Bohemia and the Long Wait for Sunrise Highway

Local History

Bohemia and the Long Wait for Sunrise Highway

Photographs from 1986

The Photograph

The Road Before the Expressway

This is Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, before it became an expressway. In 1986 it was still, through here, a wide surface road: several lanes in each direction, a painted center, curbed grass islands, and lights that stopped everything on red. The photographer is sitting in traffic, camera raised through the windshield, on what must have seemed a completely unremarkable afternoon.

Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, Bohemia, 1986, seen through a windshield with traffic signals strung overhead — Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, Bohemia, 1986.

A tractor-trailer dump truck holds the center lane, throwing a hard black column of exhaust into an otherwise flawless sky — the sort of blue-and-cumulus afternoon that makes the diesel plume the only thing wrong with the picture. Whether that truck was hauling for the road work or simply passing through, no one can now say, but it stands in the photograph as a kind of omen.

A burgundy full-size sedan waits at left, chrome bumper and squared-off roofline, unmistakably the tail end of the Detroit era. A smaller maroon hatchback sits at right with a New York plate. Ahead, a scatter of pale sedans and a box truck work through the light. Along the right shoulder run utility poles, a tangle of overhead wire, cobra-head streetlights, and — rising above the treeline in the golden arches that need no caption — a McDonald’s sign. Parking lots and low commercial buildings spread off both sides. The pavement is patched and oil-stained down the lane centers, worn in the way of a road carrying far more traffic than it was ever designed for.

Origins

A Plan Older Than Most of the Drivers in It

The idea of converting Sunrise Highway into a modern limited-access expressway was not new in 1986. It was not even middle-aged. Suffolk County’s own corridor study traces the concept to 1936, with formal recommendations in the late 1940s and the first limited-access construction beginning in 1958. The original surface road had reached Great River by 1940 and East Patchogue by 1953. The plan was to widen it to six lanes, add service roads, and be rid of the traffic lights.

Then the state built it the way large public works are actually built: one segment at a time, as money appeared, across four decades. The conversion crept eastward. West Babylon to Bay Shore was finished in 1972. In 1983, the limited-access section reached Connetquot Avenue in Great River — and stopped. That is precisely where matters stood when this shutter fell.

The Bottleneck

Bohemia Was at the Head of the Line

East of Connetquot Avenue the highway dropped from a modern expressway down to two lanes at a traffic light: the Oakdale Merge. Bohemia sat directly behind that bottleneck, holding the short end of an unfinished road while the finished road ended a few minutes to the west.

The stretch past Pond Road, Oakdale-Bohemia Road, and Locust Avenue out to Lakeland Avenue was the final piece of the entire undertaking. It did not open until May 1998 — twelve years after this photograph was taken, and sixty-two years after the plan was first drawn.

Anyone who drove Sunrise through the late 1980s and 1990s remembers this without needing a document to confirm it. The work was slow in a way that stopped being an inconvenience and became a condition of living here: something you routed around, budgeted time for, and eventually stopped expecting to end.

The Same Afternoon

Five More Frames Down the Corridor

The Sycamore Avenue frame was not the only one taken that day. Five more survive from the same drive, working along the corridor through the stretch that would wait another twelve years for its turn. Together they record something a single photograph cannot: not a corner, but a road — the whole unfinished length of it, intersection by intersection.

Taken in sequence, these frames make the case better than any description of it. Pond Road and Locust Avenue are the two intersections named in the county’s own account of the final segment — the last lights on the last unfinished piece of a road first drawn in 1936. In 1986 they were still ordinary crossings, with signals overhead and driveways opening straight onto the through lanes. Twelve years later there were no lights on Sunrise Highway anywhere in Bohemia.

The Oakdale Merge

Why It Took So Long

Piecemeal funding explains part of it. The state authorized segments as budgets allowed, and a project spanning half a century outlives the urgency that began it.

But the Oakdale Merge had a problem money could not solve. The land on either side is parkland — environmentally sensitive and legally difficult. The State Department of Transportation wanted a full interchange there, with complete service roads and a westbound flyover. Environmental objections over damage to the adjacent parkland stalled it.

What got built instead was a compromise: Montauk Highway relocated onto a tight parallel road with limited connections, and all connections to and from Sunrise Highway westbound simply cut off. Not a solution but a concession — and one still in place today. In 2020 the state completed a $7.2 million short-term safety project at the merge, and the 2022 state budget set aside $30 million to study a genuine redesign. Ninety years after the first plan, it remains unresolved.

Then and Now

The Same Arches, a Different Road

The golden arches are still standing at Sycamore Avenue. So is the row of storefronts behind them, joined now by a convenience store and a flagpole. Nearly everything else has changed — and the largest change is the one easiest to overlook.

Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, Bohemia, in 1986, a surface road with overhead traffic signals — **1986.** Traffic signals over the through lanes at Sycamore Avenue.

Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, Bohemia, in 2020, seen from the service road with the expressway beyond the fence at left — **2020.** Sunrise Highway at Sycamore Avenue, from the service road. Google Maps

The signals are gone, and so is the through traffic. The 2020 view is not taken on Sunrise Highway at all, but on the service road that now carries local traffic past these businesses. Sunrise itself runs beyond the fence at left, behind a guardrail and a strip of grass, and nothing on it stops. That separation is what the state spent sixty-two years building.

It is worth sitting with the trade. The 1986 photographs show a road where the village and the highway shared the same pavement — where you turned into the parking lot straight off the through lanes, and where everyone travelling the South Shore had to wait their turn at Bohemia’s lights. The modern arrangement moves a great deal more traffic and keeps the two firmly apart. Whether that counts as a gain depends a good deal on whether you were driving through the village or living in it.

Reflection

What the Photographs Are For

Roads are the hardest local history to hold onto. A demolished house leaves a gap somebody remembers. A rebuilt highway erases its own predecessor so thoroughly that within a few years no one can quite picture what was there — which buildings came down, where the driveway used to enter, how close the pavement once ran to somebody’s front step.

That is what these 1986 photographs preserve. The road as it had been for decades, on an ordinary afternoon, with the lights still hanging over it and a dump truck smoking in the middle lane — a few years before the longest-running construction project in the town’s memory finally reached Bohemia.

Help Us Fill In the Blanks

A good deal about these photographs is still unrecorded. We do not know who stood behind the camera, what the businesses under that yellow sign were called, or precisely which piece of work broke ground here in 1986.

If you remember these corners, worked in one of these storefronts, or hold photographs from the construction years, please contact the Society. Corrections are welcome and encouraged — the people who lived it know it better than any document does.

Sources: Suffolk County Department of Planning, Sunrise Highway Corridor Study: Islip Town; New York State Department of Transportation project records; contemporary reporting on the Oakdale Merge.