(unindexed to date - please scroll away)
This is yet another new (15 Mar 04) page to cover additional information and
photographs of this interesting old highway; see also my
Automotive, Chrysler,
Dudgeon (really!), Mercedes, and
SS and JAGUAR car pages and other related pages.
A Motor Parkway Panel has been convened to keep the
LIMP alive in situ, in minds, and in museums.
There is also a lot of automotive material on my ORDNANCE
and HISTORY pages.
Also, if you like automotive history, see the links on the
Automotive page.
RoW = Right-of-
Way.
LONG ISLAND MOTOR PARKWAY
(Central Nassau County - continued)
(15 Mar 04)
[This material is about Central Nassau County and some has been removed
from the
Western Nassau County page, which had overloaded.]
(15 Mar 04)
Mitchel Field Area (1937)
(16 Mar 04)
Motor Parkway Panel Associate Howard Kroplick is playing "Can You Top This?" with
himself and has even exceeded any previous wonders with the followng massive
view of Mitchel Field as it was on 11 Feb 1937, a year and two months before the
Long Island Motor Parkway closed down; in this view, Roslyn is in the upper left
corner, New Cassell in the upper right, Uniondale in the lower left, and East Meadow
in the lower right, Hempstead Turnpike runs across the bottom, and the
LIMP across the center (this appears to be a US Army Air Corps picture):
(1937 Aerial photo courtesy H. Kroplick - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnail image; click on picture for VERY much larger (1.1Mb) image]
There is such an incredible amount of material on this image that I dassn't process it
and am using up enormous bandwidth to present it in full. To avoid obscuring
anything of interest, I have marked up a duplicate copy which follows; on it, the LIMP
is noted "L", one can make out Clarence MacKay's extravagant Harbor Hill
[HH] atop Roslyn at upper left, Mitchel Field, with it's extant parade
ground [PG], Roosevelt Flying Field [RFF] with the Old Westbury Golf
Club in its SW corner [OW], the 1937/38 (George) Vanderbilt Cup course
[V] with its twin access bridges over the LIMP (below the "V") leading to the
¾-mile long main grandstand (running diagonally between
the "V" and the "L"), the Meadowbrook Club [MC] with its huge polo stadium
[P] and its private LIRR Salisbury Plains station on the Central Branch (former
Central RR of LI) [C], and the LIMP Meadowbrook Toll Lodge [MT].
Running W-to-E (left-to-right) across the photo are the LIMP [L] (upper),
Stewart Avenue [S] (middle), and the Central Branch [C] (lower):
(1937 Aerial photo courtesy H. Kroplick - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnail image; click on picture for VERY much larger (1.1Mb) image]
If you look very carefully at the left margin, you can just barely make out the Jericho
Turnpike bridge OVER the LIMP at the top of the "J" and the Mineola Toll
Lodge (just left of the RoW opposite the hook of the "J"), the LIMP bridge over Hillside
Avenue [H], the loop around the Wheatley Hills Golf Club (at the top left "L")
with its private underpass under the LIMP in the middle of the course, and Robert
Moses's fatally-competitive Northern State Parkway [N] swinging around
between the LIMP and Guinea Woods Road [GW] / Clinton Street
[CL] and ending (at that time) at Jericho Turnpike [J] , with its
Hillside Avenue bridge showing quite clearly directly under the "L".
KEY - alphabetical:
A - Arthur Street (in Garden City) / Oak Street (in Uniondale)
C - LIRR Central Branch (former Central RR of LI)
CH - Cherry Lane (in Carle Place)
CL - Clinton Road (in Garden City) / Glen Cove Road (in Roslyn and N) /
- Guinea Woods Road (in old Westbury)
CP - Carle Place
CR - Carle Road/Union Avenue (in Carle Place on Westbury line)
E - Ellison Avenue (in Westbury)
GW - Guinea Woods Road (in Old Westbury) / Clinton Road (in Garden City) /
- Glen Cove Road (in Roslyn and N)
H - Hillside Avenue (ending at Jericho Turnpike in Carle Place)
HH - Harbor Hill (in Roslyn)
J - Jericho Turnpike
L - LIMP
LI -LIRR Main Line
MA - Merrick Avenue (in East Meadow) / Post Avenue (in Westbury)
MT - Meadowbrook Toll Lodge
N - Northern State Parkway
O - Old Country Road
OW -Old Westbury Golf Club
P - Polo Ground (at Meadowbrook Club)
PA - Post Avenue (in Westbury) / Merrick Avenue (in East Meadow)
PG - Parade Ground (at Mitchel Field)
RFF - Roosevelt Flying Field
RR - Roslyn Road
S - Stewart Avenue
U - Uniondale Avenue
V - George Vanderbilt 37/38 Cup Course
W - Westbury
WA - Westbury (Maple) Avenue
WN - Whaleneck Road {?}
? - mansion (upper center}
? - mansion (right upper}
I would love to identify those two huge mansions [?] with grand N-S allées
leading to them. The central one may well be the Harry Payne Whitney estate
in Old Westbury; he married Gertude Vanderbilt.
Here is a vertical strip enlargement of the Roslyn-Garden City stretch and a further enlargement of that portion from Wheatley Hills to Old Country Road:
[Thumbnail image left; click on picture for larger image]
Extracted from that is this detail of the Wheatley Hills loop, with the golf course
bridge just left of the "L" (arrow), the Hills=ide Avenue overpass at the upper
left of the "H", the Jericho Turnpike underpass at the upper left of thr "J", and
the Mineola Toll Lodge to its left (arrow) [under the "L" is the Hillside
Avenue bridge over NSP]:
Now, this is the entire W-E segment of the LIMP, Stewart Avenue, and the
Central Branch:
[Thumbnail image left; click on picture for larger image]
Extracting from that, these are three major segments,,slightly overlapped);
from just E of Clinton (the former Curtiss Field in lower left) to the E end of
Mitchel Field, central Mitchel (above the parade ground, with polo fields
beyond), and Mitchel to Merrick Avenue:
Now to the Merrick Avenue area with with Merrick running diagonally from
upper left to lower right, under the LIMP bridge, and the Meadowbrook Club
and the Central's Salisbury Plains station at right and the Meadowbrook Toll
Lodge [MT] at upper left:
Details of the Central bridges and the club and station are on
the new
Central continuation page 4.
(17 Mar 04)
Russell and Old Country Roads.
(12 Mar 04)
The new residents at Russell and Old Country Roads, whose big back yard lies across
the LIMP RoW, invited me over to see just what was there. It seems that
when the LIMP properties were sold off south of OCR, the then-residents on Pell
Terrace and Russell Road bought their halves of the RoW, EXCEPT for the person at
the N end of Pell who, being on a curve, had more than enough back yard anyway.
Thus, the landowner at the NE corner of Russell and OCR had the option to buy BOTH
halves and did so. Apparently, no one else along Russell and Pell did this; their
yards end at the center line of the RoW. Not so our friends; they have the full
width (E-W at that point) and, even more interesting, some artifacts!
- This house and its grounds are
PRIVATE PROPERTY!
Please do not trespass and do NOT bother the good folks who live there!
They have two posts (looking SE)!
(All photos 06 Mar 2004 by and © 2004 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnail images; click on pictures for larger images]
Strangely, however, they have a triangular boundary post immediately S of a square
guard rail post! You may recall from LIMP
cont. page 0 that the square or rectangular posts held spiral or twist wire as
guard rails if the holes were parallel to the RoW or bolts, which in turn held
2" x 6" planks as guard rails, if the holes were perpendicular to the
RoW; they were usually on either side of the RoW paving. The square post has
three (3) holes (or, at least, three holes above ground) parallel to the RoW, thus
matching those across OCR and those S at the Clinton Road to Raymond Court
segment. The triangular post, which was normally located at the 50' mark from
the centerline on both sides of the RoW to mark the property line and had little bits of
wire sticking out, probably to hold fine wire lines to help delineate the boundary, has
no protruding wire; it most likely rusted off long since (looking SE):
The triangular post points inward toward the RoW and both are along the E boundary
of the property, backing on the house on Pell. I assume that at least one of
the posts was moved somewhere along the line. There is also a good deal of
broken concrete along the fence at the E boundary; it does NOT appear to be classical
LIMP paving and may well represent, instead, the 3' extension added on each side
after the original parkway was found far too narrow. The next shot was taken
from the S end of the property, standing on the centerline of the RoW, looking N (it
has been artifically lightened to compensate for the lowering skies):
You can see the easternmost building of the Fairhaven apartment complex over the
fence. So far, so good, but there is a mystery coming up; the S boundary is
NOT linear. The S boundary is some 10' further S along the E edge and also
along the W edge of the RoW but projects that 10' N along the two lanes of the
parkway proper!
In these shots, we are standing on the W/B lane (L), the centerline, and the E/B lane
(R) looking S (don't forget that the parkway ran N-S here). I couldn't get a
good shot of the offset because of the brush but here's a SW view that gives some
indication:
(All photos 06 Mar 2004 by and © 2004 S. Berliner, III - all rights reserved)
[Thumbnail images; click on pictures for larger images]
This last (R) was taken through the OCR fence, standing dead on the centerline of the
RoW looking over OCR at Fairhaven and Vanderbilt Drive; you can make out the LIPA
power transmission tower at R and the Fairhaven posts are just to the R of the fronts
of the cars parked facing R (E). There's one little catch here; look at any
Hagstrom's LI atlas and this seems all wrong! Hagstroms shows Fairhaven
(Laurel, Russell, and Vanderbilt Drives) all to the E of the RoW, with no room for the
Dade properties between the RoW and Clinton on the N side of OCR! Explain
that away, mein Herr Langensheidt! It comes about because Mineola and
Carle Place exchanged that land after 1938 but that doesn't explain the map error.
- This house and its grounds are
PRIVATE PROPERTY!
Please do not trespass and do NOT bother the good folks who live there!
Because the Main Page overloaded, please visit the
many Continuation Pages noted on the LIMP Index page.
THUMBS UP!
THUMBS UP! - Support your local police,
fire, and emergency personnel!
S. Berliner, III
To contact S. Berliner, III, please click here.
of this series of Long Island Motor Parkway pages.
© Copyright S. Berliner, III - 2003,
2004
- All rights reserved.
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