First Parkway's Last

In 1906, when automobiling was a sport requiring goggles and a linen duster, William Kissam Vanderbilt II and some rich cronies who wanted to motor to their Long Island homes at 40 m.p.h. without scaring horses and infuriating the public, joined in buying a 50-mi. strip of land down Long Island from Flushing to Lake Ronkonkoma. On it they built a narrow, wriggling ribbon of concrete and macadam with bridges over every crossroad. Total cost: $3,500,000. The Long Island Motor Parkway was thus the first modern type highway. In 1908, 1909 & 1910 Mr. Vanderbilt & friends used five miles of the road together with parts of Jericho Turnpike and Plainview Road for the first of the famed Vanderbilt Cup Races, the eleventh of which will take place next week at Roosevelt Raceway./-

After the War, the owners of the Parkway turned it into a toll road. At 50-c- per car or $110 per season, some 290,000 automobiles used the speedy road annually during the next decade. It was the best route to the swanky Hamptons. Lately, however, the development of great trunk parkways along Long Island, parallel to their curvy forebear, has cut its traffic to a bare 23,000 cars in 1936. Last week, bored with paying some $45,000 a year in taxes, Mr. Vanderbilt offered to give the old Parkway, which is now assessed at $1,100,000, to the public. President Robert Moses of the Long Island State Park Commission graciously accepted, said the old road would be modernized and linked into the rest of the parkway system.

/- Next week's race is the second of the second series (TIME, Oct. 19), is sponsored by George Vanderbilt over the opposition of his second cousin, W. K. II, who sponsored the first series to promote good highways, scorns the present races as merely pecuniary.

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