Highways, Turnpikes, Roads

Until the Revolution, settlement was largely restricted to the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, and the rivers remained the chief arteries of travel and trade. Merchantmen loaded with goods from London and Paris sailed up the Hudson to Albany, sold their wares, and took on cargoes of pelts, ginseng, flax, and flour.

In this same period, a crude, narrow road was cleared along the bank of the Hudson and another was built across the 17-mile sand plain between Albany and Schenectady, which was later extended to Fonda, Little Falls, and beyond. Other roads were few and of small account except locally. The occasional overland traveler followed a rough and tedious way, waiting for rains to cease before fording rivers and following blazed notches on trees to find shelter in the scattered homes of settlers.

Soon after the Revolution, roads were somewhat improved and extended, mainly with the proceeds of a series of lotteries in 1797. Finding its financial resources inadequate to meet the growing needs, the State chartered turnpike companies to build roads with private capital and to collect tolls to obtain a return on their investment. The Albany-Schenectady Turnpike was completed in 1805 at a cost of $10,000 a mile. Other roads were built from Schenectady to Utica, from Utica to Canandaigua, and from Canandaigua to Lake Erie. Shortly after the War of 1812 this Mohawk route was completed across the State. Its outstanding competitor was the Great Western Turnpike, running west from Albany over the ridges south of the Mohawk Valley through Cherry Valley and Cazenovia. (Today State 5 and US 20, the two most heavily traveled east-west highways in the State, follow in the main the routes of
those early roads.) Turnpikes leading west from Newburgh and Catskill later became short cuts to western New York. These were the most important pikes in a highway system that by 1821 included about 4,000 miles of improved roads.

The turnpikes presented a scene of varied activity: wagoners driving six and eight-horse teams that hauled heavily laden wagons with broad-rimmed wheels; drovers herding cattle, sheep, or pigs to the eastern markets; tin peddlers in their slender wagons filled with notions; stagecoaches providing rapid transportation for travelers and mail; and emigrants moving west, their household goods packed in their covered wagons. Stage lines connected New York and Albany, and with Albany and Troy as a hub, extended north, west, and east, joining far-flung communities. Travelers filled innumerable taverns from garret to bar; in 1815 there was on the average a tavern for every mile on the road between Albany and Cherry Valley. Since wagoners and drovers did not mix well, many taverns specialized in their clientele.

The turnpike era lasted about 30 years. The roads were never prosperous, paying small dividends at best, even in the days of heaviest travel, principally because of large maintenance costs. The competition of canals and railroads hastened the end of the private turnpike, and the roads were eventually turned over to the State.

Streetcars

Another phase of railway transportation is represented by the streetcar, at first drawn by horses, later driven by electricity carried in wires strung overhead or laid in a channel between the rails. After the turn of the century this new public utility, widely applied, enabled the cities of the State to spread out in residential and industrial suburbs. A natural extension of the urban streetcar was the interurban trolley connecting upstate cities, in some cases paralleling the railroads, in other cases providing more direct connections than the railroads afforded. Some operators built picnic grounds and amusement parks at countryside terminals and encouraged week-end outings. Equally popular was the "Twilight Trolley Tour," for which cars decorated with colored lights were provided to rattle lovesick "spooners" over 25-mile networks of trolley lines. But the introduction of the bus marked the beginning of the end for the trolley. The interurban lines have almost all been superseded, and within cities streetcar lines are being replaced by bus lines. Some of the old trolley cars have been saved from destruction by conversion into lunch wagons, and thus transformed stand stationary and disconsolate beside the roads they once traversed.

The Bicycle Craze

A bicycle craze that set in early in the trolley period led to the formation of cycling clubs, which built and maintained hundreds of miles of cinder paths out of the annual $1 fees paid by members. Their hard smoothness conducive to high speed, these paths produced the "scorcher," forerunner of the present-day automobile driver who has nowhere in particular to go but is in a terrible hurry to get there. Many of the old bicycle paths were widened to accommodate the first "gas buggies," "steamers," and "electrics."

The Automobile

In recent years, the large-scale use of the automobile, in 1939, 2,749,135 motor vehicles were registered in the State, brought to the fore the problems of a new age in transportation. The turnpike era was in a sense revived, in an extremely elaborated and accelerated, one is tempted to say a "jazzed-up" form. The highway became a motorway, subject to traffic that was dense and continuous, traveled by vehicles that were ponderous, vehicles that were swift, and vehicles that combined something of both qualities. The science of highway engineering had to be revised and relearned, and the licensing and regulation of motor vehicles and, in large part, road construction and maintenance became functions of the State. 

Expansion of the highway system involved the construction of a number of noteworthy bridges, including the George Washington Memorial, Bear Mountain, and Rip Van Winkle Bridges over the Hudson, the Thousand Islands Bridge over the St. Lawrence, the Champlain Bridge at Crown Point, and the Peace Bridge at Buffalo, Westchester County has developed a system of three-and four-lane boulevards through landscaped parkways leading into New York City, and the State has built extensions of these north toward Albany and east toward New England. In the field of highway illumination the General Electric Company has introduced sodium vapor lights, which are now used along stretches of road in various parts of the State.