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New York State Route 394

highway in New York

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 20, 2025
Entity authorityQ2486791
Source-derived summary

New York State Route 394 (NY 394) is a state highway located within Cattaraugus and Chautauqua counties in southwestern New York in the United States. Its western terminus is located on the shore of Lake Erie at an intersection with NY 5 in the Westfield hamlet of Barcelona. The eastern terminus is located at an interchange with the Southern Tier Expressway (I-86/NY 17) at the Coldspring hamlet of Steamburg. From Mayville to Jamestown, NY 394 follows the western edge of Chautauqua Lake. East of Jamestown, the route straddles the Southern Tier Expressway and connects to the highway in four different locations, including at its eastern terminus.

The segments of NY 394 between Westfield and Mayville, as well as east of Jamestown were originally designated as NY 17 in 1924. Six years later, the remainder of current NY 394 gained a pair of designations as part of the 1930 renumbering of state highways in New York; however, by the mid-1940s, the Mayville–Jamestown stretch was solely designated as New York State Route 17J. In November 1973, NY 17 was realigned onto the new Southern Tier Expressway east of Jamestown. The former alignment of NY 17 between Jamestown and Steamburg and all of NY 17J were redesignated as NY 394. NY 394 was extended westward to Barcelona shortly afterward. Today the route is also concurrent with part of New York State Bicycle Route 17.

Editorial summary

“New York State Route 394” enters the record as highway in New York. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what York, State and Route can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1924, 1930, 1973—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around York, State and Route.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“New York State Route 394” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, York, State and Route provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2486791. The first chronological checks are 1924, 1930 and 1973.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from New York State Route 394” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.