The Long Island 45: the Motor Parkway

Motor Parkway overpass, 73rd Avenue at 199th Street, Fresh Meadows

While making your way through the southeastern part of Fresh Meadows as you get close to Cunningham Park, you may spot the occasional white-painted overpass crossing the street. They’re not old railroad trestles or park paths… instead, they mark one of America’s very first parkways designed for automobile traffic.

In 1904, the auto age had arrived in Long Island and industrialist heir William Kissam Vanderbilt helped ring it in with a road race that became known as the Vanderbilt Cup Race. It was one of the very first auto races and attracted drivers from the world over.

The Cup Race was run in Nassau County on Jericho Turnpike, Bethpage Turnpike and Hempstead Turnpike–all now busy highways but in those days they were farm-to-market, unpaved roads.

Pit stop on the Motor Parkway

The race attracted thousands of spectators every year despite dangerous conditions that produced occasional fatalities among its participants. In 1906, after several spectators broke through a wire fence in Mineola, a race car smashed into a crowd, killing a spectator. Vanderbilt then decided that the Cup Race needed a separate course.

After a persuasive public relations campaign, land in the middle part of Long Island from the Queens line to Lake Ronkonkoma was purchased, although enough farmers and landowners held out along the original proposed route to make the new Motor Parkway a twisting, turning route. (The Northern State and Interborough Parkways, which followed in subsequent decades, suffered from a similar malady).

Above: 1920s map showing the full extent of the LIMP. Dotted red lines indicate sections never built.

Construction began in June 1908 and eventually, the first phase of the Motor Parkway was completed in 1910. The Parkway pioneered the use of overpasses and bridges to avoid intersections with previously existing roads.

Tragedy, though, was a constant companion of the Vanderbilt Cup Race, and after the 1910 tilt, in which four people were killed and twenty injured, the race was never held again on Long Island. Indianapolis, Indiana became the national capital of auto racing. Vanderbilt, though, was still in good shape because the Motor Parkway was designed as a toll road as well as a race course, and contained 12 tollbooths along its 45-mile route.

The Parkway was never subject to traffic jams in the early years, mainly because of its hefty freight. It cost $2 per tollbooth… a double digit amount in today’s money! Vanderbilt reduced the toll to one dollar by 1917, but that was still prohibitively high. By the 1920s, though, 150,000 vehicles used it annually. It was still the best-quality road in the area then, since the Northern and Southern State Parkways had yet to be built and Jericho and Hempstead Turnpikes were still two-lane farm roads. Vanderbilt continued to expand the Parkway westward, reaching Springfield Boulevard in 1911 and eventually, to Horace Harding Boulevard in what is now Fresh Meadows by 1926. Its final length was 45 miles.

The Depression, combined with Robert Moses’ aggressive road building, combined to doom the Parkway in the thirties. Traffic was siphoned off the narrow Motor Parkway by Moses’ superior roads, the Northern and Southern State Parkways. Vanderbilt turned the Parkway over to New York State in 1938 in exchange for back taxes, without having made a cent of profit. “A white elephant for the past 20 years,” Moses called it.

Though Suffolk County kept the easternmost 13 miles of the Motor Parkway for auto traffic, Nassau County has mostly used it as right of way for the Long Island Lighting Company, as it was then known. Small portions of its old route are still visible in Levittown and New Hyde Park, among other areas.

It’s the Queens portion that concerns us here, since, by pure luck, it’s mostly intact! A long stretch of the Motor Parkway is intact as a pedestrian and bicycle path between Cunningham Park and Winchester Boulevard just north of Union Turnpike. Today, the Motor Parkway is maintained by the New York City Parks Department, which keeps the foliage trimmed and removes any fallen branches after storms. Some of the Parkway’s original concrete posts lining the old route can be seen in the underbrush, and other clues, like the “1926” under the overpass at 73^rd Avenue, mark the date of the Parkway’s final western expansion.

Above: Motor Parkway overpass in Cunningham Park

In the late 1990s, the Motor Parkway was connected to a lengthy greenway running along maintained park paths running west to Kissena Park; and the Kissena Park Corridor leads west from there across the Van Wyck Expressway to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. Cyclists now have a miles-long path unfettered by auto traffic in eastern Queens — and many Queens residents are pushing to extend the pedestrian parkway eastward.