“They Shall Not Pass”

Part I: Sherwood Island and the Connecticut Shore

In 1914, Albert M. Turner identified 230-acre Sherwood Island as the best site for a state beach in Fairfield County, setting the stage for a showdown between the Connecticut State Park Commission (CSPC) and nearby estate owners who recoiled at the idea of thronging holiday crowds in their midst. Turner knew the Connecticut shore intimately. He knew the rocky beaches of the narrow southwestern Sound, the modest sand dunes of its Rhode Island border, and the omnipresent pungent mud of its salt marshes at low tide. For three months in 1914, he hiked the coast from New York to Rhode Island. Hired by newly minted CSPC, Turner surveyed Connecticut’s 245-mile coastline for a large, scenic beach well removed from the pollution pouring from the industrial ports of New Haven and Bridgeport. Turner’s report, one of the first state park surveys in America, became a foundational document of American state park ideology. ¹² Of the 245 miles Turner walked, approximately 45 were inside city or borough limits, including a frontage of 6.5 miles of city parks. Turner found 70 miles of the shore tightly packed with private beach cottages and an additional 40 of large, costly residences. Only 90 miles remained available for state beaches. ¹³

The park commission prioritized a state beach program because the majority of Connecticut’s population lived in the state’s somewhat narrow and rolling coastal plain. ¹⁴ In 1914, the state’s average population density was 231 persons per square mile, but along the Sound this ratio reached 529 persons per square mile. Fairfield County’s coastal commuter corridor along the NYNH&H already housed a quarter of the state’s 1,114,756 residents. The CSPC hoped to establish five evenly spaced 2.5-mile-long beaches. “From the date of the first meeting of the Commission it has been plainly evident that the field most urgently demanding attention,” the CSPC observed in 1914, was the “shore of Long Island Sound. Its popularity for purposes of recreation is almost universal, there can never be any more of it, and the rapid development of the last two decades has left very little of it accessible to the public.” ¹⁵ Turner identified 230-acre Sherwood Island in Westport, a former farmers’ collective and tide mill site, as the only potential state beach in developing southwestern Connecticut.

Turner faced significant obstacles in his search for a state beach site in Fairfield County. First, state law privileged private use of the beach over common public use. Connecticut allowed owners of upland property to use the foreshore for docks and other purposes without specific grants. ¹⁶ Connecticut courts furthermore ignored recreation as part of the public’s right to use tidelands and limited these public rights to only unobstructed access for navigation. ¹⁷ Second, property values were skyrocketing. As late as 1898, Connecticut’s beaches had often been included free in the sale of adjacent property or priced by acre. By the 1910s, beachfront was priced more expensively by foot; land that had sold for $400–$1,000 an acre now sold for $15–$40 a foot, or $3,000–$10,000 an acre. ¹⁸ Increasing real estate values threatened the preservation of Connecticut’s shoreline. “Natural scenic beauty and the unrestricted private ownership of land are things apart, and quite incompatible,” Turner concluded. “The small landowner fairly clogs the landscape with his wooden dreams, and the big one walls it up.” ¹⁹ The field secretary acknowledged that “to the fortunate few who may have a country house or a shore cottage with an automobile or so,” a public beach was unnecessary. Without state beaches, however, Turner worried the majority of the public would soon face only “the dusty highway and the No Trespass sign.” ²⁰ (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Connecticut’s privatized beaches.

Turner advocated park design to serve the collective public and included recreation in his definition of the public good in 1914, nearly a decade before these ideas gained nationwide credence. At the end of World War I, fifty-five years after the establishment of the nation’s first state park at Yosemite, two-thirds of states lacked state parks. Not one had successfully developed a comprehensive state park system. ²¹ Turner’s philosophy that Connecticut had a responsibility to protect public beach use from privatization proved unpopular in exclusive Greens Farms. Estate owners there defined access to the shore as a specialized local prerogative and took a stand against accessibility for the larger public. In 1914, Turner reported that a substantial section of Connecticut’s tidelands had already passed into private hands and would “more jealously guarded each year as its value increases.” ²² His fear proved a reality in Greens Farms, where park opponents successfully stalled state beach development for nearly a quarter century.

Picturesque Greens Farms, located fifty miles from New York City in the developing corridor of the NYNH&H Railroad, flourished as an estate community for industrial, banking, and investment magnates during the Gilded Age. New York business tycoons such as Edward T. Bedford, an associate of John D. Rockefeller, transformed former colonial farms into palatial summer estates—Bedford became Westport’s largest taxpayer—and forwarded a powerful vision of privileged localism. ²³ The keystone parcel of the CSPC’s park plan was the high ground between the mill pond and the NYNH&H tracks. In 1921, however, George W. Gair, an executive of a Brooklyn-based paper goods firm, had purchased a 53-acre parcel that included this site. ²⁴ Gair acquired large sway in local politics because of the half-million dollars he paid in yearly taxes and his appointment as Chairman of Westport’s Board of Finance in the 1920s. Determined to preserve the seclusion of his new Greens Farms estate, he organized an anti-park constituency of powerful Republican estate owners including his neighbor Bedford. ²⁵ The Greens Farms community occupied a small geographic range of just four square miles. Park opponents lived in proximity to each other and Sherwood Island. They were also all taxpayers and voters in Westport. The public who lived outside of Greens Farms’ socioeconomic, spatial, and jurisdictional boundaries were seen as invaders. Gair mobilized his community with “jaws set, teeth clenched, and one slogan, ‘They Shall Not Pass.’” ²⁶

Based on Turner’s suggestion, the CSPC first purchased acreage on Sherwood Island in 1914. By the close of 1917, however, the commission owned just 30 piecemeal acres. Only visitors willing to ford New Creek at low tide could enjoy state-owned Alvord Beach. ²⁷ The lack of signage, accessible roads, and clearly marked parking made locating public holdings akin, an early visitor complained to a local newspaper, to searching for “a light hid under a bushel.” ²⁸ Because of these limitations, the CSPC considered the park useless until further development.

Greens Farms residents envisioned an exclusive patrician estate community incompatible with a plebian public park. The prestigious Sturges family complained that visitors built fires on their beach and lawn at the foot of Pine Creek. ²⁹ Gair found such behavior appalling and issued a call-to-arms to preserve the sanctity of the domestic waterfront of Greens Farms. Locals bathed at the town-owned Burial Hill and Compo Beaches and had no need of a park at Sherwood Island. “Home sanity,” he claimed, was at risk because of out-of-towners, “with the usual ‘don’t-care-a-damn’ spirit for the locality,” who Gair predicted “would change Greens Farms, with all its unique charm and quiet home life, into a Coney Island and kill many places like mine.” ³⁰ It was inappropriate of the state, in the words of Gair’s constituent Harry R. Sherwood, to “come into Westport and ruin a good part of [Greens Farms] property.” ³¹ To Greens Farms residents, localism meant exclusive neighborhood control of development and use of the shore.

In rejecting the idea of a regional public, Greens Farms localism exacerbated the park crisis in Fairfield County that had inspired the CPSC’s plan for Sherwood Island. In the 1920s, Fairfield failed to meet the ideal of an acre of park for every hundred persons, a ratio identified by the planners of the Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs, and lagged behind its neighbors. Southwestern Fairfield County provided one acre of parks for every 332 residents, while the Bronx provided one acre per every 209 persons and Westchester provided a stunning one acre for every 28. ³² In Fairfield County’s cities, the situation was even worse. Bridgeport, for example, possessed only one park acre for every 401 persons. ³³ As an idealized category, a region is defined by a shared geography and structural political and economic processes within which residents find commonalities in political, economic, and social trends. Greens Farms localism, however, reveals the extent to which residents drew internal boundaries that segmented the region. ³⁴ To Greens Farms residents, the regionalism that drove state planning was synonymous with public access and outsider control. Both were unwanted. Greens Farms fought these dual aspects of regionalism—the influence of outsider state planners and broadly defined recreational public. For example, Frederick M. Salmon, an influential Westport representative in the state legislature, did not believe his hometown had any responsibility to provide parks for a regionally-scaled public. He dismissed park support exactly because it emanated from Norwalk and Bridgeport. “Let those cities clean their own polluted harbors,” Salmon said, “and they won’t have to depend on Westport for clean bathing waters.” ³⁵ The Greens Farms philosophy of isolation led residents to deny any responsibility to address the public recreation needs of nearby cities.

Following Sherwood Island State Park’s inception in 1914, Westport’s Town Clerk predicted that nearby landowners “would try to put the State in an embarrassing position” by holding up the purchase or transferring or developing the property. ³⁶ He was right. Arthur Sherwood restricted his 39 acres in the center of the island for residential use through covenants, while other anti-park allies engaged in a flurry of real estate transactions to subdivide nearly 2,000 feet of shore, including the area informally used by recreationalists as parking. ³⁷ Between August and December 1924, three real estate companies incorporated, bought Sherwood’s land, and platted the center of the island for restricted residential use. These subdivisions, combined with the nearly fifty acres Bedford sold to the Gair family, secured almost 100 acres from state reach. ³⁸ (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Sherwood Island Park Association properties map of Sherwood Island.

Sherwood Island residents doggedly policed property boundaries to prevent the few excursionists who found the public beach from spilling onto private property. They installed concrete walls and high wooden fences. Frustrated visitors found “most of the beach from high to low water mark fenced off in the interest of private owners, with a high barrier of railroad ties and guarded by a big yellow dog, unmuzzled.” ³⁹ One excursionist angrily concluded that the typical Sherwood Island resident “has the advantage, due to greater wealth, of being able to own land bordering the beach and thereby thinking he is owner of the beach and the water in front of his property.” ⁴⁰ Estate owners effectively, in the words of the Bridgeport Sunday Post, “claim[ed] the foreshores for their own.” ⁴¹

Greens Farms did not stop at intimidation and physical barriers to isolate state-owned Alvord Beach. The community’s elite localism functioned as a political strategy which Gair and his allies mobilized through local government. At an October 27, 1924, town meeting, Gair fathered and ushered through an aggressive anti-park resolution: “Resolved: That the town of Westport does not desire the state of Connecticut to acquire additional land at Sherwood Island for park purposes. Resolved further that the town of Westport does not desire a state park at Sherwood Island. Resolved, that the representatives from this town to the next General Assembly do their best to prevent an appropriation for any such purpose.” ⁴² This resolution made Gair’s opinions municipal policy, as seen in the town’s 1929 dredging of New Creek. Gair and cottage tenants on the western tip of the island complained to the town executive board that the mud and stagnant water of New Creek at low tide bred swarms of insects. In the summer of 1929 Westport’s selectmen approved and contracted out the dredging of the creek on the grounds of mosquito control. New Creek became a twelve-foot channel extending 450 feet. ⁴³ Since fording the creek was the only way to reach Alvord Beach, the dredging effectively disrupted access to the state-owned waterfront. Outraged park supporters castigated Westport and “Gair’s ditch” as a blatant attempt to thwart public access to the beach. ⁴⁴ Demonstrators from inland Redding, Ridgefield, and New Canaan Hill forded the creek to protest the physical and social barriers preventing public use of the shore. ⁴⁵ Nothing came of the protest.

George W. Gair not only aligned local politics with his interests but extended his community’s privileged localism in the state legislature to wield private power over public property. Gair’s Greens Farms constituency enjoyed substantial influence in the state Republican Party. Comptroller Frederick M. Salmon, the chief fiscal administrator of state accounting from 1923 to 1932, and fellow Republicans in control of the Appropriations Committee of the General Assembly allied with park opponents. ⁴⁶ By the early twentieth century, the Republican Party, drawing votes from white, Protestant suburbanites and rural residents, controlled the state legislature. ⁴⁷ The state assembly honored Westport’s anti-park resolution and consistently denied the CPSC the funds necessary to finish purchasing land at Sherwood Island. In 1921 the General Assembly denied the park commission their entire $535,000 request; by 1924 the CPSC had held 139 meetings and submitted plans to five successive sessions of the General Assembly without successfully securing additional financial support to finish Sherwood Island State Park. ⁴⁸ The substantial progress at Hammonasset State Beach in eastern New Haven County underscored the state’s persistent evasion of funding for Sherwood Island. By 1924, three years after Hammonasset’s opening, the state had spent $130,960 for 565 acres and the construction of first-aid and lifeguard stations and a 1,400-locker bathhouse thereand only $12,959 for the acquisition of 48 noncontiguous acres at Sherwood Island. ⁴⁹ In contrast to Hammonasset, the CSPC deemed its Westport beach a failure. ⁵⁰ In April 1923, Park Commissioner George A. Parker had resigned to protest the legislature’s inaction. William H. Burr, one of the only Greens Farms residents who supported the park, commented on the obstructionism and subsequent resignation to Turner, “Sorry Mr. Parker resigned, but now we know what we are up against.” ⁵¹

Having successfully blocked the completion of Sherwood Island State Park for a decade and a half, in 1931 Republicans in Hartford went as far as attempting to totally depower the state park commission. In that year, the Republican-controlled General Assembly created a special subcommittee to relieve the park commission (renamed the State Park and Forest Commission [SPFC]) of its control of parks in Fairfield County. ⁵² The subcommittee toured Sherwood Island under the care of Gair and Westport’s First Selectman King W. Mansfield, a proponent of beach relocation; the subcommittee subsequently recommended abandoning the territory in favor of a new park at Roton Point, Norwalk. ⁵³ Protest erupted in Fairfield’s cities and from its planning organizations. The editor of the Bridgeport Post condemned the state for considering the $700,000 Roton Point project and abandoning property that it had owned for seventeen years. The president of the Fairfield County Planning Association accused the subcommittee of neither visiting Roton Point nor appraising the land before issuing a “flabby” and “amorphous” report that served only Greens Farms’ anti-park agenda. Because of the uproar, the bill was recalled and effectively killed. ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, that the General Assembly created such a subcommittee underscores the power of Republican Greens Farms elites to block state-sponsored regionalism. ⁵⁵

Throughout the 1920s, the state legislature acknowledged Westport’s obstructionism and its own “policy of inaction.” ⁵⁶ This inaction, secured by Republican interests, was exacerbated by the fact that Connecticut counties lacked the power to mediate between state and local politics. The state’s New England town tradition situated governmental authority in local jurisdictions. At its founding as a colony in 1636, Connecticut created town government. It did not create county jurisdiction until the 1660s. A secondary form of government, the county lacked a chief executive who could forward a regional development program. ⁵⁷ As a result, inland residents were left with no effective county authority to demand recourse; they could do little more than write angry letters to the editor condemning the state’s pandering to the “guard of New York commuters” to keep the “common herd from the back towns” off the beach. ⁵⁸

For over two decades, the state failed to guarantee the rights of the public in the face of vested interests. New park planners in greater New York, led by Turner of the SPFC, forwarded the idea that Connecticut had a responsibility to provide beaches to the regional public and called for a regional perspective at the same time Gair and his constituents mobilized against Sherwood Island State Park. Gair’s cohort both protested this regionalism and articulated an alternative vision of a privatized shore. Greens Farms estate owners romanticized the coast as a stretch of small villages and estates dispersed across open land. Their privileged strain of localism bolstered this fantasy by rejecting a regional conception that linked their enclave with industrializing centers like Bridgeport and the right of a broad public to recreate alongshore, even though the state held Sherwood Island in trust for the public. Planners predicted Fairfield would become a county of large cities woven together by intensive suburban development. “What Westchester County is today Fairfield County will be tomorrow,” the Fairfield County Planning Association urged. “What Bridgeport is today, the other cities of the County will be tomorrow.” ⁵⁹ Prosperous Bridgeport boasted the state’s largest park system; suburbanizing Westchester boasted the nation’s most celebrated comprehensive county park system. Each was an example of growth and successful park planning. While the SPFC successfully built parks across the state, through home rule Greens Farms rejected state parks as well as this vision of regional planning for the coastal corridor. ⁶⁰

Part II: Long Island’s Gold Coast

In the same years that Greens Farms estate owners challenged an inclusive vision of public recreation in Connecticut, on Long Island’s North Shore wealthy individuals sought seclusion and private leisure on an even greater scale. Louis C. Tiffany and Walter Jennings on Cold Spring Harbor both closed former popular resorts. At Glen Cove, Standard Oil co-founder Charles Pratt built a stunning 1,100-acre family compound and privatized three-quarters of a mile of waterfront and more than 40 adjacent acres of land under water. ⁶¹ In addition, as Tiffany’s privatization strategies reveal, beneficial enjoyment grants became stepping stones to even greater privatization as estate owners looked to control not just riparian beaches but nearly forty miles of shoreline. Greens Farms localism was rooted in spatial proximity and neighborhood homogeneity. North Shore resistance to state parks, however, occurred on a much larger geographic scale. Because of the palatial scale of individual estates and their aggregation across northern Long Island, the region’s elite anti-park coalition spanned a collection of homogenous municipalities. In addition, differences between state and county power structures in Connecticut and New York offered landowners different tools to exert control over local public recreation. North Shore barons cumulatively employed beneficial enjoyment grants and home rule governance to secure their private playground.

The concentration of Gilded Age wealth on the North Shore gained the region the nickname the “Gold Coast” by the first years of the twentieth century. Nick Carraway’s cheeky summary, “I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) captured the region’s defining characteristics. ⁶² The 110-square-mile Gold Coast was definable because of its hilly topography, its waterfront of deep fjord-like bays, and the homogeneity of its millionaire population. Home to the largest concentration of wealth and power in the United States, the district encompassed more than six hundred estates virtually undisturbed by industry, public parks, schools, or subdivisions. ⁶³ Gold Coast barons built a landscape of private leisure and display composed of extravagant estate compounds including greenhouses, casinos, pools, and personal polo fields and golf courses. Utilities magnate John E. Aldred summarized, “That part of Long Island was inaccessible. We, Mr. Guthrie and I, the Pratts and the Morgans wanted to keep it so.” ⁶⁴

The snobbery and obstructionism of Gold Coast millionaires who strove to preserve their privileged playground dominate the narrative of North Shore development. The popular attention to Robert Moses’s incendiary battle with millionaires over state parks and the Northern State Parkway, as told in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1972), directs the reader away from a more nuanced understanding of Moses’s conflict with New York City’s industrial aristocracy in Long Island development. By the end of his career in the early 1970s, Moses faced popular and scholarly condemnation for his personal ambitions and the institutional failure of urban renewal. Until recent revisionist scholarship, this criticism overrode the fact that Moses had enjoyed widespread popularity as a Progressive-era park planner. ⁶⁵ Yet his popularity eclipsed shortcomings in park plan execution, specifically on the North Shore: neither wholesale criticism nor praise adequately addresses the Gold Coast battle between regionalism and localism of which Moses was a part. Reckoning with the obstacles mounted by private property interests refocuses the narrative of Long Island development on the power of elitist home rule to shape public land-use patterns. This point of view reveals the limits of regionalism—and Moses’s power—in the New York metropolis.

Long before Robert Moses unveiled his 1924 plan to make Long Island a public playground for New York City urbanites, beneficial enjoyment grants like Louis Comfort Tiffany’s proliferated along the North Shore. These grants, which empowered riparian landowners to privatize and build on tidelands, were the first step landowners took to insulate beaches from public use. In 1850, the New York State Land Board, which managed state-owned public land, created beneficial enjoyment grants. Because of the Public Trust Doctrine, a legal trust established at the nation’s founding, the government is required to preserve public use of the shore. ⁶⁶ While under Public Trust Doctrine the state could legally divest and make private the shore, in theory the public’s rights remained paramount. Between 1880 and 1920, however, the Land Board managed state-owned foreshore as property liable to divestment. On the North Shore, grants encompassed nearly the entire western shore of Hewlett’s Point north of Little Neck Bay; the majority of the eastern shore of Hempstead Harbor; and nearly all of the western shores of Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor. ⁶⁷ In total, the number of beneficial enjoyment grants challenged public access to North Shore beaches. ⁶⁸ Gold Coasters extended the privacy of the estate first across public beaches with beneficial enjoyment grants and then across contiguous estates through village incorporation. Such legal mechanisms fostered an extraordinary period of hinterland growth in which local proprietary interests effectively barred the public from the entire North Shore.

In 1910, Louise and Roswell Eldridge pioneered estate incorporation in New York State in Great Neck, Long Island. Speculators developed subdivisions in the southern section of Great Neck peninsula near the Eldridge estate Udalls in the early 1900s. These new residents, largely of modest means, called for the incorporation of villages and special districts drawn to include estates, such as Udalls, whose high property taxes could be exploited to cover the majority of the costs of new municipal services. ⁶⁹ Faced with increased taxation, the Eldridges preemptively incorporated the territory around Udalls as the Village of Saddle Rock on October 26, 1910. The estate made up all but 10 percent of the new village’s territory. Village status sheltered their estate from inclusion in any special districts, removed it from the Town of North Hempstead’s tax roll, and gave the Eldridges legal oversight of village public works. ⁷⁰ Until 1910, state Village Law required a minimum population of two hundred persons over a square mile or less, constraining incorporation to territories with moderate or high population densities; on May 7, however, the legislature had amended the law to allow the incorporation of districts less than one square mile with fifty to two hundred persons. ⁷¹ The amendment made possible the transformation of the 126-acre Udalls and its approximately fifty servants and family members into a municipal entity. Roswell Eldridge’s influence in state politics probably enabled the passage of this amendmentThe incorporation of Saddle Rock empowered the Eldridges to dictate use of nearby public land. ⁷²

Beginning with the Eldridges in 1911, Gold Coast estate owners constructed village boundaries in service of particular ideological and material interests, namely, the community’s leisure and aesthetic preferences and privacy expectations. The intensive incorporation of estates or groups of estates as villages created a millionaires’ district across the North Shore between 1911 and 1932, the period during which it was possible to incorporate small areas with populations of more than fifty persons. Sociologist Dennis Sobin employs the term “estate village” to define incorporated villages primarily or exclusively composed of contiguous large estates that generally lacked traditional village centers. More than twenty-four estate villages were incorporated between 1911 and 1932, including Lake Success, Laurel Hollow, Old Westbury, Saddle Rock, and Sands Point. ⁷³ Incorporation did not service community-building. Estate villages emerged as exclusive spaces where like-minded industrialists did not so much interact but maintained parallel lives in gracious seclusion. As a form of government, the incorporated village epitomized the privileged, exclusionary localism of estate owners. Estate interests achieved political hegemony through the fragmentation and the spatial exclusion of potential resistance from middle-class property owners. Of the service communities that supplied estates with labor and provisions and the commuter railroad stops at Great Neck, Glen Head, Locust Valley, Oyster Bay, and East Norwich, all except Great Neck remain unincorporated. ⁷⁴ In the nineteenth century, incorporation was generally employed to supply suburbanizing districts with urban municipal infrastructure of streets and sewerage. In contrast, estate owners incorporated exclusive villages to suburbanization and the ensuing public works taxes and assessments. ⁷⁵

Incorporation formalized societal fragmentation and abetted North Shore elitism. Not only did estate villages skirt developing suburban districts, they stretched to embrace contiguous estates to further solidify a homogenous population of Gold Coast barons. In 1926, Louis Comfort Tiffany and his neighbor the prominent lawyer Henry W. DeForest sponsored the incorporation of Laurel Hollow. The two families comprised seven of the fifteen people who voted on the incorporation of the less-than-square-mile community. Laurel Hollow village government developed under Tiffany’s thumb. DeForest’s son-in-law became mayor; DeForest and Tiffany’s son-in-law received two of the three village trustee positions; and Tiffany’s architect became road commissioner. ⁷⁶ Working with like-minded neighboring estate owners, Tiffany finally achieved control over development.

Land transfers between estate-holding families were a common practice on the Gold Coast. Property owners sliced parcels from their estates and sold them within their cohort to create the minimal population required by law for incorporation without having to include subdivisions. Leading up to the vote for the consolidation of the villages of Barkers Point and Motts Point into the village of Sands Point, a local reporter observed, “From the real estate transfers recorded in the County Clerk’s office . . . one would think a boom had struck the Point section. But it was only to create a few more freeholders . . . as will be readily understood by a careful reading” of the records. ⁷⁷ To enable consolidation, the Guggenheims, Kingsburys, and Laidlaws sold family members land. Of the twenty real estate transactions, all but four unfolded within families. All transactions carried only nominal prices. Howard Kingsbury was president of Barkers Point and James Laidlaw was the attorney who had overseen the village’s incorporation: both had explicit vested interests in a successful consolidation. Representatives of the excluded subdivisions speculated, with probable accuracy, that school tax avoidance drove the land transfers for incorporation. The three villages successfully consolidated in July 1912.

Gold Coast incorporation took on a distinctive pattern. That at times incorporation appeared to be a charade of democratic voting underscored the power of estate owners in the creation of a typical “millionaire municipality.” Estate owners spearheaded incorporation to serve personal goals and ran, usually uncontested, for positions on the new village boards. Charles E. Ransom, the town clerk of Oyster Bay who conducted ten incorporation elections in the twenties recalled, “[i]n most comparatively few home owners were eligible to vote. . . . On several occasions the entire vote was cast in the first hour . . . in almost every instance the election was held in luxurious surroundings and the hosts did everything possible to make the hours pass pleasantly.” ⁷⁸ Ransom generally oversaw the vote and Winslow S. Coates usually acted as the attorney for the petitioners. Contestation was rare. Local businessmen who depended on estate business tended to vote with estate owners, as did the large portions of the village population employed on estates. Estate owners were simultaneously voters’ employers, campaigning politicians, and election hosts, providing refreshments. Voting against such figures would have been at the least uncomfortable. In Saddle Rock, for example, Roswell Eldridge was mayor from incorporation in 1911 to his 1927 death, when his wife Louise succeeded him—in an election held on Eldridge property. She subsequently held the office through the 1930s. ⁷⁹ In the words of a New York Times headline, estate village incorporation could be easily summarized: “Millionaire Village Born as Iced Drinks Clink; 13 Voters Create Muttontown, L.I., Unanimously.” ⁸⁰

Exclusionary laws ensured privacy through spatial and social distance, the inherent purpose of estate village governance. Incorporation withdrew land from town oversight; this home rule made local prerogative over land use largely untouchable. ⁸¹ Villages across greater New York passed ordinances to ban outsiders from local beaches. In Westchester County, New York, across the Sound, Rye’s efforts to restrict parking on local roads were overturned by the county’s progressive Board of Supervisors. In contrast, the Gold Coast villages of Lake Success, Kings Point, and Sands Point all passed ordinances restricting parking near parks and swimming spots to restrict users to residents within walking distance. Following incorporation, Tiffany’s Laurel Hollow immediately restricted beach use to residents. Lake Success prohibited “meeting on sidewalks.” ⁸² Estate owners additionally used municipal status to bar industrial and commercial land use through zoning. ⁸³ Cove Neck banned the erection of “amusement concessions and ‘hot-dog’ stands” on the peninsula in its first official ordinance. ⁸⁴ When incorporation was proposed for Lake Success in 1927, one resident complained that the proposed village zoning was “so rigid . . . as to deprive the property owners therein all the free use of their property.” A majority of the area’s residents, however, welcomed restrictions that could bar city recreationalists, and approved incorporation. ⁸⁵

Beneficial enjoyment grants and restrictive village ordinances eroded the publically owned shore unfettered by effective challenges until the 1920s. The New York Attorney-General’s 1911 worry that the proliferation of beneficial enjoyment grants had engendered a “radical departure” in the preservation of public beaches was never critically examined. ⁸⁶ Estate villages’ legal closure of old rights-of-way and unlawful private encroachment exponentially compounded waterfront privatization. After its initial survey of the shore in 1924, the Long Island State Park Commission (LISPC)concluded that such lax government oversight and “pre-emption by private owners and the closing up of old rights of way” that had provided beach access between estates made the shore practically inaccessible. ⁸⁷ In a 1925 speech to the legislature, Democratic Governor Alfred E. Smith lamented that the state’s tradition of selling public waterfront had occurred with “apparently no thought of the future on the part of [the Land Board] directed towards retaining in the public possession for recreation, health and numerous other public purposes.” ⁸⁸ Having abdicated its sovereign trust of the foreshore, the state was in danger of squandering a unique public amenity.

Restrictive village laws designed to exclude the wayfaring public rankled the regional public and politicians, outrage that gained support from the powerful State Council of Parks and LISPC, both established by Robert Moses in the 1920s. In June 1925, a riot erupted in the village of Huntington when local police barred nonresidents access to the beach. ⁸⁹ In response, Governor Smith called a special summer session of the legislature. Broadcast statewide on the radio, Smith criticized Gold Coast barons for monopolizing the waterfront. “After you leave the city line . . . you can ride in an automobile about fifty miles and you cannot get near the water.” The governor went on to condemn local government for parochial isolationism of restricted park and beach access. ⁹⁰ Hailing from the Irish slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Smith reportedly told Nassau’s landed elites who complained parks would bring “the rabble” to the North Shore, “I am the rabble!” ⁹¹ For nearly a decade, Smith, a well-known urban machine Democrat, was the principal figure of New York State’s powerful Progressive Party. Smith implemented widespread civil service and social reform in his four terms as state governor between 1918 and 1926. His staunch support of urban working-class rights included the right to public recreation. ⁹² New York State, Smith declared, would not bend to wealthy residents who deemed the general public “undeserving of the superior views” of the North Shore. In concluding “private rights must yield to the public demand,” Smith effectively declared war on Gold Coast localism. ⁹³

Estate villages and beneficial enjoyment grants pre-dated state park plans, yet in 1924 North Shore privatization became the LISPC’s main target in a fight that revealed this phenomenon to the region. The 1924 creation of the LISPC was part of Governor Smith’s sponsorship of public recreation and regional planning. Smith declared that “the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy” to which Robert Moses added, “when rich and poor can play side by side at a state-controlled resort, that theorem is demonstrated.” ⁹⁴ Smith and Moses, the first president of the LISPC, claimed that Long Island’s expansive waterfront was a natural playground for New York City. ⁹⁵ The LISPC sited parkways along the northern and southern sides of the island as well as parks and beaches. ⁹⁶ According to the commission, the Northern State Parkway through Wheatley Hills would do little damage to local aesthetics or property values, since the right of way represented only a fraction of the average estate. Governor Smith rationalized, “the same boulevard which carries the millionaire from his office to the threshold of his golf club or estate should carry the City man in his small car out to parks and the shorefront in the open country.” ⁹⁷ But Gold Coast millionaires valued the North Shore’s uniform inaccessibility. The LISPC’s proposed Northern State Parkway through Wheatley Hills, although platted along the southernmost section of the Gold Coast, was thus seen as a threat to the entire region.

Gold Coast barons wielded their influence in both local and county government to fight state park planning. Paralleling the way Greens Farms exploited Connecticut’s feeble county government, the Nassau County Republican Party, the party of estate owners, rendered the potentially powerful county government of New York toothless. In the early twentieth century, Boss Wilbur Doughty’s Republican machine took control of Nassau and fostered a decentralized, one-party system that let county powers lie fallow while incorporated villages dictated regional policies. ⁹⁸ Having depowered county government, in 1924 and 1925 Nassau representatives moved to subordinate all state park land acquisitions, and thus all LISPC plans, to approval by the state Land Board. ⁹⁹ The LISPC enjoyed complete independence in state government, free from checks and balances by any other municipal or state bureau. Of the Land Board’s two appointed appraisers, one was brand new, formerly the owner of a paint shop in Buffalo, and neither had experience in park planning; the board seemed a likely forum in which Nassau Republicans could place individuals willing to block LISPC plans. Governor Smith condemned this attempt to subject park planning to local “influence and manipulation” and summarily vetoed the bill. ¹⁰⁰ Unlike Greens Farms, however, Gold Coasters failed to block parks at the state level.

When efforts to block the LISPC park plan failed in the legislature, estate owners organized the Nassau County Committee (NCC) to co-opt regional planning to support North Shore isolation. The committee declared that its 264 members, who owned in aggregate 18,000 acres, spoke for regional residents who resented “interference of the state in local affairs” and wished to be “freed from the LISPC” that made park and parkway plans “without regard . . . to local needs.” ¹⁰¹ In 1925, the NCC hired respected landscape architect Charles Downing Lay to complete an independent survey of Long Island’s beach and parkway needs. Lay recommended that “the whole territory of the northerly part of Nassau County be omitted from any plans for parks or parkways” until the district was “ripe” for development—an unspecified and distant future date. ¹⁰² An impressive range of park planners and landscape architects echoed Lay’s call to preserve the Gold Coast and offered an alternative to the LISPC’s plan. ¹⁰³ Regional planning and localism were not mutually exclusive—regionalism, as Lay’s A Park System for Long Island reveals, could forward local community goals. ¹⁰⁴ Wholly local struggles over public versus private amenities repeated across contiguous estate villages and shaped the regional development of the North Shore. Far from merely parochial, the state park battle profoundly shaped the estate district’s government and its residents’ lifestyles.

In 1929 the landmark Regional Plan for New York and Its Environs, which on the whole stressed the importance of a comprehensive public park network, also omitted regional parks and parkways from the North Shore. ¹⁰⁵ Celebrated Scottish planner Thomas Adams, director of the plan, argued that the Gold Coast should be preserved because its lack of development had a public value. “Wealthy citizens inclined to use their money in developing and preserving the natural landscape,” the Committee on the Regional Plan said, “are creating for the Region . . . something that may be as valuable from a cultural point of view as any collection of works of art.” ¹⁰⁶ Private estates preserved beautiful landscapes at no cost to the public and indirectly contributed, the recreation specialist for the plan said, “to the health and enjoyment of all citizens.” ¹⁰⁷ Adams valued the landscape’s uniform beauty but did not acknowledge that its aesthetic could be ideological in and of itself—a manifestation of the Gold Coast’s politics of exclusion. He agreed with Lay that North Shore parks were unnecessary since the gracious landscaping of far-flung estates veritably constituted parkland. ¹⁰⁸

Estate village zoning ordinances preserved the North Shore from parks as well as from industry and subdivision sprawl. The NCC and Thomas Adams of the Regional Plan codified estate village exclusionary laws as good land-use planning. Adams celebrated the estate landscape as “open” development that essentially balanced the dense “closed” development of New York’s urbanizing outer boroughs. ¹⁰⁹ This theory of open development grew from and contributed to the planning debates of the 1920s and 1930s on the best way to control growth. Cities, leading planners Lewis Mumford and Frank Lloyd Wright said, had grown too big, too congested, and too polluted. ¹¹⁰ Estate villages, however, mitigated sprawl. Penetration of closed development into the Gold Coast, Adams warned, would constitute nothing less than “a public misfortune.” ¹¹¹ Adams deemed valuable estate villages’ restrictive land-use patterns and lack of development intellectually defensible.

While Gold Coasters’ localism appears at first glance contradictory to regional planning goals, estate owners easily enlisted regional planners to secure elite estate land-use. Thomas Adams tried to convince the LISPC that his assessment of the North Shore was not a challenge to the commission’s mission but a legitimate alternative perspective and an important land preservation technique. ¹¹² Unlike Greens Farms residents, Gold Coasters did not outrightly reject regional planning. They did, however, insist that it occur on self-serving terms that flattered their sense of importance. The NCC used regional planning theory to validate their exclusive claim to the region’s best environmental amenities and neutralize the authority of planners who advocated overriding village priorities through a regional public recreation program. ¹¹³ The regional plan accommodated and ultimately sanctioned elite privacy created by the mutually reinforcing decisions of aggregate estate villages. Neither Robert Moses, in his role as park planner, nor Governor Smith, with his reputation as a champion of the urban masses, could forgive North Shore residents for walling off the shore and leaving the public with only “dust and dirt.” ¹¹⁴ To them, estate village politics of exclusion could not be excused, even if they did consequently aid the overall balance of land use in New York’s hinterlands. No matter the alternative plans presented, the LISPC continued to call for North Shore parks and parkways.

The Limits of the Public Sphere Alongshore

A shared taste for elitist, private recreation and residential patterns became the basis of group and social distinction in Greens Farms and on the North Shore in the early twentieth century. Localism enabled landed elites to secure such preferences from state-sponsored public recreation. Historians who dismiss localism as a multitude of autonomous, small publics unconcerned with any large, shared project miss the power of hinterland actors to collectively shape metropolitan growth. ¹¹⁵ A vernacular regionalism emerged from the choices of North Shore magnates-turned estate village leaders. Landowners made calculated decisions that cumulatively fostered a homogeneous private leisure landscape. ¹¹⁶ Incorporation functioned as a powerful regional development tool, albeit rooted in exclusivity rather than the progressive reform traditionally associated with regionalism. Gold Coast regionalism preserved its community’s taste for sparse residential development. In 1930 Nassau’s population density per acre was 12 persons, and the Committee on the Regional Plan predicted no substantial change for the coming decade. ¹¹⁷

Neither the eventual creation of Sherwood Island State Park in Connecticut nor the park and parkway plan for Long Island were entirely successful endeavors for their corresponding park commissions. The LISPC failed to convince incorporated villages that their attempts “to secure isolation from their city and suburban neighbors” would be best served by regional parks to contain urban recreationalists. ¹¹⁸ After four years of rancorous negotiations, in December 1929 the commission acquiesced to a five-mile detour around Wheatley Hills. ¹¹⁹ Not only did Gold Coasters successfully reroute the parkway south of their estate region, the LISPC was unable to establish a single state beach in the region until the 1970s. ¹²⁰ In Connecticut, the legislature refused to appropriate to the state park the nearly half a million dollars necessary to complete land acquisitions on Sherwood Island until 1937, following the Democrats’ capture of the state government during the Depression. The delay forced the state to spend large sums on property subdivided expressly to block the park. ¹²¹

Albert Turner’s call for Connecticut state responsibility over public beaches remained unanswered for thirty years. The National Conference on State Parks (est. 1921), however, embraced Turner’s 1914 CSPC report as a foundational text for beach preservation in conjunction with California’s 1928 state park survey. In this survey of potential parklands, leading park planner Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. demanded the “vigorous safe-guarding” of beaches. ¹²² Today California enjoys a reputation for the protection its state law affords public recreation alongshore. ¹²³ But California’s early beach management parallels that of New York State. After achieving statehood in 1850, California authorized the sale of public tidelands and, in 1868, established the Board of Tideland Commissioners to facilitate such sales. ¹²⁴ Yet a decade later, the state reformed such practices, amending its constitution to forbid the sale of shorelands near incorporated municipalities. In 1909 the legislature extended this protection to all tidelands. It was not until the 1930s that California’s Supreme Court prohibited the freeing of tidelands from the public trust—until then California, like New York, allowed the privatization of shore deemed nonessential to commerce and navigation. ¹²⁵ Finally, in 1938, the state created the California State Lands Commission to safeguard public beaches, rejecting exclusionary definitions of community beach use, although privatization threats remained. ¹²⁶ Nineteenth-century parallels between New York’s and California’s management of public beaches, however, prove ahistorical the popular belief of the latter’s beaches as intrinsically public. Twentieth-century parallels can be found between California and Connecticut state park commission’s prescient articulation of the public’s right to recreate alongshore. Future scholarship on the process by which states championed the publicness of beaches has the potential to further illuminate how government management, the public trust, and private rights are perennially entwined and contested alongshore.

In thwarting Progressive-era state beach programs, Greens Farms and the North Shore communities valued private privilege over the public good. Park protest in these estate districts makes visible the comparative powers of local versus regional governmental units to dictate public land use and the extent to which traditions of decentralized government empowered localized challenges to regionalism. This story reveals the importance for urban history scholarship to step beyond the city to examine metropolitan growth and regional planning from the perspective of local players on the periphery. The resulting beach battles led to three important and mutually reinforcing lessons. First, park obstruction underscores the exclusionism inherent in these estate communities. In Greens Farms, localism meant private consumption of the shore. On the Gold Coast, it meant collective consumption by a narrowly defined community. Estate community identity depended on keeping the public at large out. Such a vision of the public was particularly narrow given the extent to which high property values limited community entry to the wealthy. Estate communities felt no compunction to provide outsiders access and rebuffed CSPC and LISPC attempts to do so. Second, the failure of state government to ensure public access to the shore in both places reinforced localism. Finally, home-rulers rejected state park planners as foreign invaders and endeavored to disable the state’s power to affect regional plans. The lack of powerful county-level governance to balance local and metropolitan recreation needs augmented the ability of elites to block regional planning. In Greens Farms and on the Gold Coast, Progressive state park planners and the recreating public at large represent threats to localism that would not be borne.