New York State Route 111 - History

History

The origins of NY 111 date back to 1914 when the state of New York awarded a contract on July 29 to improve a 9.56-mile (15.39 km) highway in the towns of Islip and Smithtown to state highway standards. The road covered by the project began at Main Street in East Islip and headed north on Carleton Avenue and Wheeler Road to Hauppauge, from where it continued northeast to Village of the Branch via Hauppauge Road. Reconstruction of the road cost $263,359 (equivalent to $3.61 million in 2013), and the rebuilt road was added to the state highway system on June 1, 1922, as unsigned State Highway 1208 (SH 1208). In the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York, hundreds of state-maintained highways were assigned a posted route designation for the first time. One of these was SH 1208, which became NY 111.

On September 13, 1966, NY 111 was realigned south of Hauppauge to follow a slightly more westerly alignment to the hamlet of Islip along Joshua's Path and Islip Avenue, two streets that ran parallel to the route's original path on Carleton Avenue and Wheeler Road. Ownership and maintenance of NY 111's former routing was transferred to Suffolk County, which redesignated the road as CR 17. The ultimately cancelled eastern extension of the Northern State Parkway would have crossed NY 111 just south of Village of the Branch at a point north of Mount Pleasant Road. An interchange between the parkway and NY 111 was planned at that location.