961. (NYT, “TOBAY POND SAVED,” December 8, 1960, p. 36.) |
| 1960 | Sunken Forest formally dedicated as the Sunken Forest Preserve. |
| 1961 | Cape Cod National Seashore established under President Kennedy — the model that will be deployed against Moses three years later. |
| March 1962 | A severe nor’easter (“Ash Wednesday Storm”) batters Fire Island. Moses revives the parkway plan a third time, again citing storm protection. |
Phase 4 — The Fire Island uprising (1962–1964)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Spring–Summer 1962 | Dunewood residents Maurice “Murray” Barbash (homebuilder) and his brother-in-law Irving Like (lawyer) sketch out — literally on a napkin — a counter-proposal: a federal Fire Island National Seashore that would lock the island car-free forever and pre-empt Moses’s parkway. They form the Fire Island Voters Association to unify the 17 communities. |
| July 10, 1962 | First public hearing on the Moses parkway, held — provocatively — at the Jones Beach West Bathhouse. Over 1,000 protesters show up carrying “Ban the Beep” signs and singing Pete Seeger-influenced protest songs (“I isn’t a-gonna study roads no more”). Moses and his engineers adjourn the meeting after 20 minutes. This is the moment Moses first loses control of the press narrative on Long Island. |
| 1962 | Padre Island National Seashore established under Kennedy. The federal seashore-doctrine pipeline is now demonstrably operational. |
| 1962–1964 | Fire Island Voters Association door-to-door canvasses, distributes pre-written letters to Congress, raises money. Governor Nelson Rockefeller sees the Moses parkway opposition as his political opportunity to finally rein in Moses and quietly aligns with the seashore campaign. |
| November 22, 1963 | JFK assassinated in Dallas. The seashore-preservation movement now has a martyred patron whose conservation legacy is fresh. |
| September 3, 1964 | Wilderness Act passed. Fire Island legislation will reference its principles directly. |
| September 11, 1964 | Fire Island National Seashore (FINS) established by Congress. Enabling legislation specifies that access to the Davis Park–Smith Point zone “shall be provided by ferries and footpaths only” and prohibits any development “incompatible with the preservation of the flora or fauna or the physiographic conditions now prevailing.” Moses is permanently blocked from extending Ocean Parkway across Fire Island. It is one of the rare outright defeats of his career. |
| 1964 | As consolation, Rockefeller renames Fire Island State Park (the western end at the Lighthouse) Robert Moses State Park — Moses gets a statue but loses the war. |
| Post-November 1963 | The Town of Oyster Bay renames its 1959 Tobay Sanctuary the John F. Kennedy Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary, attaching its 1925-rooted resistance symbolically to the federal anti-Moses framework Kennedy’s administration had built. |
Phase 5 — Federal entrenchment (1964–1980)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1964 | Fire Island Voters Association renames itself the Fire Island Association — and is still active in 2026, working to block offshore drilling and manage climate-driven retreat. |
| May 1966 | Sunken Forest Preserve, Inc. donates its 50 acres to FINS, conditioned: “the property shall always be maintained in its natural state and operated as a sanctuary, and that no public road or highway shall be built through it.” The legal language explicitly forecloses any future Moses-style move. |
| November 10, 1978 | The portion of Robert Moses State Park east of the Fire Island Lighthouse is transferred from New York State into Fire Island National Seashore — federalizing more of the island and shrinking the Moses-named footprint. |
| December 23, 1980 | Wilderness designation: Otis Pike Fire Island High Dune Wilderness created. The Davis Park–Smith Point zone is now legally wilderness, the strongest federal land protection available. |
Phase 6 — Modern (2007–2026)
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2007–2010s | NPS Environmental Assessments for FINS expansion and management plans. |
| 2013 | Cherry Grove Community House and Cherry Grove Theater listed on the National Register of Historic Places — formal recognition of Fire Island’s role as a foundational gay/queer community sanctuary in 20th-century America. |
| 2017+ | Push for Fire Island UNESCO World Heritage status begins. |
| December 2019 | NY Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell introduces a bill to rename Robert Moses State Park (citing Moses’s racism, slum clearance record, and barrier-beach overreach). Bill fails to gain legislative support. |
| 2024 | FINS celebrates 60th anniversary. |
| 2026 (current) | Fire Island remains roadless, car-free outside the Robert Moses State Park footprint at the western tip. |
What Moses’s defeat is worth: property values 2026
The Moses parkway, had it been built, would have:
- ended Fire Island’s car-free identity overnight
- collapsed the rental + seasonal-bungalow economy into a generic Atlantic City–style boardwalk strip
- destroyed the LGBTQ+ sanctuary communities (Cherry Grove, Pines) which depend on isolation
- converted the Sunken Forest into a roadbed
- removed the federal protection rationale that locks out offshore oil drilling
The price of that defeat is directly visible in 2026 housing data:
| Metric | Fire Island (FINS-protected) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Median home value, Ocean Beach | $1,406,210 (up 11.1% YoY) | Zillow, March 2026 |
| Median listing price, Fire Island | $1,674,500 (39 active listings) | Realtor.com, 2026 |
| 2025 average sale price, Fire Island | $1,420,849 | Fire Island real-estate market recap, Jan 2026 |
| 2025 total sales volume, Fire Island | $79,909,250 | Same source |
| Median sale price/sqft | $685 | Redfin |
Key comparison points:
- Ocean Beach (FINS-protected, Fire Island): $1.4M median
- Long Beach (mainland Nassau barrier, Moses-developed parkway access): historically much lower — typical median in mid–high $700Ks, Long Beach’s value bump comes from being a commutable beach town, the opposite of Fire Island’s premium.
- Robert Moses State Park (the one part of Fire Island Moses got) — has no private housing at all. Pure parking lot + bathhouse, exactly the Jones Beach formula.
The pattern is unambiguous: the parts of the South Shore barrier system Moses controlled became day-trip parking-lot parks with zero adjacent residential value capture; the parts Moses lost became some of the most expensive seasonal real estate in the United States.
This is the inverted-Moses thesis in dollar terms. Moses believed beach access required parkways and parking lots and that conservation was elitism. The market has rendered the verdict: the parcels that beat him are worth orders of magnitude more per acre than the parcels he conquered, and the protection itself is the value driver. A Fire Island bungalow is expensive because there are no cars, because the island is federally locked, because the alternative (the Moses parkway model) was killed in 1964.
Why this matters for the JFK Sanctuary specifically
The JFK Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary sits inside the only piece of South Shore barrier land that resisted Moses from the very beginning and never gave up — Oyster Bay’s middle slice. It is therefore the physical embodiment of the 1925 Save Our Beaches Committee’s victory.
That committee’s victory was invisible for 35 years (1925–1959) — it took the form of land not being transferred, infrastructure not being built, a parkway not being extended. Then in 1959–1960 it was made formal as a wildlife sanctuary. Then in 1963–1964 the Kennedy assassination + the Fire Island federal seashore campaign + the Town’s renaming gesture welded the local 1925 resistance to a national anti-Moses ideology and inscribed Kennedy’s name on the parcel as a kind of historical receipt.
So the public narrative collapses two real things into a misleading shorthand:
- “JFK saved this land” — false in any literal sense
- “The Kennedy administration’s federal seashore policy made it possible to permanently defeat Moses on Fire Island, and Oyster Bay attached its 1925 victory to that name as a tribute” — true, and load-bearing.
The contrarian read — that this was the exact opposition of Moses, dressed in Kennedy’s name — is correct.
Source files in this folder
- Caro Power Broker 1925 Fight — extracted Caro passages on the 1924-1926 town referenda
- Pli Jones Beach Report Extracts — extracted SPLIA 2004 Jones Beach report sections
- Tobay 1960 Nyt — full NYT Dec 8 1960 “Tobay Pond Saved” article
- Fire Island Association Narrative — the islanders’ own account of the 1962–1964 fight
- Property Value Data 2026 — Redfin/Zillow/Realtor.com snapshots
- Current Voices And Class Structure — 2026 power map (Goldhirsch/FIA, Robin/FIPPOA, Stony Brook archive), $1.7B FIMP fight, offshore wind battle, and the structural reason Oyster Bay is loud while Islip/Bay Shore is invisible despite doing all the work
- Suzy Goldhirsch Deep Profile — Deep dig on the FIA president: confirmed NOT the Mount Sinai palliative-care Suzanne Goldhirsch; 19+ year continuous institutional figure; pioneered the Seaview erosion-control-district financing mechanism that made $1.7B FIMP possible; succeeds the Barbash/Like founding generation; photo source citations