Route Description
The highway is a six-to-eight lane urban boulevard, with the northernmost section, from 59th Street to 72nd Street (where it becomes the Henry Hudson Parkway), elevated above a former rail yard adjacent to tracks still used by Amtrak. Trucks and buses are allowed only on the surface section.
In an outdoor installation for the Armory Show, American artist Janet Echelman affixed her sculpture Roadside Shrine II to the underside of West Side Highway's piers 90 and 88. The vinyl-coated polyethylene mesh cones were illuminated at night, fluttering in the wind as visitors flagged down taxis.
Read more about this topic: West Side Highway
Famous quotes containing the words route and/or description:
“A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)