Streetwise Cross-ventilation, espionage, and other routes to urban immortality. Essay by Judith Dunford New York City's famous excess in all things applies also to its street names. I started to notice this last spring when I left the Conservatory Garden in Central Park and saw that I was passing R. Lonnie Williams Place, not just plain old East 104th Street. After that honorary signs popped up at me everywhere I looked—streets named Lee Strasberg, United Jerusalem, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leonard Bernstein, even Nelson and Winnie Mandela Comer, where the sign has outlived the marriage. Smaller and easier to erect than equestrian statues, they were a quick and easy Way to honor heroes and heroic ideas. What they weren't was used or even meant to be used—I can't imagine any New Yorker who would be caught dead giving his address as 783 Big Brothers and Big Sisters Street. Manhattan's most notorious example of an unused name is Avenue of the Americas, which has become a shibboleth for identifying tourists, and which even cabbies don't recognize. But there it is on the signs. Nowhere are there more of these honorary names than on a very short stretch of Grand Street on the Lower East Side where, looking out the window of an M14A bus one day, I counted five in about as many blocks. Tcopied them down as I passed: Samuel A. Spiegel. Rheba Liebowitz. Samuel Dickstein, Abraham E. Kazan, william "Bill" Sicklick (nickname included, a rare distinction). Who were these people and why were they being honored in this way? The next day I went to look them up. Samuel A. Spiegel, it turned out, had been a State Assemblyman, later a judge, who sponsored a bill that rotected tenants on public assistance rom eviction. Rheba Liebowitz, alas, has nearly disappeared from the record except as "community activist." Born in Vilna in 1885, Samuel Dickstein was for many years a UnitedStates Congressman remembered = principally for his work on immigration; in a twist right out of John Le Carré, he was a member of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, and also, according to recently opened KGB files, a Soviet spy. William "Bill" Sicklick maybe the Sicklick who once ran a fabric shop on’Grand Street—I couldn't be sure. Except for the espionage moment, none of this was very exciting until got to Abraham Kazan, in my admiring judgment a certifiably great man, the fathier of cooperative housing in America. In the 1950s, Kazan and his colleagues from the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union decided to parlay the experience they had amassed running their credit union into borrowing enough funds to build housing on a large scale. Their radical idea was that they could sell individual pieces of ownership to union members, who would then become their own'landlords while living in clean, well-lighted apartments. Thus was born the Amalgamated Houses in the Bronx and a new era in housing. {he site was picked to be near the bosky pleasures of Yan Cortiandt Park (and also near the Jerome Avenue subway). Fresh air was a big thing for a population not long out of tenement railroad flats. Each apartment in this workers’ paradise had cross-ventilation. (When T was growing up I though the phrase was Yiddish.) The buildings sat on a grassy campus of walkways, open spaces, and benches—amenitiés commonplace today but radical at the time. Ten years or so later there were between 40,000 and 50,000 union- sponsored apartments in New York, in complexes that had sprung up everywhere—Big Six Towers for printers, Electchester for the electrical trades, Concourse Village for meat cutters, and many others. One of them was the Seward Park Houses along Grand Street, also for garment ‘ workers. Kazan served on its Board, along wi e Alex ROSe, Harry Van Arsdale, Jr., and the legendary David Dubinsky. Since Kazan's time, thoughtful urban planners like Jane Jacobs have changed people's ideas about massive high tise buildings by suggesting that these may not always be the right answer, that they can destroy a neighborhood's integrity, remove the vitality of its street life, and worst of all, merely create a vertical slum that replaces the horizontal one. Some of these criticisms surely apply to Kazan-era housing; no one can look at the rather featureless stretch of Grand Street where Seward Park Houses stand and see it as picturesque, or perceive anything like front-stoop socializing on the street (maybe it exists on the benches). As my bus went by I noticed a woman spread-eagled on Seward Parks lawn in a very, very small garment, probably made these days in Bangladesh, to sun herself. Street life has moved on—or moved in, maybe—to community raoms in these buildings. Yet surely even Jane Jacobs would agree that people who were crammed f into places like the Lower East Side's ! Tenth Ward, bounded by Rivington, Division, Bowery, and Norfolk, might have found such ‘buildings an earthly Eden. The smail Tenth Ward, aroughly six-square-block area on my stréet map, the most congested place on earth in'1900, packed 15,000 families totalling '76,000 people into 1,179 tenements. The streets may séem picturesque now in photographs, and the life remote when you visit the Tenement Museum, but they were neither picturesque nor remote to the people who had to cope with conditions there, They would have moved to Brooklyn or the Bronx as soon as they could, and in turn their children and grandchildren to the co- ops, and glad to be there. =] Oddly enough—ah, History!—the Tenth Ward fess where the current gentrification of the Lower East Side is taking place. The loft-Menschen who now vie for Reighborhood apartments and coolly shell out for a ‘meal at one of its pricey restaurants what not too long ago would have bought the building in which they sit—these people might not choose Seward Park. But unlike their forebears they do have a choice. I went back to see how, specifically, my list of people had béen honored and returned unimpressed. No bronze horses, no abelisks, not even a plague. Samuel Spiegel gets a bleak ittle triangle where Madison Street runs into Grand; Rheba Liebowitz Square is an otherwise ordinary, unadorned slab of municipal asphalt; the fanciest thing about Samuel Dickstein Plaza is the word "plaza." My hero, Abraham Kazan, gets his name on Columbia Street, not nearly as ; impressive as the big red Seward Park buildings directly across the street that to a far greater extent immortalize him. So my tour left me wondering what, exactly, was the point of giving places honorary names, especially places like the ones I had just seen. They weren't really destinations ("Meet me at Liebowitz Square"? I doubt it.) The names weren't on parks, like Bryant, or buildings like the Javits Center, where they would be uttered by everyone who went there. They weren't even the streets’ real names. They would never be used. Of course any street with a proper name honors someone—a president like Jefferson or Madison, a rich family like Rutgers or Delancey, an American hero like Pike (for Zebulon, of the Peak). These names, all in the neighborhood, have acquired an in-place authenticity over time, and have become their streéts.