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The Richmond Parkway is a freeway that traverses the South Shore of Staten Island, New York, USA from northwest to southeast. It begins near the intersection of Richmond Avenue and Arthur Kill Road, and ends at the Outerbridge Crossing. It opened in 1972.
The section of the parkway that exists today represents only a fraction of the highway that was originally planned. The parkway was supposed to begin in the island's Sunnyside neighborhood, where it was to branch off from the Staten Island Expressway; however, in the late 1960s intense community opposition erupted — much of it from environmentalists — because the parkway's planned route would have bissected the Staten Island Greenbelt and would have caused much condemnation of private property; indeed, Al Deppe's Restaurant, a highly popular establishment resembling Chuck E. Cheese's which had stood at the corner of Richmond Avenue and Arthur Kill Road since 1921, was forced out of business while the arguments raged. The section of the parkway between the proposed Staten Island Expressway interchange and its present terminus ended up never being built, and the route itself was subsequently demapped.
The spur that was actually built was constructed along Drumgoole Boulevard, and as a result, the parkway's service roads were named Drumgoole Road East and Drumgoole Road West (these roads being named for Father John Drumgoole, the Irish-born founder of the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin, a Roman Catholic orphanage and monastery better known today as Mount Loretto). From time to time, proposals have been made to revive the aborted section of the parkway, in response to steadily increasing traffic congestion on Staten Island, but none of these proposals have yet to receive significant support from the island's elected officials or residents.
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