In 1921, a highly popular restaurant and amusement place resembling today's Chuck E. Cheese's opened at the northwest corner of Arthur Kill Road and Richmond Avenue. Known as Al Deppe's, it was forced out of business in the late 1960s when its property was condemned to make way for the proposed Richmond Parkway. However, due to intense opposition — much of it from environmental activists — the parkway section that would have passed over Deppe's location was never built. Only the section south and west of this point was constructed. It opened in the autumn of 1972, overlaying a pre-existing thoroughfare named Drumgoole Boulevard, in honor of the Roman Catholic priest John C. Drumgoole who founded an orphanage in Pleasant Plains.
