NYC Streets Named for Other Streets
Different cities have patterns of street naming. Boston is haphazard—there are five Washington Sts., repeats of other names, and few, if any, numbered streets. Philadelphia’s major north-south streets going west from the Delaware River are numbered, with major exceptions like Broad St. It’s a large city by area—named streets are interrupted frequently—and a street in one neighborhood has another piece in a separate neighborhood miles away. Washington features letters, numbers, names, and states’ names about equally.
Numbers dominate two NYC boroughs (Manhattan and Queens), there are large “numbered” areas in large swaths of Brooklyn and the Bronx, and few numbers in Staten Island except 1st through 10th in New Dorp. Signers of the Declaration of Independence can be found on street signs in Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, while the southern side of the borough unimaginatively features letters and numbers. In Eastchester in the Bronx, you’ll find early NYC mayors. In Rosebank, Staten Island, classical composers; in New Springville, 1960s-era astronauts; in New Brighton, US presidents in the 1840s and 1850s.
And, also streets named for other streets. Why not give a street a separate identity instead of sowing confusion by giving it the name of another street?
Shown above is E. Broadway, which runs from Chatham Square, where the Bowery begins, northeast to Grand St. It was originally named for Harman Rutgers, brewer and member of the locally prominent Rutgers family.
For most of its route E. Broadway was paralleled by Division and Hester Sts., which formed the dividing line between the street grids of the Lower East Side and the Williamsburg Bridge area, but both Hester and Division were cut back by the construction of the Seward Park Houses in the 1940s.
In NYC, all Broadways are a homage to the original that begins at Bowling Green and runs up the center and western parts of Manhattan island and, as Route 9, goes almost to the US border with Canada. Brooklyn’s Broadway runs from Williamsburg through Bushwick to East New York, and is under an el most of the way; in the Bronx, Broadway’s a northern extension of Manhattan’s; Queens’ Broadway goes from Ravenswood, Long Island City to the heart of Elmhurst at Queens Blvd. and Grand Ave.; and in Staten Island it’s a two-lane road, moderately trafficked but not a main artery, in West Brighton and Livingston.
W. Broadway in Manhattan is an amalgam of several former streets: College Pl., Chapel St., and Laurens St.. The streets were grouped under the moniker W. Broadway around 1841, with the piece running between Bleecker St. and Washington Square South becoming South 5th Ave. before becoming LaGuardia Pl. in 1967.
There’s a vast difference from the W. Broadway in the early-20th century and the present one: from the 1880s through about 1936, W. Broadway was shrouded by the 6th Ave. El, which ran over it from Murray St. north to W. 3rd, where it jogged west to 6th Ave. Since 1918, the IRT 7th Ave. line has run under W. Broadway from Leonard to Vesey Sts., so for almost 40 years, the avenue had both a subway and an el.
Broadway Alley, between E. 26th and 27th just west of 3rd Ave., by some accounts, was laid out as early as the 1830s as a break between surrounding buildings. By 1909, mapmakers began showing the name “Broadway Alley.” There had been individual dwellings on the east side of the alley. Today, just one remains.
Broadway Alley is approximately five blocks east of the actual Broadway, which is the longest street in Manhattan and the Bronx. There’s speculation that it acquired the name because local property owners wanted to impart a gay (in the “upbeat” sense of the word) theatrical aura to the place. However, in its almost two-century history, it’s been home to prostitution and crime. It was once lined on its east side with stables and tenement houses. A story holds that the Barnum and Bailey Circus had kept their elephants in the alley at one time.
Shore Road Dr. in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn can be considered one of the more picturesque roads in Brooklyn still open to auto traffic, with the closure of the roads in Prospect Park. It runs from 4th Ave. and 66th St., at the west end of Lief Ericson Sq., west to its junction with the Belt Parkway, which since 1940 it has served as an approach and exit road. It doesn’t look like a road associated with pedal to the metal Belt Parkway traffic, though, twisting and turning uninterrupted among grass and trees. At intervals, it’s bridged by ornate arches that carry 3rd Ave. and Ridge Blvd.; a third, connecting Colonial Rd. with the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was lost decades ago.
Shore Road Dr. is a vestige of an early effort to build picturesque carriage roads around Brooklyn. Fort Hamilton was originally going to be one, but evolved into the truck exhaust-dominated roadway of today. Only Ocean and Eastern Parkways are manifestations of this one-time effort. Until the 1920s, Shore Road Dr. was called Bay Ridge Parkway, until the name was flipped in the 1920s to 75th St. (which native Ridgeites still call it). The awkward moniker Shore Road Dr. was applied to the former Bay Ridge Parkway, and it never had a formal street sign until the 1980s. When I was a kid, I noticed Shore Road Dr. kept its collection of cast iron lampposts for a few years after the rest of Bay Ridge had converted to mercury vapor lamps in the 1960s. Shore Rd. itself twists and turns along the Narrows waterfront, which it was once much closer to before the Belt Parkway was built on landfill in the late-1930s.
There’s another street named for Shore Rd.: Shore Road La. is a dead-end cul-de-sac on the actual Shore Rd., hence the moniker, just north of 86th St. and just south of Fort Hamilton High School. The lane was built in 1941, when the high school was built, replacing the old Crescent Athletic Club.
Grace Court Alley proceeds east to a dead end from the east side of Hicks St. south of Remsen. It’s not on the same line as its namesake Grace Court, which is across Hicks and named for the nearby Grace Church, and the two may have developed independently of each other. Like Manhattan’s Washington Mews and MacDougal Alley, it was a lane that originally held stables serving buildings on paralleling streets. Long ago the stables were converted into carriage houses, and today fetch prices unimaginable to the artisans who built them in the 19th century. Most of Grace Court Alley’s north side and all of its south side are given over to these carriage houses.
Flatbush Ave. originally began at Fulton St. at about Nevins and then proceeded southeast to Marine Park as it does today. It’s hard to imagine downtown Brooklyn without a Flatbush Ave. Extension that gets traffic to the Manhattan Bridge, but the Extension was created in 1906 when the bridge was built at the dawn of the auto age.
House numbering for the Flatbush Avenue Extension begins at about Concord St. and runs to Fulton, where numbering for Flatbush Ave. proper begins there at #1. Because #1 is at Fulton, it would’ve been difficult to begin it at Concord and re-number the entire avenue, so the section between Fulton St. and the Manhattan Bridge retains the “Extension.”
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Eastern Parkway originally ended at Ralph Ave., but it was later extended northeast to Bushwick Ave. On some maps, it’s still called the Eastern Parkway Extension, but since it just continued the address numbering of the already established Eastern Parkway, it isn’t called an Extension, and street signs just call it Eastern Parkway.
Brooklyn has a few duplicate streets, such as Atlantic Ave. (Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, etc., and Sea Gate) and West St. (Gravesend, Greenpoint). It also has two W. 9th Sts. One can be found in Gravesend, and runs in one piece from Bay Parkway south to 86th St. and Ave. V.
The other W. 9th St. is on the outskirts of Red Hook at the south end of Carroll Gardens and is a western extension of 9th St., running from Smith St. west to Columbia St. Maps made before about 1900 show it as Church St.
The first 9th St. bridge crossing the Gowanus Canal was completed in 1905; in 1999, the bridge reopened after a complete renovation. In the 1930s, a massive railroad trestle carrying the IND subway was built over it. My educated guess why Church St. became W. 9th is that the city wanted to continue 9th St. further west after the bridge opened in 1905, but didn’t want to renumber all the houses on the street all the way to Prospect Park, which they’d have to do. So, W. 9th St. it was.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)