History
The Broad Channel roadbed of Cross Bay Boulevard was constructed over an aborted turnpike built by a syndicate headed by Patrick Flynn from 1899 to 1901. Flynn planned to build a roadway across the bay eighty feet wide and containing a double-track trolley line, a bicycle path and roadway. Flynn's project aimed at connecting the Jamaica Bay islands, filling in the marshes and leasing properties for homes along the route. The Long Island Rail Road, whose trestles were the only transportation connection across the bay at the time, vigorously opposed Flynn's plans in an effort to protect its monopoly. In June 1902, the New York Court of Appeals invalidated the 1892 lease that Flynn's project was based on. Today's Cross Bay Boulevard follows the path of Flynn's proposed roadway and was completed in 1923.
A $5 million project begun in 1924 involved the paving of Cross Bay Boulevard with concrete, as part of what was described as "the largest vehicular trestle in the world".
A 1941 proposal would have created an expressway on the route of Cross Bay and Woodhaven Boulevards, connecting Queens Boulevard to The Rockaways.
Cross Bay Boulevard was mentioned in The Vaccines song Norgaard about Danish model Amanda Norgaard
Read more about this topic: Cross Bay Boulevard
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)