History
NY 304 was assigned as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York. The route was originally an at-grade highway for its entire length, following what is now East Washington Avenue (CR 35), Middletown Road (CR 33) from Pearl River, and Main Street to West Nyack Road (then NY 59) in Nanuet. Here, NY 304 turned east, overlapping with NY 59 to access its current alignment. Farther north, NY 304 originally utilized North Main Street (CR 29) in New City and Haverstraw (CR 29) and South Mountain (CR 90) roads from New City to US 9W in Haverstraw. NY 304 was realigned slightly in the early 1940s to follow East Central Avenue in Pearl River and the overlap with NY 59 was eliminated in the mid-1950s when NY 59 was moved onto a new highway paralleling West Nyack Road to the south.
Street traffic forecasters for the Rockland County Planning Department predicted in 1960 that the section of the road between Pearl River and Nanuet would serve 30–40,000 vehicles per day in 1980. Since the road would not be able to sustain that amount, a new bypass between the two locations was opened in the mid-1960s as a realignment of NY 304. The bypass, which extended from Central Avenue in Pearl River to West Nyack Road in Nanuet, handles about 23,000 cars per day as of 2008. The Pearl River–Nanuet bypass was part of a larger plan to build a freeway extending from Pearl River to Haverstraw at Hook Mountain State Park (Rockland Lake State Park); however, the section of the route north of Nanuet was cancelled as the county's 1980 traffic volume projection for the Nanuet–Haverstraw corridor was not high enough to justify the construction of a new highway.
Although the plans for a Nanuet–Haverstraw freeway were scrapped, NY 304 was ultimately moved onto a new, mostly at-grade highway between the two locations in the mid-1960s. The new alignment utilized the pre-existing Long Clove Road near the northern tip of DeForest Lake and a newly-built road bypassing New City to the east and running generally northeasterly to the junction of Ridge and Long Clove roads. The northernmost part of NY 304 was realigned in the 1980s to follow a new highway paralleling Long Clove Road to the south.
Read more about this topic: New York State Route 304
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)