I did some work around 1988-1989 in New Jersey re access to beaches there.
The beach communities in New Jersey are actually quite accessible by railroad
from Newark and other urban areas. But it was very expensive to get ON the
beaches, once you reached the beach towns. From Colonial times, the beaches
of New Jersey were public property -- i. e. state, not the towns. (I don't
recall if that was accepted or was proved in the lawsuits I worked on. I
didn't work on that issue, but in any event, that was made clear.)
What the towns did, to minimize "outsiders" from use of the beaches, was
to build boardwalks, and charge very high prices for a daily badge to cross
the boardwalk and use the beach. For their own residents they sold season
badges at low prices -- and some towns actually sold those badges in
February, rather than during the summer season.
What I showed was that the pricing was discriminatory, and we won
lawsuits against four beach towns. I haven't followed what has happened
since, and whether this had (or continues to have) the beneficial outcome
intended -- i. e. opening the beaches cheaply to the urban dwellers, I don't
know.
Gene Coyle
Michael Pollak wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Jul 1999, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
>
> > N.B. Directions to Jones Beach
> >
> > By train and bus, take the LIRR from Penn Station to Freeport; buses run
> > from Freeport to Jones Beach every half hour; roundtrip tickets to Jones
> > Beach include bus fare.
>
> Needless to say, not an option when the bridges were built; Moses
> personally vetoed that spur of the LIRR. Buses could get to the beaches on
> local roads, but the trip was thus made longer and more costly. Moses's
> attempts to keep buses full of poor and black people off his beaches (low
> bridges were only one of several strategies) is discussed and documented
> at length in (and perhaps Winner borrowed the argument from?) Robert
> Caro's wonderful book _The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New
> York_. It's even in the index: buses, bridges too low for.
>
> Michael
> __________________________________________________________________________
> Michael Pollak................New York [EMAIL PROTECTED]
