Horace Harding Boulevard was initially developed as a through route from Elmhurst to Nassau County as Nassau Boulevard in the 1930s, and was later named for a financier and friend of NYC traffic czar Robert Moses. It was widened into the Long Island Expressway in the 1950s, with Horace Harding’s name still affixed to the service roads. Today the LIE (as everyone refers to it, despite its being called the Queens Midtown Expressway and Horace Harding Expressway on Queens signage) runs from the Queens Midtown Tunnel to near Riverhead in Suffolk County as Interstate 495. In “rush” hours, it’s been dubbed “the world’s longest parking lot.”
However, a short piece of the original Nassau Boulevard can be found for approximately two blocks in Little Neck as the LIE was dipped south of its original route. This short two-lane piece runs from the north service road of the LIE, runs east past Little Neck Parkway and 260th Street, and into Nassau County — where it changes names to become Horace Harding Boulevard once again in Lake Success, where it angles southeast into the north service road of the LIE once again, with its two-way traffic ending at Lakeville Road.
This is one of two roads in Queens named for Nassau County, though Nassau Road is just over the city line past Glenwood Street in northern Little Neck. Further south, the Nassau Expressway (I-898) parallels the Belt Parkway east of Kennedy Airport.
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1/20/18
10 comments
Manhattan has Nassau Street in the Financial District. Brooklyn has Nassau Avenue in Greenpoint, a stop on the G Train. So “Nassau” is represented in at least three of the five boroughs.
There are plenty of Nassau Streets and Avenues, etc., but I am talking about streets clearly named for Nassau County.
OK thanks Kevin, clarifying this and my second posting. Don’t think there are other streets in Queens named for Nassau COUNTY. I’ve lived in Nassau and Queens most of my life and can’t think of any others. In Nassau County, there is a major north-south arterial called Nassau Boulevard, which is also a station on the LIRR Hempstead Branch. Nassau Boulevard also intersects the LIRR about a mile north at Merillon Ave. Station on the Main Line.
In late 2012 and most of 2013 I was driving to locations in Westchester and even Connecticut every day for my main job. They eventually assigned me to worksites closer to home. In any event, if eastbound Expressway traffic seemed especially glacial in the afternoon I sometimes got off and stopped at the Panera located on this stretch of Nassau Boulevard. If I spent an hour or so there traffic would usually be better when I left.
I called this the Panera Bread Strategy.
Let me add some additional tidbits to my initial comment. Staten Island has a Nassau Street in its northeast corner, about a mile west of the St. George Ferry. On maps it is a dead end street to and from Harvard Avenue. There was also, for many years, a Staten Island Railway stop called “Nassau” that was named not for a street but for a nearby defunct smelting plant that has been razed. That station was closed in 2017 (along with Atlantic). Both were replaced with a brand new facility known as Arthur Kill that includes a parking lot for commuters.
I cannot locate a “Nassau” named street in The Bronx. However, The Bronx shares a short water-only boundary with Nassau County, between City Island and the Great Neck peninsula.
There are plenty of Nassau Streets and Avenues, etc., but I am talking about streets clearly named for Nassau County.
From looking at it on Google Maps I found something interesting about Staten Island’s Nassau Street. It runs for one block from Harvard Avenue on its east end to Franklin Avenue on its west end … almost. For no reason I can discern it dead-ends maybe 75 feet from Franklin. From the dead-end to Franklin is just a patch of grass that doesn’t appear to belong to the houses on either side of it. Street View shows no signs of a curb cut on Franklin, so I doubt there ever was a house on it. Utility wires run along the north side of the grass area.
The mystery remains: why does Nassau not run through to Franklin?
Note: a short distance away Van Buren, Fillmore and Buchanan streets run parallel to each other. Homage to three of the more obscure presidents?
Anything named Nassau was named for the House of Nassau Royal family from the Netherlands. There is also a small town upstate below Albany named Nassau, also a Nassau Shores in NY State. In NJ, Princeton has its well known NASSAU HALL on its campus. And…….who can forget Nassau in the Bahamas!
Until this, the only Nassau Boulevard I knew about was the one by Adelphi University over in Garden City, though I doubt it was even connected to the one mentioned here.
About forty years ago, a friend moved into an apartment off of Horace Harding Boulevard, While walking around his new neighborhood, we found ourselves at a branch of the Queens Borough Public Library right on HH Boulevard. I entered this citadel of knowledge and asked the two librarians at the reference desk therein if they knew who HH was. They both drew blanks.