Photo Gallery: Roadway Fixtures
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The Conduits are well known and oft referred
to traffic landmarks in Southern Queens, serving as the service
roads for the Belt Parkway. They basically carry the ball forward
towards the west from and eastward to Sunrise Highway, together
forming a contiguous monster highway stretching from the deepest
netherworlds of East New York, Brooklyn, all the way out to Montauk,
Long Island. The Conduits suffer, however, from a strange psychosis
that doesn't seem to affect too many other roads; they don't
exactly know what the hell they are. First of all, there's the
North/South thing. Yes, granted, South Conduit is positioned
along the southern embankment of the Belt, while the North, of
course, is on the North, but since when do roads get such designations
based on where they sit? The usual protocol is that the direction
forms the basis of the designation; Instead of North Conduit
and South Conduit, they should really be West Conduit and East
Conduit. If that isn't bad enough, they appear forever confused as to whether they are Avenues or Boulevards. In Brooklyn, they are a Boulevard, with a huge center mall that was once intended to hold the never built Bushwick/Cross Brooklyn Expressways. Conduit Boulevard, therefore, has the ignimony of being a service road to itself. In Queens, west of Cross Bay, where both Conduits know they are a service road to something else, they are supposed to be Avenues. I don't know anyone who has ever referred to them as either Avenue or Boulevard more than two times in a row. Most don't refer to them as anything but simply "Conduit", because in truth, nobody is ever really sure what the hell they are supposed to be. Hell, nobody even knows for sure if they should be a 'they', or an 'it'. Now, none of this would be so terrible if the Conduits themselves at least knew who and what they were, but they seem to be the most confused of all. The corner of the eastbound South Conduit and neutral, non-directional Farmers Boulevard shows South Conduit to be a Boulevard. These signs technically serve as official declarations of indisputable fact by New York's Department of Transit. Trouble, of course, is that they are wrong. They should say Avenue. Then again, maybe all the Avenue signs at other corners are wrong. Maybe for the two block stretch on either side of Farmers, it, or they, is or are, a Boulevard or Boulevards. The Conduits aren't the only roads to change designations upon crossing a border; Grand Avenue in Queens becomes Grand Street in Brooklyn. Merrick Road on Long Island gets promoted to Boulevard status in Queens. Horace Harding still gets referred to as Boulevard by many out of resilient habit, even though it has been officially marked as Expressway ever since the plowing of what we now call the Long Island Expressway through its center lane right-of-way. None, however, have suffered from such a contagious case of confusion as do the Conduits. Signs shot and confusionitis still raging as of 7/2000. |