What’s in a name? Shakespeare’s denials notwithstanding, the answer is: plenty. A person’s name can convey age, ethnicity and socioeconomic background, and place-names can be just as revealing, telling us what a locale was like before human intercessionor who was in power when a label was first applied. Time, moreover, changes the meanings and associations conjured by names. To a New Yorker of a certain age, the surname of Joshua Jelly-Schapiro suggests the memorable motto of Schapiro’s winery, whose sweet kosher vintages, practically jellied in their thickness, “you can almost cut with a knife.”
Once a Lower East Side landmark, Schapiro’s is long gone, and Mr. Jelly-Schapiro, as it happens, is an author and geographer rather than a winemaker. But “Names of New York” explicates Gotham’s place-names to intoxicating—if occasionally numbing—effect. The result is a vivid toponymic history of an ever-changing metropolis.
Place-names, the author observes, “can recall long-ago events or become, as settings for more recent ones, metonyms for historical change.” Consider Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, once synonymous with the petit bourgeois aspirations of its denizens but now a global emblem of cool. It’s also the name, the author says, of “a notorious street gang in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and of insipid restaurants and boutiques, trading on long-distance imaginings of hipster cachet, from Auckland to Paris. But long before any of that, Breukelen was and remains a town of Gouda-munchers outside Amsterdam.”
The English language was draped over the Dutch city of New Amsterdam long ago, but the earlier mother tongue still pokes through here and there. Kill is Old Dutch for creek, yet it’s hard not to think of something very different when hearing of the former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Or how about Spuyten Duyvil? The name of that charming corner of the Bronx describes where “the Harlem River’s eddies touch the Hudson.” But despite the neighborhood’s soothing water views, the Dutch phrase means “the devil’s whirlpool.”
“Names of New York” conveniently unravels some of the city’s most durable minor mysteries. If you live in or visit Queens, for instance, you’ve probably wondered how it got such strange addresses. The answer is that surveyor Charles Powell, in 1911, devised the notorious two-part number system to indicate precise location (the first number is the cross street) when the borough was consolidating its multiple street-grid systems. The author’s example is 64-43 108th in Forest Hills, “which happens to be the address of the neighborhood’s go-to spot for kosher Chinese, Cho-Sen Garden.”
Names of New York
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Pantheon, 243 pages, $22
Mr. Jelly-Schapiro’s book will appeal to dyed-in-the-wool New Yorkers wherever they live, but even the city that never sleeps may find itself nodding off during the author’s catalog of the many new designations arising from a 1992 law that made it possible to recognize martyrs, heroes and communities by means of supplemental honorary place names. Yes, Queens has 10 streets honoring men named Frank.
Yet this latest layer of the urban palimpsest demonstrates that each new group, when it reaches critical mass, inscribes itself in the city’s book of place-names (with the help of politicians ready to proclaim Little Brazil, Tibet Place and Calle Colombia, among others). Not surprisingly, one New Yorker’s hero can be another’s anathema, as with the 18th- and early 19th-century Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, commemorated on a street in Brooklyn though “known for massacring his ex-colony’s masters.”
“Names of New York” appears at a time when the names of places are increasingly contested. Pondering place-names today, Mr. Jelly-Schapiro says, means “engaging questions around when and why we should change street names that honor, say, historical figures whose business wasn’t selling oranges but people.” He observes that around 70 streets in Brooklyn are named for slave owners.
Noting the many boulevards renamed for Martin Luther King Jr. after his assassination, Mr. Jelly-Schapiro cites Chris Rock on the unfortunate paradox that, if you’re on a street named for America’s greatest exponent of nonviolent change, there is too often “some violence going down.” In fact, there are deeper complexities here that exemplify the pitfalls of demanding moral purity from those for whom we name things.
One of America’s greatest sons, King himself bore the name of Martin Luther, whose failings included virulent anti-Semitism. King has any number of schools named for him yet plagiarized sections of his doctoral dissertation. In 2019 one of his biographers, David Garrow, revealed FBI wiretap records indicating that the married King, like so many prominent men, was a philanderer. Most disturbing of all, the documents appear to show that, in 1964, King stood by and even offered advice as a fellow minister committed rape.
What does all this mean for the many places bearing King’s name and for the many other place-names troubling to a modern consciousness? There are no easy solutions. In considering the gravity of what has been alleged, we might recall King’s own words. “All of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us,” he told his congregation in 1968. Yet he insisted that “God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we make, but by the total bent of our lives.”
Mr. Akst writes the Journal’s weekly news quiz.
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