The Bethpage State Parkway is a 2.49-mile (4.01 km) long parkway in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. The parkway begins at exit 31, a trumpet interchange, of the Southern State Parkway in the village of North Massapequa. The parkway serves three interchanges, Boundary Avenue, NY 24, and Central Avenue before terminating at a traffic circle (unsigned exit B5) with Plainview Road and a local park road in Bethpage State Park. The parkway is designated as New York State Route 907E, an unsigned reference route, as well as the Philip B. Healey Memorial Parkway. Healey was a New York State Assemblyman who died in May 1996.
The Bethpage State Parkway was first proposed by Robert Moses and the Long Island State Park Commission in 1924 to help get people east to parks in Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Construction of the parkway began in 1934, and opened on November 14, 1936 alongside the Laurelton Parkway (part of the Belt Parkway system) in Queens. The new parkway cost $1.04 million (1936 USD) to construct. Moses proposed extending the Bethpage in both directions, south to Merrick Road via Massapequa State Park, and north to Caumsett State Park, via an extended Bethpage and the new Caumsett State Parkway. Both proposals eventually failed to be constructed, while bike paths have been constructed or are in construction in both directions of the parkway. Several scaled-back proposals to extend the Bethpage north have been proposed, including an extension to NY 25A in Cold Spring Harbor and an extension to NY 135 (the Seaford–Oyster Bay Expressway) in Bethpage.
A new bike path was constructed along the Bethpage State Parkway in the 1970s on the former southern alignment and the current parkway, which is getting extended in 2012 with the new Bethpage Bikeway to the Long Island Rail Road station in Syosset. This extension also uses part of the former Long Island Motor Parkway.
Read more about Bethpage State Parkway: Route Description, Exit List
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