Co-Named Streets Commemorate Local Heroes, Part III

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. But a New York City agency has offered a way for those who are interested to get to know these local heroes a little better.

The New York City Department of Records and Information Services has created an interactive map to help people decipher the signs and 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. (Read the first two parts of the series — covering hyperlocal street honors for Nicholas Figueroa and Moises Locon, Frances Goldin, Jane Jacobs, Joey Ramone, Sylvia Rivera, and Police Officer Brian Murray — here.)

Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer Way

The intersection of Fifth Avenue and Washington Square North honors two Greenwich Village residents who lived together in the community for some four decades, championing and pursuing LGBTQ+ rights and civil liberties within the community and serving people’s special needs. Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer married in Canada in 2007, and tragedy that followed just two years later resulted in a Supreme Court case that led to the legalization of gay marriage in the United States.

Spyer was a well-known clinical psychologist who worked tirelessly for thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom were LGBTQ+, until her death in 2009. Her entire estate was left to Windsor, but she received a large tax bill from the federal government for the inheritance. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defined marriage for federal purposes as the union of one man and one woman, denying same-sex married couples their rights, including federal estate-tax exemption for surviving spouses.

Windsor chose to fight the law, becoming the lead plaintiff in the 2013 Supreme Court case United States v. Windsor. The Court overturned portions of DOMA, determining  the federal interpretation of the law that “marriage” and “spouse” could only apply to opposite-sex unions was unconstitutional, as determinations about who could be married had always been left to the states, with the federal government obligated to honor those determinations, and several states at that point had begun to allow same-sex couples to marry. As a result of Windsor’s victory, federal agencies extended rights, privileges and benefits to same-sex couples who married in states or other countries where their unions were given legal sanction. The decision ultimately helped lead to legalization of gay marriage across the nation two years later in the Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges. The crossing was co-named for these pioneers in 2022.

Read more about Windsor and Speyer, as well as other local LGBTQ+ history, on our Civil Rights and Social Justice Map, and about our work to protect that history in our communities.

Dave Van Ronk Street

Dave Van Ronk, the “Mayor of MacDougal Street,” was a fixture of the Greenwich Village music scene of the 1960s and indeed in the American folk music revival as a whole. Perhaps best known for his association with another folk star of the period, Bob Dylan, he was an outstanding musician in his own right who inspired, aided and promoted the careers of many other singer-songwriters.

Firmly committed to the folk-blues style, Van Ronk performed blues, jazz and folk music starting when he first arrived in the Village in the late 1950s. He both wrote his own songs and interpreted the work of earlier artists and his folk-revival peers. He was an irreverent and incomparable guitarist, but his most important role may have been as the “guru on the mountain,” teaching and advising other musicians who went on to great fame.

Van Ronk Street, on Washington Place between Barrow and Grove Streets, was named in the artist’s honor in 2003, the year after he passed away.

Read more about Van Ronk’s legacy in Greenwich Village and on folk music here.

Ellen Stewart Way

Ellen Stewart was the first African-American fashion designer for Saks Fifth Avenue, but in the East Village she was best known as founder and artistic director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, which has been a fixture of the off-off-Broadway artistic community from its home at 74A East 4th Street since 1969.

La Mama has staged more than 3,000 productions in New York, and won more than 60 Obie Awards. The theater has been home to playwrights such as Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Harvey Fierstein, and Terrence McNally; directors including Tom O’Horgan, Joseph Chaikin, Robert Wilson, and Richard Foreman; and a range of actors from Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Richard Dreyfuss to Bill Irwin and Danny DeVito.

Stewart received well-deserved recognition not only from the city’s artistic community but also from national and global organizations, including the MacArthur Genius Award, the National Endowment for Arts and Culture, and Ukraine’s Les Kurbas Award for Distinguished Services to Art and Culture. She was also inducted into the Broadway Theatre Hall of Fame, the first Off-Off-Broadway producer to receive this honor.

East 4th Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery was named Ellen Stewart Way in 2011, shortly after she passed away.

La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club has twice received a Village Award from Village Preservation: in 2014 for its achievements as a center for theatrical arts, and in 2023 for the renovation of its 150-year-old East 4th Street home. RSVP for this year’s Village Awards ceremony, coming on June 11, here.