CRAZED from the unrelenting July heat and humidity, I was scuttling east on the Long Island Expressway south service road recently when I spotted the anomaly seen above. It’s a street sign for the Horace Harding Expressway, which is what I-495, the Long Island Expressway, is officially known as within the friendly confines of New York City. It was installed during the years 2011-2015 (in my estimation) when a font called Clearview supplanted the traditional Highway Gothic on NYC street signs. What’s unusual about it? Well, you don’t usually see the entire street name rendered in a straight line, with the type of road (here, “Expressway”) spelled out in full. To get it to fit on the sign, the letters had to be artificially condensed, which is easily done on a type program such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. This is the only such sign of its type I’ve seen to date.
Contrast it with the usual method seen here. The name of the street is in larger letters, with the designation in smaller letters on the second line. It was also installed after the Department of Transportation returned to the Highway Gothic font. Unfortunately, they have not returned to spelling street names and designations in all caps, as was the practice before 2011 or so.
I confess. As I said on a recent Facebook post, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn is one school I wish I had attended. In 1990-1991, I attended a now-closed trade school, the Center for the Media Arts, where I took a variety of graphics courses but did best with QuarkXPress and the aforementioned Photoshop and Illustrator. I later learned the rudiments of InDesign at Macy’s. But even today, my knowledge only scratches the surface of what these incredibly intricate computer softwares can do, along with the WordPress I write these FNY pages.
Horace Harding was among a number of obscure figures such as Julius Miller, Major William F. Deegan, and Henry Bruckner, after which lengthy highways were named. Harding (1863-1929) was was an American banker, financier and art collector. Why was the road named for him? As you may guess, Robert Moses was involved. Harding supported Moses’ Nassau County parkway plans and was the first to propose a road beginning at Queens Boulevard to run east to the Oakland Country Club, where he was a member and avid golfer. The road opened in 1928 as Nassau Boulevard and was renamed Horace Harding Boulevard a year later. Even after the road was expanded into the LIE in the 1950s, it retained his name on the service roads.
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7/22/24
9 comments
I saw an article a few months ago, which described issues in and English village over more concise signage. The North Yorkshire council decided that apostrophes on street signs confused computer systems and determined to eliminate them. For example, “St. Mary’s Walk” simply became “St. Mary Walk”. Eventually, they desire to eliminate hyphens and ampersands, also.
Here, in Queens, the use of hyphens in the street numbering system has a definite purpose. The digits before the hyphen tell you the cross street of your desired destination, while those after the hyphen identify the specific house number. Many computer systems are eliminating these hyphens, which also totally eliminates the helpful guide to your destination.
When you get to thoroughfares like Northern BL or Francis Lewis BL (just to use two examples) it might be helpful if there were some indication of which “hundred block” starts at that thoroughfare. Many cities with named streets (such as Los Angeles north and west of Downtown) have the “hundred block” right on the sign. At that intersection, Northern is the 43-00 and F. Lewis is the 200-00, if I am not mistaken.
That would be helpful, but those reference numbers would change often. At its origin In Long Island City, Northern Boulevard cuts on a diagonal through the street grid until Woodside, when it runs between 32nd and 34th Avenues. When it hits Flushing it begins to meander again, and is south of 35th Avenue until it dips south at 164th Street and is in a diagonal again for a while. In Bayside it realigns with the street grid and runs south of 43rd Avenue before it gets confused again in Douglaston and Little Neck, exiting the City south of 44th Avenue.
Unlike other systems like Los Angeles the Queens hyphen can’t be removed and the last two assumed to be the house number on the block bc the house numbers sometimes extend to three digits. Such as 115-117 224th Street in Cambria Heights. The dash has totally flummoxed Google.
….and for high school you should have gone to Printing Trades in Manhattan.You would have been
in your element! But no,in eighth grade the nuns made sure we were kept in the dark regarding our
possible options with the public high schools because they wanted us to go to the Catholic ones instead
where we could salute the flag of the Vatican.
You should add Robert Van Wyck to your list of obscure politicians. The vast majority of people are not aware that Van Wyck Boulevard in Queens (later subsumed into the accursed Van Wyck Expressway) was named for
Robert A. Van Wyck, a former NYC Judge and the first Mayor of the consolidated City of New York. He was Mayor when the original IRT line began construction in 1900.
The Miller Highway hasn’t existed after the lower half of it was demolished and renamed the West Side Highway, while the upper part was renamed the Henry Hudson Parkway.
And add to this mix the Joe DiMaggio Highway. In 1999, the New York State Senate and the New Yor State Assembly passed legislation, signed by the Governor, which bestowed that name on the old West Side Highway, running from Batter Park Place to West 72nd Street. Do any signs bearing this name exist?
Back in the 1970s, a friend and I stopped off at the Queensborough Library branch on Horace Harding Boulevard. While my friend searched for an childhood favorite book of his, FREDDY THE PIG, I asked the head librarian if she knew who was Horace Harding. Both my friend and I struck out.