Shore Front Parkway is a beachfront road paralleling the

Rockaway Beach and Boardwalk The Rockaway Beach and Boardwalk is a public park in Rockaway, Queens, New York, composed of the Rockaway Beach and the adjacent Rockaway Boardwalk. The beach runs from Beach 9th Street in Far Rockaway to Beach 149th Street in Neponsit, a di ...

in the

New York City borough The boroughs of New York City are the five major governmental districts that comprise New York City. They are the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. Each borough is coextensive with a respective county of the State of New ...

Queens Queens is the largest by area of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City, coextensive with Queens County, in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York. Located near the western end of Long Island, it is bordered by the ...

, running between Beach 73rd Street and Beach 108th Street. The parkway opened in 1939 after parks commissioner

Robert Moses Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was an American urban planner and public official who worked in the New York metropolitan area during the early to mid-20th century. Moses is regarded as one of the most powerful and influentia ...

cleared a strip of land north of the boardwalk. Moses demolished more than 700 buildings in the parkway's path and destroyed what he described as "catch-penny enterprises" along the boardwalk, replacing them with recreational fields. In the process, nearly half of the

Rockaways' Playland Rockaways' Playland was an amusement park that operated from 1902 to 1987 in Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern t ...

amusement park was destroyed. Often called the "road to nowhere" by Rockaway residents because its termini do not access any well-traveled locations, Shore Front Parkway was intended by Moses as a link in a never-completed grand shorefront drive extending from

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

to the

Hamptons The Hamptons, part of the East End (Long Island), East End of Long Island, consist of the town (New York), towns of Southampton (town), New York, Southampton and East Hampton (town), New York, East Hampton, which together compose the South Fork ...

. This project of Moses' was permanently thwarted in the 1960s when the

National Park Service The National Park Service (NPS) is an List of federal agencies in the United States, agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, within the US Department of the Interior. The service manages all List ...

gained control of the bulk of

Fire Island Fire Island is the large center island of the outer barrier islands parallel to the South Shore of Long Island in the U.S. state of New York. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy once again divided Fire Island into two islands. Together, these two isl ...

in Suffolk County, an essential link in the proposed highway, and decreed that it remain a permanently roadless National Seashore. In July 2007, the

New York City Department of Transportation The New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) is the agency of the government of New York City responsible for the management of much of New York City's transportation infrastructure. Ydanis Rodriguez is the Commissioner of the Departm ...

announced that it would extend Shore Front Parkway through Beach 67th Street, where it would intersect with Rockaway Beach Boulevard. The extension, called Beach Front Road, was subsequently extended through to Beach 60th Street. The southernmost roadway of Shore Front Parkway accommodates a two-way protected bike path.

References

Transportation in Rockaway, Queens Parkways in New York City Robert Moses projects Streets in Queens, New York {{NYC-road-stub

See also

References