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National Geographic : 1979 Jul
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frankly admit they have more experience with wildlife than with portable toilets. But they're learning fast. Park personnel regularly remove stripped and stolen cars from remote beach areas. At Breezy Point alone, 162 cars were removed in 1974, soon after the Park Service took control from New York City. With two or three arrests each weekend during the summer, mainly for disorderly conduct and narcotics violations, Riis Park poses a challenge for its rangers and contin gent of park police. Bathing areas at the beach have been more or less self-segregated for years. Fam ilies, blacks, Hispanics, whites, senior citi zens, teenagers, homosexuals, and nudes congregate in specific sections of beach. Beachgoers usually self-monitor the group ings peacefully. Nonetheless, strangers un aware of the arrangement have had problems. Last summer a black teenager was severely beaten by a group of white youths when he sat down on "their" beach to read a book. Keeping order in packed Jacob Riis Park-50,000 bathers on a peak summer day-is child's play for the Park Service compared to the task of coming up with a Gateway master plan satisfactory both to the surrounding communities and to the metropolitan area as a whole. Surrounding Gateway's Breezy Point Unit are proud, fiercely protective Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods, whose families have lived there for years. They are determined not to go the way of central Brooklyn neighborhoods, plagued by crime. In 1971, when former President Richard Nixon toured the proposed park area by helicopter, the mothers of Breezy Point made a brown paper sign thirty feet long that read: Our Children Are Safe Here. "We can live with Gateway, but we don't want to be devoured by it," said John J. Car roll, attorney for the Breezy Point Coopera tive, a community of 2,800 homes in the middle of the park sometimes called the Irish Riviera. Members of the cooperative, mainly summer residents, oppose overnight adult camping at the Breezy Point Unit and label as "destructive" plans to double peak use on a given day to 200,000. "Look what happened there on July 23," warns Carroll. July 23, 1978, was a particularly hot Sun day, and huge crowds-some say 200,000 swarmed Jacob Riis Park. When it came time to go home, no one could move. There was some drinking and some unin vited picnicking on lawns. Traffic backed up for miles. Windows of buses were broken. Drivers were assaulted. It was after midnight before the last people were able to leave the park. This, of course, is not what the Park Ser vice has in mind. To begin with, they would like to spread people throughout the Breezy Point Unit. And then eliminate some of the cars and traffic congestion with improved mass transit. Park's Success Rides on Transit Plans Mass transportation is the key to bringing all these bits and pieces of park together and making it accessible, as Congress had hoped, to inner-city people with limited rec reational opportunities. Transportation is also the most sensitive issue in the Gateway planning process. The potential is there to make Breezy Point a 38-minute boat ride from lower Manhattan. Current plans call for the extension of two city bus lines and for express bus service from Newark to Sandy Hook. All would be financed in part by funds recently autho rized by Congress to improve access to U. S. parks. Water transportation is still at the discussion stage. Meanwhile, some Gate way communities vow a fight to the end to keep the buses off their streets. The inner city, meanwhile, has not been silent. Minority groups are as interested in jobs and business opportunities at the park as they are in Gateway's beaches and ball parks. "We want our piece of the pie," said Al Wood of the Central Brooklyn Coordinating Council, which represents 125 civic and business organizations. Two years ago the Park Service set em ployment goals for women and other minor ities at 40 percent by the end of this year. In addition, they promised to notify such groups of all available park concessions and contracts. Gateway also initiated Job Corps and Youth Conservation Corps programs to Elbowroom for the Millions
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