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The 8 ocean beaches of Jones Beach

BY BARBARA SHEA

"TWO HOT DOGS, please -- hold the sand." The young wag in the Jones Beach grill line had to be joking. Everyone knows the sand isn't added at the snack bars. It's sprinkled on by the gentle breeze and the hundreds of sizzling feet that dance past your blanket while you're savoring one of life's greatest pleasures: an ocean.side junk-food lunch.

Lunchtime entertainment? Just look around you. Sunbathers preen on a rainbow of towels, boogie boarders coast atop the breakers rolling in from Africa, toddlers intently scoop holes at the water's edge, and watchful elders knee-deep in the frothy backwash reminisce about days when they, too, tried to dig to China and built castles in the sand. Life is indeed a beach -- especially a beach named Jones.

Jones Beach is actually eight ocean beaches strung together along a 6.5-mile sandspit, plus a half-mile still-water beachfront on Zach's Bay. They're just part of a 2,413-acre state park that also offers -- sometimes limited by area, season or permit -- two pools, surfing, surf and bay fishing (day and night), stargazing, a bandshell with outdoor dancing, a 14,000-plus-seat outdoor theater whose summer concert schedule includes top stars, a 1.9-mile boardwalk dotted with photos of early beachgoers in shin-to-chin bathing costumes or business suits and straw hats (all Long Island state parks are highlighted in the Castles in the Sand historical exhibit at the East Bathhouse), a 2-mile health walk, a boat basin, picnic areas, basketball and shuffleboard courts, softball fields, paddle tennis, volleyball, 18-hole pitch-putt golf, miniature golf, playgrounds, a nature center, gift shops and a glass-walled full-service restaurant.

Skateboarding, roller-skating and inline skating are prohibited in the park year-round and bicycling is banned from the boardwalk April 1 to Oct. 1, but they're allowed on the 4.5-mile recreation path running along Wantagh State Parkway from Cedar Creek County Park on Merrick Road to Parking Field 5 at the Jones Beach Theatre (where there are bike racks).

The state park's two lofty landmarks nearby are more than decorative. The 231-foot Jones Beach Tower, modeled after the campanile of St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, stores 316,000 gallons of water from wells that supply the park. And the bright signal flags that fly from the nearby Central Mall's 90-foot ship's-mast flagpole bear the coded messages "Jones Beach State Park" and "Keep Your Park Neat," followed by the current year.

Jones Beach opened Aug. 4, 1929, during a voice-choking, car-stalling sandstorm that almost canceled the ceremony marking the completion of a troubled project. Voters defeated the first referendum proposed by the Long Island State Park Commission's irrepressible president, Robert Moses (rumors that the proposed public beach would have no local benefit reportedly were started by wealthy estate owners who feared a Coney Island East). Then labor strikes stopped work awhile. And money became such an issue, Moses had to persuade his mother to advance $20,000.

Despite critics, Jones Beach has always been a crowd-pleaser. It drew 1.5 million visitors its first year and now logs 6 million to 8 million annually -- most during summer. The all-time one-day record tally was 276,000, on July 4, 1998. (Beachgoers, incidentally, annually scarf up 1.5 million hot dogs, 650,000 hamburgers and 1.2 million servings of ice cream.)

Today there are official radio-free zones as well as unofficial favored gathering spots. Senior citizens and families like Field 6, for example, because it has the shortest walk from car to water (young families also like the Zach's Bay beach, where there's a day camp weekdays). Nature lovers prefer West End Field 2, which has the longest walk across a sparser-peopled beach and thus more solitude. Teens and post-teens, of course, immediately head for the busy Central Mall.