Thursday, October 1, 2026
Sixty-four years ago, in the spring of 1962, I began working as a reporter on Long Island, and engaged immediately in my first big story — Robert Moses’ plan to build a four-lane highway on Fire Island. It would have devastated much of the exquisite nature of that barrier beach, along with its 17 very special communities. I was 20 years old.
After two years of grass-roots opposition and journalism, in which I played a significant part, the highway scheme was stopped. In September 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation establishing Fire Island National Seashore.
In those two years I merged investigative reporting with environmental journalism, a combination that has been a journalistic and academic focus of mine for the past six decades. Life has its circles, and I was delighted that Alexcy Romero, superintendent of the national seashore and a 1990 graduate of SUNY Old Westbury, was a guest speaker at the school on Earth Day. As a professor at the university for 47 years, I taught investigative reporting and environmental journalism.
In his talk, Romero said, “I did not know how I was going to apply my environmental science degree.” He found a highly positive application for it for more than three decades now at the National Park Service.
Romero has been the superintendent at Fire Island since 2018. “Everything we do is about protecting resources and providing a good, memorable visitor experience,” he said. The title of his presentation was “Cities and Seashores,” and its focus was “Long Island seashore conservation and working in public service.”
Romero is originally from New York City, and when he was appointed superintendent, he said, “As a native New Yorker, I have spent many days enjoying the Great South Bay by boat, strolling the beaches of Fire Island, and have experienced some breathtaking sunsets that only Fire Island National Seashore has to offer. I look forward to working with all the communities, partners and talented staff managing this beautiful resource that many people have come to treasure.”
In 1962 I had never been to Fire Island. But even though I was also from New York City, I became an Eagle Scout, relished nature, and my family camped in the summers at Wildwood State Park, in Wading River.
I got the reporter’s job at the Babylon Town Leader, and when I arrived on my first day of work, the newspaper’s publisher, James Cooper, and editor, John Maher, told me that Moses had just announced his highway plan for Fire Island, and they wanted me to go there that weekend and put together a story.
As Robert Caro wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book, “The Power Broker:Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Moses had the New York media in his pocket. But that wasn’t the case with the Town Leader. Moses had a home in Babylon, and through the years the newspaper took on Moses and his various projects.
I lucked out by connecting with Fire Islanders including TV journalist Charles Collingwood, playwright Reginald Rose, author Theodore H. White and some regular folks, who articulately explained how the island’s nature and communities would be impacted by the proposed highway. A walk in Sunken Forest made the environmental importance of Fire Island clear to me.
I wrote a story, the first of many. We discovered that the four-lane highway Moses built to the west, along Jones Beach, instead of being an “anchor” of the beach — as Moses insisted a highway on Fire Island would be — regularly needed to be bolstered with sand pushed along its edges by bulldozers working at night.
The first call I received the morning after my first story ran was from Murray Barbash, an environmentally committed builder from Brightwaters. Barbash and his brother-in-law, Babylon attorney Irving Like, co-author of the state’s Conservation Bill of Rights, then organized a Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore. Their view was that Moses couldn’t be stopped on the state level because of the enormous power he wielded in New York. If Fire Island were to be saved, it would have to be through the federal government. Also, a national seashore offered a positive goal, they felt. And happily, that’s what came about.
Karl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
