The Belt Parkway, or Belt System or Circumferential Parkway is a series of New York City limited-access highways that form a complete circle around the Boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.

History

The Belt Parkway was proposed by builder and highway advocate Robert Moses in 1930 to provide modern highway access to Manhattan and to connect to. and use similar design principles to, parkways already constructed on Long Island and Westchester County, New York. Construction began in 1934. The full loop was completed when the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (also known as the BQE) finished in 1960.

The Belt System

Though some signage bears the same "Belt Parkway," the Belt System is made up of a series of interconnecting highways, none of which are actually the single Belt Parkway. Originally there were:

• part of the Grand Central Parkway (GCP) running west from the Triborough Bridge to a point east of LaGuardia Airport, where the GCP veers south and east, then the
• Whitestone Parkway from the junction of the GCP northeast to the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, then becoming the
• Cross Island Parkway from the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge east and then south near the border of Nassau County, New York to a connection with the Southern State Parkway then south on the
• Laurelton Parkway , a short connector that then turns west as the
• Southern Parkway (distinct from the Long Island Southern State Parkway mentioned above) in the median of Conduit Boulevard, turning south at Cross Bay Boulevard to become
• Shore Parkway , the part most people think of when they mention "Belt Parkway," skipping across former islands in Jamaica Bay, turning west partly over the former bed of Coney Island Creek then making a large arc to the north to connect to the last original segment, the
• Gowanus Parkway to end at the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel to Manhattan.

All of these original parkways except the Gowanus were built on strips of green and treed rights-of-way in a more pleasant surrounding than most highways of their time. The Gowanus Parkway was built as an elevated structure over Third and Hamilton Avenues in order to avoid the active docks and industrial areas in that part of Brooklyn.

Conversion and completion

New York parkways are closed to commercial traffic, which means any vehicle with a non-passenger registration, including all commercial trucking of any size. Originally this included even station wagons, which had "suburban" registrations, but they are now allowed, along with passenger-registered SUVs and vans.

The system was not completed as a parkway, and some portions of the original system were converted to expressways, which allows commercial traffic to use them, even interstate heavy trucking. These expressway portions are:

• Gowanus Expressway, replacing Gowanus Parkway as a connector between Manhattan and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge to Staten Island and New Jersey;
• Whitestone Expressway, which converted Whitestone Parkway into a truck route to connect the Van Wyck Expressway to the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge; and
• Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, built as an expressway to connect the Gowanus Parkway/Expressway to the Triborough Bridge and Grand Central Parkway to complete the system.

External links

• Belt Parkway Historic Overview at Steve Anderson's nycroads.com