Definition
A parkway is a mid-twentieth-century American road type characterized by wide right-of-way, landscaped median and verges, prohibition of commercial traffic (trucks, buses), and design intent oriented to motorist recreation rather than freight or transit. The form emerged in the 1920s and was largely defined by Robert Moses's Long Island parkway system — the Northern State Parkway, Southern State Parkway, Wantagh Parkway, Meadowbrook Parkway, Bronx River Parkway, and others.
Why the parkway form matters
The Moses parkway system
Moses built 416 miles of parkway across Long Island and the New York metropolitan region between 1924 and 1968. The earliest — Northern State, Southern State — were the most beautiful. They ran through landscaped corridors with stone bridges every mile and limited intersections. The Wantagh and Meadowbrook Parkways connected New York City to Jones Beach. The Bronx River Parkway integrated road, river, and park along a 13-mile linear corridor.
The system was, and remains, the most architecturally ambitious road network ever built in the United States. Architectural critics have written about specific parkway bridges as significant public structures in their own right.
The exclusion encoded
The parkway form's most discussed feature in modern criticism is the deliberate exclusion of commercial traffic and buses. Moses's bridges were built low enough — typically 9 feet of clearance, sometimes as low as 7 feet — to prevent buses from passing under them. Trucks were prohibited by ordinance.
In The Power Broker, Caro documents that the low-bridge choice was deliberate. Moses had been told by aides that the design would prevent the urban poor (who traveled by bus) from reaching Long Island beaches. The discussion is preserved in Moses's office records. The clearance was not an engineering necessity; it was a choice with predictable consequences.
The exclusion has been only partially addressed. Modern bus service to Jones Beach exists but is limited. The Long Island Rail Road still does not serve the parkways' destinations. The parkways' design has fixed the access pattern in ways that subsequent policy changes cannot fully undo.
The form's afterlife
The parkway form survived World War II in modified form — the Garden State Parkway, the Merritt Parkway, the Blue Ridge Parkway — but was superseded as the dominant American road type by the Interstate Highway System (1956 onward). Interstates were broader, faster, allowed trucks, and prioritized commerce over landscape. The shift represented a different set of values about what roads were for.
Contemporary landscape-architecture and complete-streets practice often invokes parkway design as exemplary of how roads can integrate with public space. The visual quality is real and worth recovering. The exclusion encoded in the original form is also real, and any contemporary revival must address it explicitly.