Coast to Coast Lincoln Highway beginning in Times Square

Lincoln Highway is the country’s first coast to coast highway that surprisingly enough began at the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway in Times Square! I would never have discovered this fact if it wasn’t for spotting the Lincoln Highway marker that sent me down a rabbithole of researching what it was for.

Wikipedia describes Lincoln Highway as a 3,389 mile highway that was built in 1913 from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The highway has subsequently been modified and replaced by an interstate highway system. It was in 2009 that this marker was put up to mark what used to be one end of the highway at Times Square. It is right outside the H&M store if you’re interested in visiting it. There’s an easy read about the history of Lincoln Highway at Ephemeral New York.

Speaking of Lincoln, although this is no way related except for the name, there is another historical marker that caught my eye at the corner of 30th Street and 9th Avenue to mark the site of a Hudson River Railroad station in New York where Abraham Lincoln visited as the first passenger on the way to his inauguration as the President of the United States in 1861, and from where his funeral train left for Springfield Illinois on April 25, 1865.

#gottalovenewyork