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