The West Side Highway (officially the Joe DiMaggio Highway) is a mostly surface section of New York State Route 9A (NY 9A) that runs from West 72nd Street along the Hudson River to the southern tip of Manhattan. It replaced the West Side Elevated Highway, built between 1929 and 1951, which was shut down in 1973 due to neglect and lack of maintenance, and was dismantled by 1989. The term "West Side Highway" is often mistakenly used, particularly by the news media traffic reporters, to include the roadway north of 72nd Street which is properly known as the Henry Hudson Parkway.
The current highway, which was completed in 2001, but required some reconstruction due to damage sustained in the 9/11 attacks, uses the surface streets that existed before the elevated highway was built: West Street, Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Avenue. A short section of Twelfth Avenue still runs between 129th and 138th Streets, under the Riverside Drive Viaduct.
Read more about West Side Highway: Route Description, History, Major Intersections
Famous quotes containing the words west, side and/or highway:
“We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)