History
The segment of modern NY 120 between Westchester Avenue and the north end of the overlap with NY 22 was originally designated as part of Route 1, an unsigned legislative route, by the New York State Legislature in 1908. Route 1 approached Purchase Street from the west on Westchester Avenue and continued north from Armonk on what is now NY 22. NY 120, meanwhile, was assigned as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York to the portion of its modern alignment north of the junction of Purchase Street and Westchester Avenue (then NY 119) in Harrison. It was extended south to US 1 in Rye c. 1938 by way of Purchase Street and Highland Road.
NY 120 was altered again by the following year to follow NY 119 east along Westchester Avenue to US 1 in Port Chester. Most of NY 120's former routing south of Westchester Avenue became part of NY 119A, a new route assigned to all of Purchase Street between NY 119 and NY 120 in Harrison and US 1 in Rye. NY 120 was realigned once more c. 1961 to follow Purchase Street south to Rye, supplanting NY 119A. At the same time, NY 119 was truncated on its east end to Purchase Street while the portion of Westchester Avenue that had carried NY 119 and NY 120 between Purchase Street and Port Chester became an extension of NY 120A.
The two-lane bridge carrying NY 120 over the Metro-North Railroad in Chappaqua was rebuilt as a four-lane bridge in 2012 for $19 million. Once completed, the bridge was named the SSG Kyu Hyuk Chay Memorial Bridge in memory of Army Staff Sergeant Kyu Chay, whose family owns a dry cleaning business adjacent to the bridge. A plaque was also erected in his honor at the war memorial by the Chappaqua train station. Chay, a Special Forces linguist and Korean immigrant, was three credits shy of his law degree at Brooklyn Law School when he was killed in Afghanistan.
Read more about this topic: New York State Route 120
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother—both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child’s history is never finished.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)