The parkway opened in 1939 after parks commissioner Robert Moses cleared a 200-foot-wide (61 m) strip of land north of the boardwalk.

Moses demolished more than 700 buildings in the parkway's path and destroyed what he described as "catch-penny enterprises" along the boardwalk, replacing them with recreational fields.

[3] Often called the "road to nowhere" by Rockaway residents because its termini do not access any well-traveled locations, Shore Front Parkway was intended by Moses as a link in a never-completed grand shorefront drive extending from Brooklyn to the Hamptons.

[4] This project of Moses' was permanently thwarted in the 1960s when the National Park Service gained control of the bulk of Fire Island in Suffolk County, an essential link in the proposed highway, and decreed that it remain a permanently roadless National Seashore.

[6] The southernmost roadway of Shore Front Parkway accommodates a two-way protected bike path.