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Masstransit to bethpage state park2/19/2023 ![]() So how did this get started and continue to be perpetuated? By individuals repeating a story that they’ve heard or read, but who have also never taken the bus to Jones Beach. Never Let The Truth Get In The Way Of A Good Story ![]() This wasn’t unique, at that time, Long Island had a significant number of mass transit bus routes and destinations. In the particular case of our neighborhood, it wasn’t unusual, in a one car household, for the carless parent or older kids accompanied sometimes by their younger siblings to get to the beach by catching the Massapequa loop bus to Massapequa Park train station where they would transfer to another bus that would stop at Massapequa and Seaford train stations and continue on to Jones Beach. The assumption was that since it was written in a book, it had to be true, so we were then left to try to figure out how both the idea and our shared realities could coexist. Comments popped up such as, “maybe the buses couldn’t get there during the early years of the park?” or “did they use smaller vans until they fixed the bridge problem?”. To say the least we were collectively puzzled. We were all in our late teens and had previously ridden the bus to the beach. I first heard the low bridge tale when one of my friends was told the story by his father, who I can only assume recently, read “The Powerbroker”, he then told a group of us. Not to mention all of the white denizens of the five boroughs that he supposedly, purposely would have excluded until the minority populations of the city had grown large enough. If there had been a goal to build low bridges in order to keep out bus bound minorities, then Moses would have needed a crystal ball as part of his planning toolkit. It wasn’t until 1960, thirty years after the Park’s opening day, that the white population of the city fell below 90% to 85.33%. The 1930 census shows that the demographic breakdown of New York City’s population of 6,930,446 was 95.08% white and 4.73% black. There are a number of easily discovered materials on the internet that show that buses could always access the Park, such as the below 1937 Bus Schedule from Flushing: When researching the parkways built by Robert Moses, there are a considerable number of sources that contend that he purposely built the bridge overpasses too low so that the minorities of New York City wouldn’t be able to access Long Island’s State Park system, specifically, Jones Beach. How many “experts” will continue to repeat this incorrect assertion because they are too dull, uninformed, disinterested, or biased, to care whether it’s correct? ![]() This underscores the truth of the statement, specifically because of it’s innate historical inaccuracy. Yet there are over 500,000 web pages and twenty published books that attribute, without a citation of a source, this quote to him. The irony of this is that according to Professor Randall Bytwerk, Goebbels never said it. “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”, is a quote typically ascribed to Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany.
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