state office, but continued to make occasional suggestions, such as the location of picnic areas in Columbia County. He also took a widely publicized drive from his home in Hyde Park to the site of the 1939 New York World's Fair in 1938 that brought publicity to the new highway. With Roosevelt preoccupied by his presidential responsibilities, his successor as TSPC chair, Francis Masters Jr., cultivated relationships with area state legislators. Assemblyman D. Mallory Stephens of Putnam County, and Senator Charles Bontecou in Dutchess, became strong supporters of the parkway. They helped secure funding when a veto by governor Herbert Lehman in 1937 threatened to postpone paving for the next segment, to NY 52 in Dutchess County. That interchange marked a change in the parkway's design reflecting an evolution within the engineering community. Previously the parkway had been mostly undivided, with medians only in a few places where necessary. This, a practice of the WSPC, had helped save land acquisition costs. But increasingly medians proved to be safer and more scenic. The segment between routes 52 and 82 at Arthursburg was the first designed as a fully divided parkway, with a continuous median. For the rest of the Taconic's construction, the roadways would come together only when necessary, at bridges and grade intersections. Land acquisition had presented some problems, with some landowners attempting to profiteer and others reneging on earlier donation agreements since the price of land in the parkway's path had gone up. The commissioners used their power of eminent domain sparingly, despite Moses's recommendations to the contrary, preferring to negotiate with local landowners since they, too, were longtime residents of the region. A land donation from James Baird, an engineer whose firm had built the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, led to the creation of James Baird State Park along the parkway in LaGrange. Farmers, some of whom had received grade crossings to ensure that they could cross the parkway to their lands, nevertheless complained that they couldn't take their own families for a ride on the road, since they often owned pickup trucks as their primary vehicles, which were not allowed on the road as commercial vehicles until decades later, as privately licensed or "combination-plated" vehicles. Local governments also saw the parkway as offering little benefit to their transportation needs, since it avoided the settlements in the region and could not handle commercial vehicles. The commission did not