Evolution of a Highway

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Long Island's post-World War II growing pains and the steps needed to relieve them are written in stone -- and asphalt.

At right is the Southern State Parkway in 1952, looking east toward the Park Avenue Bridge in Roosevelt. Below is the same section in 1998. Originally, the road was designed to accommodate traffic of the 1930s as a 42-foot-wide, four-lane undivided highway, with touches by master builder Robert Moses that included wooden light poles, stone bridges and brown-and-white signs.

But by the 1950s, heavier traffic created by the postwar housing boom was clogging the arteries. Before the war, traffic on the Southern State was estimated by the state Department of Transportation at about 15,000 vehicles per day. By 1951, that figure had risen to 71,000 per day and to 107,000 by the mid-1950s. Today, the department estimates, 190,000 vehicles a day move through this section in Roosevelt.

A partial response on the Southern State Parkway in 1950, according to Christopher Cotter, a senior landscape architect with the state agency, was to build a 15-inch-thick concrete median barrier with a 5-inch-diameter steel tube on top, as shown in the photo at right.

But a radical transformation was needed just a few years later. A completely new parkway was built next to the original, with a wide grass median strip. New bridges, such as the one completed in 1956 over the westbound lanes in the bottom photo, were constructed next to the originals, using stone from the same quarries.

In the mid-1980s, lighting was updated with aluminum poles that were colored brown to blend with the landscape. Signs have evolved, Cotter noted, with the last improvements being made in the 1980s. Early in the 1990s, he said, median barriers were installed to prevent crossover accidents.

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