There's a school named for him. A playground. There used to be a hospital with his name, but that became St. John's, and now it's apartments and retail. And of course, there is the road: the Horace Harding Expressway, also known as the Long Island Expressway Service Road. 

So, who the heck was Horace Harding? 

Born in 1863 in Philadelphia, James Horace Harding was a wealthy banker, businessperson and art collector who happened to be pals with another pretty well known art collector, Henry Clay Frick — as in, The Frick Collection. 

Harding was also into road construction, says Jason Antos, executive director of the Queens Historical Society.

"Around the 1920s, he befriended Robert Moses, and decided to become one of his main financiers of the new arterial highway system in Queens,” Antos said. 

Harding also promoted construction of a highway from Queens Boulevard to the Nassau County Line, in order to provide better access to Oakland Country Club, where he was a member. That's now the site of Queensborough Community College. It was called Nassau Boulevard. 

"It wouldn't surprise me. There was a lot of that mentality back in the day,” Antos said. “Especially like, for example, with the Vanderbilt Parkway. It started off as a private roadway." 

After Harding's death in 1929, the name of the road was changed to Horace Harding Boulevard. When the Long Island Expressway was built in the 1950s, it was constructed over the boulevard. 

The name Horace Harding Expressway was given to the service road in Queens, which runs from Rego Park and Elmhurst near Queens Boulevard out to Alley Pond Park. George Washington made his way through there too once. 

Antos says there are a lot of names on roads, so many questions arise. 

"All the time, all the time. I get asked about, who is Horace Harding? Sometimes even who is Steinway, who is Ditmars, et cetera,” he said. “There’s a lot of, these are all street names that we grew up with, and some of them, it's more obvious who they are, but with most of them it's not that obvious, because very little is known about them or why it's named after them to begin with." 

Antos says he encourages folks to learn about the people behind the street sign names, because life is a highway. You don't want to ride it all night long not knowing who the road was named for.