History
Construction began in Westchester County in 1907, making it the earliest limited-access automobile highway to start construction. However, although construction on the Long Island Motor Parkway began a year later, a section of the Long Island road opened for traffic before the end of 1908, opening before the Bronx River as the first limited access automobile highway to be put into use. Neither was up to modern freeway standards, utilizing left turns across the opposing direction at access points.
The Bronx River Parkway was the first highway to utilize a median strip to separate the opposing lanes, the first highway constructed through a park, and the first highway where intersecting streets crossed over bridges.
The Westchester section of the Bronx River Parkway first opened to traffic in 1922 and was completed in 1925. A new roadway in the New York City borough of the Bronx including an extension south of the former Botanical Gardens/Burke Avenue terminus opened in 1951. That extension diverges eastward from the river.
From 1953 to 1955, a 2.6-mile (4.2 km) segment of the parkway between Bronxville and the Bronx was closed to straighten and widen the road. During this reconstruction period, a new overpass was also built for the Cross County Parkway.
Read more about this topic: Bronx River Parkway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)