innovative and widely copied American automobile highway built between Greenwich and Stratford, Conn., in the 1930s. The Merritt Parkway, a limited-access highway with two traffic lanes in each direction, was contemporary with the German autobahn system, the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and other limited-access highways but was outstanding in realizing the importance of aesthetics, achieved through a combination of an almost continuously curving roadway and attractive wooded and landscaped right-of-way. The parkway's extension inside New York state is the Hutchinson River Parkway and, in Connecticut, the Wilbur Cross Parkway.