Coming to your New York City borough: A new ‘co-named’ street

One was a centenarian, formerly enslaved. Another was a beloved abuela, killed inside her Brooklyn home. Another was the renowned and controversial leader of the Nation of Islam. Benjamin Prine. Juanita Caballero. Elijah Muhammad. They are just a few of the passed-on New Yorkers whose names were recently authorized by City Council to live on – on co-named street signs in the communities they graced in life.

The City Council in March signed off on 129 new street co-names – typically just a block or two on an existing street, with the larger named street remaining unchanged. As in the past, the new list remembers local heroes, including police officers killed in the line of duty, civic leaders and educators who inspired young people, and local residents who lost their lives to gun violence.

Most of the co-named streets engendered little or no dissent, according to council members. But some of the new designations, during a protracted gestation period of local lobbying, even door-to-door politicking on a particular block, sparked fierce debate over the individual’s worthiness. In other cases, the co-naming reflected changes in a neighborhood’s demographics, and new tensions, or marked the rise of new identities and changed sensibilities.

“Street co-namings are deeply meaningful,” said Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, who as chair of the Council’s Committee On Parks and Recreation oversees the co-naming process, which can stretch on for years. “You’re changing, permanently, the landscape of New York City.”

Some designations attracted more notice than others. The recent co-naming of 127th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem as “The Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad Way” is one of them. The deliberations over the change included charges that Muhammad and others in the Nation of Islam were anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, it was approved, along with the larger slate. In 2007, due to City Council rules, a slate of co-namings that included “Law and Order” star Jerry Orbach and choreographer Alvin Ailey fell through over the inclusion of Sonny Carson, a radical Black activist championed by members of the council but also marred by accusations of anti-Semitism.

“He was not an individual who sought to bring our city together,” then-City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said at the time, before leading an effort to defeat the measure. The New York Times described the vote as “divided along racial lines.”

Some street co-namings elevate a slice of New York history. Benjamin Prine, whose name will go up on Forest Avenue on Staten Island, was the last enslaved person born in the borough and died in 1900. However, his burial site was eventually paved over and turned into a strip mall, prompting a recent outcry from historians and his descendants.

“We want the recognition of what it was,” said David Thomas, the great-great-great grandson of Prine.

All in or nothing

While council members have the primary say in who does or doesn’t get a co-naming, community boards provide an advisory function and also provide the guidelines for area residents. Those guidelines can differ from one community board to the next. In Brooklyn CB 6, the application for a street co-naming specifies that an individual should have been dead for at least three years, but in Manhattan CB 1 the requirement is “deceased for at least 20 years.”

The entire slate is voted by the council twice a year, and a council member has no choice but to approve or reject all suggestions. This provision prompted a statement from Council member David Carr, a Jewish official representing Staten Island, who said Muhammad was un-deserving of a co-named street.

“I think in the opinion of many in this body and many in the public at large, this is not something we should be doing today,” said Carr at a Jan. 31 committee meeting, “but, unfortunately, it is packaged with 128 other names, many of whom I know to be absolutely worthy of this distinction, and I refuse to allow them to be held hostage to this particular individual in this package and so with that said, I vote aye.”

In response, Council member Charles Barron, who is Black, said Carr and others lacked “the moral authority” to criticize Muhammad, who along with his successor Louis Farrakhan “really have saved so many people in our community.”

The latest round of co-namings included honors for several law enforcement and other uniformed officers, including Police Officer Emil A. Borg of Staten Island, who died in 1986; Police Officer Raymond Harris, a Ground Zero first responder from Brooklyn who died of a 9/11-related illness; and Vinny Mandala, an FDNY first responder who died of cancer in 2022.

Along with crime fighters, there are victims of crime, including Juanita Caballero, a 78-year-old resident of Brownsville, Brooklyn, who was murdered at home.

The next round of co-namings is up for a vote in October.

A newbie: Bangladesh Street

Most co-namings aren’t contentious.

The March 26 co-naming of Bangladesh Street was festive and took place at the corner of 73rd Street and 37th Avenue in Jackson Heights, which is part of Krishnan’s City Council district. The city’s Bangladeshi population nearly doubled between 2010 and 2019.

Rep. Grace Meng and others were on hand for the unveiling of the sign, which was timed to take place on Bangladesh Independence Day, when the country liberated itself from the rule of Pakistan in 1971. The crowd of onlookers, said Krishnan, included one “freedom fighter” who took part in the independence movement and who grew emotional at the event.

Dressed in a red kurta, Krishnan, one of the first South Asians to be elected to the city council and the first to represent Jackson Heights, was hoisted aloft by the cheering crowd. He said the event was additionally meaningful “for so many Bangladeshis who have felt so unseen or unheard by government for so many years.”

This included, he said, “taxi workers fighting for debt relief and against predatory lending,” as well as “Bangladeshi small business owners that are desperately seeking resources from the city government, or our Bangladeshi children or parents who want to make sure Bangla language is taught in our schools.”

In that sense, elected officials said co-namings have the power to represent a political coming of age.

“When the South Asian community first came to Jackson Heights, they were not exactly welcomed,” said Krishnan’s council predecessor, Daniel Dromm. “It was a struggle. And now they have achieved something really important to them.”

An ‘empowered’ community

Some co-namings have helped catalyze public acceptance of a community. In the 1990s, there was little public recognition of openly gay people, said Dromm. As a public school teacher and activist, Dromm and others changed that by pushing for a street co-naming for Julio Rivera, a 29-year-old gay Latino bartender who was beaten to death in a Jackson Heights schoolyard in 1990.

The killing was one of a series of “gay bashings” in Queens and prompted LGBTQ activists to expand activism beyond Manhattan. In 2000, the intersection of 78th Street and 37th Avenue became “Julio Rivera Corner.”

“So our push to get that street corner named for Julio was a recognition of the recent empowerment of the LGBT community, particularly in the Jackson Heights and Queens communities,” said Dromm, who also co-founded the Queens Pride Parade, in 1993.

While co-namings can elevate individuals or entire communities, the reverse can occasionally happen, when a sign is taken down.

This happened in Williamsburg in January, when the sign for “Graham Av-Av of Puerto Rico” was taken down and replaced with one that simply read, “Graham Ave.”

Gyvis Santos, a neighborhood resident “born and raised on Graham Avenue,” happened to be walking by and documented the moment.

“I was like, holy smokes, it’s finally happened,” said Santos. “Word around town is they’ve been trying to do this for many, many years.”

His Instagram post of the sign removal went viral, prompting an outburst of anger on social media. For many in the Puerto Rican diaspora, the loss of the sign was a concrete reminder of the declining Puerto Rican population in the neighborhood due to gentrification and past statements by developers arguing that the sign needed to come down.

Within hours of the sign coming down, however, elected officials spun into action.

Jennifer Gutierrez, the local councilmember, said in an interview with Gothamist that she spoke over the phone with city Transportation Commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez, who she said assured her the removal had been done in error.

“That's a hard pill for people to swallow because it didn't feel like a mistake,” said Gutierrez. “This is also a community that has been under attack. For 30 years we've been displaced.”

Hours after it had been taken down, the original sign went back up and the DOT issued a statement on Twitter: “An overhead sign on Graham Ave in Brooklyn was mistakenly removed this morning. The proper Graham Ave-Ave of Puerto Rico sign has been reinstalled.”

But Santos said the episode served as a warning. Now he’s fighting to get another sign up, honoring Puerto Rican activist Pedro Albizu Campos, who received a law degree from Harvard and spent years in prison as he fought for Puerto Rico’s independence.

“That man touches generations and generations and generations,” said Santos.

For Gutierrez, the Queens-born daughter of Colombian immigrants, much of the signage in the neighborhood fails to speak to the history of Latinos in New York or other communities of color.

“The value is preserving a culture which is a New York culture,” she said.