Mayor Michael Bloomberg — who served the city as long as Ed Koch and Fiorello LaGuardia — deserves to have a bridge or an airport named after him. But let’s wait until there’s a new bridge or airport, because sometimes these names don’t catch on.
Is anyone calling the 59th Street Bridge the Ed Koch Bridge? Is anyone not named Kennedy calling the Triborough Bridge the RFK Bridge?
Does any real New Yorker ever refer to Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas? The grandiose title was a gesture by Nelson Rockefeller to pander to our allies in South and Central America, but the new name seemed especially silly after all those flag signs on the streetlamps rusted out and were removed a couple decades ago.
Rocky’s long gone. Let’s just stick with Sixth Avenue.
It works the other way, too. Major Deegan was a garrulous Albany political hack who was given way too much immortality when a heavily used stretch of the Thruway in The Bronx was named after him. Deegan gets name-checked on every traffic report.
William Shea was a well-connected lawyer who somehow got his name attached to the shoddy stadium where the Mets played for decades. Most of the bleacher creatures at Shea Stadium had no idea who Shea was.
Robert Moses, who built many of the city’s highways and bridges — amid accusations that he was destroying neighborhoods — had a state park and beach on Fire Island named after him. He’s as famous as the Jones in Jones Beach.
Sen. Jacob Javits scored when the convention center was given his name. But the Javits Center never had a previous name. There was no confusion.
I feel sorry for Brendan Byrne. The Brendan Byrne Arena in the Meadowlands was named after the New Jersey governor who helped get it built. Byrne is still with us at 89, but with a fortune to be made off sponsors, the arena became the Continental Airlines Arena and then the Izod Center. Most people couldn’t keep up and just called it the Meadowlands Arena. Then the Nets moved to Brooklyn and no one calls it anything anymore.
Shock jock Howard Stern had a highway rest stop in New Jersey named after him. It doesn’t get much lower than that.
As for Johnson Avenue in Brooklyn, it was named for Gen. Jeremiah Johnson, who was mayor of Brooklyn in 1837-38 and was a strong opponent of consolidation with Manhattan.
“Between New York and Brooklyn there is nothing in common,” he argued, “unless it be the waters that flowed between them. And even those waters, however frequently passed, must forever continue to form an insurmountable obstacle to their union.”
The general didn’t anticipate the Brooklyn Bridge, which I hope doesn’t get renamed the Bloomberg Bridge. Bloomberg deserves a monument that doesn’t already have a name.