Good morning. It's Wednesday. We'll look at streets in New York that get second names. We'll also look at why less than an inch of rain prompted Mayor Eric Adams to move the tent city that was under construction in the Bronx. |
 | | Benjamin Norman for The New York Times |
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The old saying "the show must go on" also applies to street-naming ceremonies in wet weather, it turns out. One went on Tuesday in the rain — the speeches were moved inside — and faster than you could say "break a leg," a block of West 42nd Street became Jim Houghton Way. |
He founded the Signature Theater, housed in a building that fills one side of Jim Houghton Way. When he died of stomach cancer in 2016, our critic Charles Isherwood said it could be argued that Houghton "did more for the American theater" in the 1990s and 2000s than anyone else. |
And so West 42nd Street between Dyer Avenue and 10th Avenue became the latest of roughly 2,000 streets in the last 30 years that have received an additional name — a "co-name," the city calls it — according to Gilbert Tauber, a retired environmental consultant who started a database to track them all. |
The City Council says that 78 co-naming locations were approved from January through July. Another 199 were approved last year. There had been a surge of co-namings after the Sept. 11 attacks to honor people killed at the World Trade Center in the neighborhoods where they had lived, Tauber said. Co-namings slowed with the pandemic, but the pace appeared to be picking up again, he said. |
The process of arranging a co-naming can be cumbersome and usually involves going through the local community board and the City Council. |
The mayor, however, can approve a temporary co-naming with an edict, as Bill de Blasio did in 2017 when East 42nd Street near Second Avenue and the old Daily News Building became Jimmy Breslin Way in honor of the Queens-born newspaper columnist who wrote for The News for many years. |
Some council members reject any and all applications for street renaming, among them Daniel Garodnick, who represented the East Side at the time of the Breslin co-naming. Ruth Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president and City Council member, said then that council members disliked the process because "one family is happy, and 12 families call up and say, 'What about my person?'" |
Tauber said there has to be "some kind of screening." |
"I think we have seen in some places a sort of, if I may use the word, promiscuous use of co-naming," he said, pulling out a 2016 photo he took at the corner of 52nd Street and the Avenue of the Americas, which had three co-names: W.C. Handy's Place, for the blues musician; WCBS-FM Way, for a radio station whose corporate headquarters were once on the block; and Cousin Brucie Way, for Bruce Morrow, a longtime host on WCBS-FM. |
On Jim Houghton Way on Tuesday, Houghton's colleagues and family celebrated the co-naming. "The fact that we got this done is a testament to how passionately I think people wanted to honor Jim," said Edward Norton, the actor who is chairman of the Signature Theater's board. |
"People forget what this block was," Norton said. "If you came up in New York in the '90s and before, this block wasn't these gleaming towers. It was this run of really humble, kind of fantastic little theaters, the Houseman and lots of others." He said the Signature "ended up carrying on the artistic spirit of this block." |
But even with his name on the street sign, Houghton's image is nowhere to be found. |
"We don't yet have his picture in a public place at Signature," said Beth Whitaker, the venue's associate artistic director, "and he always shied away. The point of Signature was lifting up playwrights and other artists. But the fact that his name is right under a 42nd Street sign, on the theater street in the neighborhood he loved, would be thrilling to him." |
Showers continue through the evening, with temperatures near 60 during the day and around the mid-50s at night. |
Suspended today (Yom Kippur). |
The latest New York stories |
 | | Benjamin Norman for The New York Times |
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Moving a tent city before it even opens |
 | | Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press |
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My colleague Andy Newman says the move is the latest twist in the city's attempts to deal with a surge of migrants. Thousands of them were bused to New York by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. |
Mayor Eric Adams had ordered the tents set up as an emergency shelter in a parking lot at Orchard Beach that was known to be flood-prone. When he was questioned last week about whether that was a good place to create a tent city, he said the city had "looked at 50 locations and found the best location." Besides, he said, "people live in flood zones." |
But less than an inch of rain over the weekend flooded the unfinished tent complex, and Adams decided to try another solution to a problem that has long challenged City Hall: how and where to accommodate more than 16,000 migrant asylum seekers who have overwhelmed the city's shelter system. New York, unlike any other city in the country, promises a shelter bed to anyone who seeks one. |
The setup on Randalls Island will hold only 500 people, half the number Orchard Beach could have taken in. Adams said the tent city would open on Randalls Island "in approximately the same time frame as the originally planned location." Administration officials had told the City Council before the flooding that Orchard Beach would be ready this week; the mayor refused to say on Tuesday how much the false start in the Bronx or the overall project would cost. |
The new tent complex will be winterized, set up in the parking lot of Icahn Stadium on the northwestern side of Randalls Island and will not provide long-term housing, the city says. People who are sent there can stay for no more than four days. Shelters in roughly 40 hotels have been opened to house them after that. |
The city has also been considering using a cruise ship to house migrants temporarily. City Hall officials have been in talks with executives at Norwegian Cruise Line; Adams said on Monday that he would announce a deal when it was final. "We are going to continue to look at every opportunity to resolve this humanitarian crisis that human beings have created," he said. |
Once, back in the 1960s, I went into an Italian deli that had a great selection of meats and cheeses on open display. |
Wandering around, I came across three round cheeses hanging in a net bag. After squeezing them and finding them to be extremely hard, I called out to the man behind the counter at the front of the store. |
"Hey, what kind of cheeses are these?" I asked. |
The man said something I didn't quite hear, so I repeated my question, a little louder this time. |
He answered again, but I still couldn't quite make out what he was saying. |
I raised my voice and asked again what kind of cheese I was pinching. |
He looked at me and raised his voice to match mine. |
"It's a bocce ball," he said. "Leave it alone." |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero, Michael Paulson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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