Last summer, Katy Reed-Basham’s goal was to get stuck in traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway. She and her colleague Elizabeth Michell would leave their homes at 7:30 a.m. and drive to the northern Bronx in time to encounter the heaviest traffic during their trip back down the parkway. If they were lucky, they’d move at a crawl or, better yet, come to a complete stop.

Crazy? Not if your goal is to document the sites and structures along the Henry Hudson Parkway.You can’t walk along the route, and, if traffic is fast-moving,you can’t look closely and take notes.Thus, you hope for traffic jams. Ms. Reed-Basham, a doctoral candidate in cultural history at New York’s Bard Graduate Center, worked in a program of the National Park Service’s Historic American Engineering Record. Her and Ms. Michell’s study is a necessary step toward the eventual designation of the parkway as a New York State Scenic Byway.

The state established its Scenic Byways Program in 1992 “to encourage local communities to protect road corridors of outstanding scenic, natural, recreational, cultural, historic or archaeological significance,” according to the state Department of Transportation.In order to achieve such a designation, the local byway group must first make the case for the roadway’s significance, then present a workable plan for the roadway’s maintenance and enhancement. Once designated, the roadway is eligible for special state and federal funds.

The Scenic Byway Initiative for the Hudson Parkway was begun in 2002 by Hilary Hinds Kitasei of the Riverdale Nature Preservancy. Other designated Scenic Byways in the sate range from the Adirondack Trail to the Robert Moses State Causeway in Suffolk County. As yet, no city roadway has been designated. But no one could plausibly argue that the Henry Hudson Parkway does not fulfill all the necessary criteria.

“Couldn’t this be the most beautiful thing in the world?” Robert Moses asked his incredulous friend Frances Perkins as they sat in a boat on the Hudson River, and Moses waved his arm toward the utterly unprepossessing waterfront of the Upper West Side.The year was 1914.

At that time, Riverside Park was only a little more than half its present size, and its name was a misnomer: The park pulled up well short of the river. Between park and river lay the tracks of the New York Central Railroad’s freight division, which with its affiliated facilities made a noisome industrial strip of the West Side waterfront. Moses was also far from being in a position of power. As he described to Perkins just what he thought should be done with the West Side waterfront, it sounded to her like the purest pipe dream. She recounted this story after Moses had made his “West Side Improvement” a reality in the 1930s – pretty much along the lines of what he had described to her years before.

In the roughly 70 years since Moses effected the West Side Improvement, its elements have changed their meaning several times. In the 1930s, the project seemed a resounding success, rationalizing and humanizing the various activities of what was still an enormously busy working waterfront.Yet with the gradual postwar decline of waterfront industries and removal of waterfront commerce to other ports, some elements of the West Side Improvement came to stand for the decay of New York’s infrastructure.

The Miller Elevated Highway, for example, was considered rather grand in the 1930s. Four decades later it was crumbling, and has been dismantled, perhaps the unkindest fate met by any Moses roadway.The New York Central elevated tracks, known as the “High Line,” ceased functioning, and portions of the structure came down, while the rest stood and stands as an industrial ruin.

But from urban success story to symbol of urban decline, the Robert Moses West Side has entered a new phase in its history: cherished historic artifact.

We see this in the much-publicized efforts to preserve the High Line and to convert it to an elevated park under the federal government’s Rails-to-Trails program. Less well known to most New Yorkers is an effort to secure state “Scenic Byway” status for another important element of the West Side Improvement, the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Moses first proposed the parkway in 1927 – when he worked for the state but not yet for the city.In Nassau and Suffolk counties,Moses was making his reputation by building parks and “parkways.” Before Governor Al Smith made Moses chairman of the Long Island State Park Commission, the natural features of Nassau and Suffolk counties tantalized city residents, who increasingly owned automobiles.

City people were less interested in using their cars for commuting than for escaping the city on weekends. Though Nassau and Suffolk were right at hand, they were enormously difficult to access. Almost all of the land was privately owned. Besides, only a handful of country roads allowed access to these lands, so even if they were publicly owned, no one could easily get to them.

Moses thus had two purposes on Long Island. The first was to get as much land into the public domain as possible. Second was to build roadways suited to the weekend drives of city people. Moses wanted to make people’s motoring excursions ones of unalloyed pleasure.Eastern Long Island was to be one great big pleasure paradise for those cooped up on weekdays in the overcrowded, dirty city.

When Moses proposed the Henry Hudson Parkway, all his parkways had been or were being built out from the urban peripheries. The Henry Hudson would be a Moses parkway right in Manhattan. It would be not only a crucial early means of allowing automobiles to function more easily in Manhattan, but would also be a crucial element of the transformation, in the eyes of Moses, of the West Side into “the most beautiful thing in the world.”

The Henry Hudson Parkway opened in 1937. It begins at 72nd Street and extends for about 11 miles through Upper Manhattan and the Bronx to the Westchester County line. Moses used the parkway to extend Riverside Park westward to the water’s edge, beyond the tracks that had seemed an impermeable barrier. He encased the tracks in a gigantic concrete box, atop which he built the park’s well-known long promenade.

To the west, parallel to the promenade, he built the parkway, carried on a great arcaded viaduct affording pedestrian access to the waterfront, where Moses built another promenade. (Everything west of the tracks is built on landfill.) The parkway moves north through Riverside Park, past Riverbank State Park, under the George Washington Bridge, past Fort Tryon Park, and past Inwood Hill Park. At the northern end of Manhattan, the Henry Hudson Bridge carries the parkway into Spuyten Duyvil, and then to Riverdale.

Moses wrote of his West Side Improvement in 1937: “By comparison, the castled Rhine with its Lorelei is a mere trickle between vineclad slopes. I wonder sometimes whether our people, so obsessed with the seamy interior of Manhattan, deserve the Hudson.”

Lest one think that pre-war Moses projects took place without objection, there was great concern, as Robert Caro details in “The Power Broker” (1974), about the damage that Moses wrought to Inwood Hill Park and to the charmingly village-like Spuyten Duyvil. Similarly, parkway construction caused great disruption and dislocation in Riverdale.The parkway traverses Van Cortlandt Park at the northern end of the Bronx before hooking up with the Saw Mill River Parkway (which Moses built) in Westchester County.

The parkway comes from a time when we had not yet dissociated the artistic from the functional, or at least not to the extent we do today.What imperils the parkway is not simply tumbling retaining walls.(Last May,a wall tumbled onto the roadway at 181st Street.) That’s simply a technical issue. The greater issue is one of consciousness.The greater peril consists in such things as the traffic planner who looks at the parkway and thinks: Better straighten out that S-curve before someone gets hurt.

Moses himself, ironically, helped to promote the mentality that sees our metropolitan roadways primarily in functional terms. In the postwar period, Moses took the view that sensitivity in design was a luxury subservient to what he viewed as the overarching need to cram as many high-speed roadways into the metropolitan matrix as possible while it was, in fact, possible to do so.

Scenic Byway status for Hudson Parkway won’t ensure that the billboards will go away, or the S-curves won’t be straightened out. But it may help to straighten out our consciousness.