The pavement was still warm and the paint not yet dry when this 1962 photograph was taken of the NY-198. Named for the creek it would scenically and ecologically diminish, the Scajaquada Expressway was extended that year from Grant Street to the Niagara Thruway as a final link in a transportation dream: “a crosstown expressway all the way from Buffalo Airport to the Niagara River,” per a 1954 Buffalo Courier-Express account. The New York State Department of Public Works had initially favored a North Buffalo route, paralleling Hinman Avenue along the Kenmore border to a point near Ontario and Niagara streets, but the Common Council rejected those plans in 1952. Instead, by 1954 the State adopted the City Planning Commission’s recommendation for a “Scajaquada Creek Parkway” that would have buried much of the creek in underground tunnels—later, the State simply plopping the expressway piers into the creek itself. “It looks as though the State has capitulated at last,” said A. Russell Tryon, the city planning director behind nearly every expressway plan implemented in Buffalo, in 1954. “All you have to do is look at the route of the Kensington Expressway to see how the Scajaquada Creek Parkway fits right with it.” With no one to speak for the creek, which at that point had been surrounded by heavy industry, it was the path of least resistance for a highway juggernaut.

Image courtesy of The Buffalo History Museum. Used by permission.