Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Progress and Protest: The Evolution of Public Works on Long Island under Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller

January 1, 2013

In the mid-twentieth century, parkways, highways, and expressways brought suburbanization to eastern Long Island. Until 1920, the island east of Brooklyn and Long Island City, Queens, remained open, predominantly rural territory. Subdivision and home-building booms of the 1920s and post-World War II era, however, substantially filled the territory to the Queens-Nassau border. In response to suburbanization in the 1920s New York had become the first state to develop a centralized park planning agency and an action plan for automobilefriendly regional park development. The island was not subject to metropolitan traffic and lacked any significant manufacturing centers; it seemed destined to support the city's recreation and residential needs, as Governor Smith often claimed. Throughout the 1930s Robert Moses realized this potential.

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