The Road that Never Made It Off the Drawing Boards

 

Saltaire's-- and Fire Island's--  most significant historical event in the Twentieth Century was not a storm. It was not an election. It was not a ship stranded on its shores.  

It  was the defeat of the road. 

There was talk of a road the length of Fire Island going back, at least to 1923, if not earlier. It was called the  “Sunrise Trail;”  the “Robert Moses Highway,” and all kinds of other names, some mentionable, some not. 

Official Saltaire Village opposition  runs back as far as 1929 when the Board of Trustees directed the Village Attorney to “prepare a suitable protest against the construction of the proposed automobile highway on Fire Island and to file same with the county, state, army and navy, and municipal authorities.”  Yet, in the wake of the 1938 Hurricane, a resolution from the Village actually came out for the highway.

But generally  over the years the Fire Island sentiment was  strongly against the highway, although it was commonly believed that it would eventually become a reality. When Saltaire was drafting new zoning rules in 1949, the mayor asked the draftsman to consider designating an area in the Village for a parking lot for if the road came through.  

But 40 years of controversy came to a boil in the wake of the March 1962 Ash Wednesday storm, that did massive damage to the Island.  The  road plan was once again revived as a solution to the repeated erosion. There was belief all around that the island would have to be reinforced.  But re-nourished dunes  would inevitably wash away, argued Robert Moses, unless a thirty-mile long berm was topped with a four lane highway to stabilize it.  

 

Fire Islanders mobilized with a fury; Moses was personally vilified. Moses' stature nationally and in Albany, was waning by 1962. Nelson Rockefeller was not Al Smith, Moses' first patron of 40 years before.  

At a public hearing at Jones Beach in July 1962, Saltairian Charles Collingwood  (a WW2 correspondent for the United Press and CBS) started to read, to a cheering crowd, a 1938 letter to the New York Times  that said that Moses “would save Fire Island the way Hitler was saving the Sudetenland.”   Moses stormed out of the hearing to catcalls and jeers.

But the Moses road plan was approved, only to be held up by  Governor Rockefeller after intense lobbying, strategically  directed to  Rockefeller's brother Laurance, an avid environmentalist. The plan was ultimately shelved, and finally with the creation of the Fire Island National Seashore in 1964, the road was pretty much dead.

This locked the fate of Fire Island, at least until now, as a road-less island. 
 

Copyright Jim O'Hare* 2017

*James O'Hare grew up summering in Saltaire and is the author of the Saltaire38.blogspot.com. He will be speaking on the history of Saltaire at the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the Village Incorporation on August 26 at 10:30 am at Saltaire Yacht Club