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When the country's first bike path opened nearly a century ago on Ocean Parkway, 10,000 bicycle riders turned out for the event. Only about a dozen people were on bicycles last week when the path was reopened to cyclists, but history will repeat itself in 1995 when the path's centenary is celebrated, according to city Transportation Commissioner Ross Sandler.
The centenary is the projected completion date of the Brooklyn-Queens Greenway, a 40-mile trail that will link cultural, recreational and historic sites from the Coney Island beach to Ft. Totten in Queens. The bike path, in the mall on the west side of Ocean Parkway between Beverley Road and Church Avenue, is in the first segment of the Greenway, stretching from the Coney Island boardwalk to the beginning of the Prospect Expressway.
Its reopening re-established a link with Prospect Park that was first envisioned by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Prospect Park and of Ocean and Eastern Parkways. The late city highway czar and master builder Robert Moses broke the link when he built the Prospect Expressway.
"This is a historic occasion," Sandler...