The quiet, tree-lined path that runs through Cunningham Park in eastern Queens was once a toll road for cars, built in 1908 by William K. Vanderbilt Jr. NYC Parks calls it the nation's first automobile highway, and on Sunday, Nov. 8, the Urban Park Rangers will lead a free walk along it.

From race road to park path

The Long Island Motor Parkway, as the Vanderbilt road was formally known, was a 48-mile private toll road. According to the Parks Department's history of Cunningham Park, it was especially popular with bootleggers during Prohibition, who used its routes to move liquor. Competition from an expanding public highway system put the parkway out of business in 1938, and the stretch inside the park was given to the city as parkland that same year. Today it is a path used by walkers, runners and cyclists, and it links several city parks.

The rangers' walk covers that history: how the road was built, its role during Prohibition, and how transportation, crime and recreation crossed paths along it.

The walk

The program runs from 1 to 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 8. It meets in the parking lot opposite the cricket field at 73rd Avenue and Hollis Hills Terrace. It is free and needs no registration.

How the park came together

Between 1928 and 1944 the city assembled a series of parcels into what was first called Hillside Park, and the motor parkway's right of way was one of them. In 1936 the park was renamed for W. Arthur Cunningham, a Manhattan-born World War I major who was elected City Comptroller in 1933 on Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's Fusion ticket and died the following year at 39. The same year, the Works Progress Administration and the Parks Department finished developing the park's southern section with tennis courts, playgrounds, playing fields, picnic groves and bridle paths.

The park was trimmed over the next two decades for Oceania Street, the Horace Harding Expressway, a junior high school and the Clearview Expressway. In 2019 the picnic area was rebuilt with new grills, accessible tables and plantings, and the walking oval was redone with fitness equipment and mile markers.

Part of a longer chain

Cunningham is one of four parks, along with Flushing Meadows Corona, Kissena and Alley Pond, joined by the Kissena Corridor into a 4.5-mile run of parkland. On Saturday, Nov. 7, the day before this walk, the Urban Park Rangers also lead a free 15-mile Queens County Parks Super Hike that passes through Cunningham on its way from the Unisphere to Fort Totten; that one requires registration.

For the Motor Parkway walk, just show up at 73rd Avenue and Hollis Hills Terrace by 1 p.m. on Nov. 8.

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