Co-Named Streets Commemorate Local Heroes Part II

We’ve all seen them: signs tucked under the official names of local streets, honoring a neighborhood notable with a “Way,” “Place,” or “Corner.” Unfortunately, more often than not the people on these “co-named” street signs are unknown to most passers-by. A New York City agency recently released a way for those who are interested to better know these local heroes.

In November, the city’s Department of Records and Information Services launched an interactive map to help people connect with the stories behind nearly 2,500 co-named streets, intersections, parks, and other locations across the five boroughs. Our own communities feature a number of sites co-named for those who lived, worked, or made art in our midst, each with fascinating stories behind them. (This is the second in our series on hyperlocal street honors; read part I, covering Joey Ramone, Nicholas Figueroa and Moises Locon, and Police Officer Brian Murray, here.)

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs was a figure of extraordinary influence on the urban environment in her Greenwich Village community, across the city, and throughout the world. Her most famous work, 1961’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, changed how people viewed the need to maintain and foster active, vibrant, small-scale city life that promotes neighborly interactions and strong communities. These were ideas that ran in the face of the then–in vogue ideas behind so-called urban renewal. The tome, written from her home at 555 Hudson Street, built on the mixed-use streets she saw outside her door to form her theories of “the sidewalk ballet” and “eyes on the street” as essential elements to the healthy functioning of cities and neighborhoods. She saw how the dense, mixed nature of people and activities in the neighborhood kept her local shops well patronized, her streets safe with watchful eyes, her neighborhood vibrant, and her neighbors interconnected.

Jacobs didn’t just write about a stronger interconnected urban existence. She was also a fierce advocate for her community, helping to thwart the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have destroyed lives and now-cherished buildings in and around SoHo, rhe Lower East Side, Little Italy, Chinatown, and the Village, among other invaluable accomplishments to preserve the quality of life and character of the neighborhood. She refused to heed the notion that women or people without formal relevant training should be involved in the decision-making process of their communities’ futures — a mindset commonplace at the time.

Jane Jacobs Way, on Hudson between Perry and West 11th Streets, was co-named in 2006 after an effort led by Village Preservation for the honor. Read more about Jacobs on our website via our blog posts and an oral history with her from 1997.

Sylvia Rivera 

Sylvia Rivera was a trailblazing advocate for the rights of transgender individuals and LGBTQ+ communities. In 1962, Rivera ran away from home after being beaten and attacked for presenting as female, eventually settling in the Greenwich Village’s queer enclave around Christopher Street. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots catalyzed Rivera’s participation in the Gay Liberation Movement. She is famously quoted from that night as saying that “while I did not throw the first Molotov cocktail of that night, I did throw the second.” Rivera became a leading figure of the riots and, for six consecutive days afterward, she resisted arrest and led protests against the police raid.

A vocal opponent of racism and transphobia within the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s and ’80s, she focused on efforts to achieve social justice for transgendered individuals of color, co-founding the S.T.A.R. house with Marsha P. Johnson in 1971 and establishing Transy House in 1997. She spent her life making physical space in our neighborhoods for her brothers and sisters, and she has come to be seen as one who, like so many before her, opened doors, and battled injustice.

Sylvia Rivera Way was designated at the intersection of Hudson and Christopher Streets in 2004. Learn more about her life and legacy here.

Frances Goldin 

Frances Goldin was an activist, civic leader, and advocate for affordable housing in the East Village and Lower East Side. A literary agent who represented progressive authors such as Susan Brownmiller, Martin Duberman, and Juan Gonzalez, Goldin was was very involved with the annual Gay Pride Parade, and a founder of the Metropolitan Council on Housing and the Cooper Square Committee. The Committee was instrumental in blocking Robert Moses’ wholesale slum clearance plan for the Lower East Side and Chinatown in the late 1950s, and instead established a mutual housing association, which helped rehabilitate buildings and add amenities to them. 

In 2012, she helped negotiate the construction of Essex Crossing, a complex on the site that includes 1,100 apartments, more than half of which are reserved for low- and middle-income tenants. In one 14-story building, named the Frances Goldin Senior Apartments, all of the apartments are deemed affordable. 

Frances Goldin Way was named in 2023 at the intersection of East 4th Street and Cooper Square. Read more about her here or listen to her 2014 oral history here.