May 29 2013 01:51 PM
Re: Things that have changed (but not really) thread ...
About New York; No Way To Name An Avenue
By DAN BARRY
Published: September 21, 2005
| AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS. This drives Gary Madovoy mad, oh, boy. Avenue of the Americas. An abomination in nomenclature. Several times Mr. Madovoy has been on the subway, the D, the B, rocking, rocking, the bilious stew over that name roiling within, when he has suddenly called out to his fellow passengers. Yes, he's the kind of person who calls out to fellow passengers. Anyway, he has called out, ''How many people here call the street we're traveling under the 'Avenue of the Americas'?'' Nobody raises a hand. This could mean that nobody in the subway calls the street above the ''Avenue of the Americas.'' Or it could mean that nobody wants to violate subway etiquette, in which unsolicited words are interpreted as a threat, a come-on, or a plea to return to Jesus. The accepted response to a subway ''good morning,'' by the way, is a dead-eyed stare. Mr. Madovoy finds encouragement in this lack of reaction, and so continues his rigorous testing with another question: ''How many people call it Sixth Avenue?'' Several people usually raise their hands -- perhaps one for every million of the eight million in this city. These results do not surprise him. Mr. Madovoy may live in Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, but his ''one-man business'' of selling electronics often takes him to Manhattan, where he must contend with his Avenue of the Americas issues. One day he tackled it head-on by conducting research at the New York Public Library -- one street mercifully east of That Avenue. He learned that 60 years ago this week, two years before his birth, the City Council voted to rename Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas. He learned that Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia argued that the change enjoyed the support of many ''reputable and well-established organizations,'' and had ''caught hold not only in this city but all over the Western Hemisphere.'' Why the Avenue of the Americas? Beyond the lofty goal of promoting relations with Central and South America, it seems, the answer is simply vanity. Powerful businessmen had lobbied for years to spruce up the tired thoroughfare, in part by having the Sixth Avenue El demolished. According to the Web site for the Avenue of the Americas Association, nee the Sixth Avenue Association, the name change was intended to ''better reflect the grandeur of the reconstructed Avenue.'' Oh, the granjer. CITY elders were mistaken if they thought that ''Avenue of the Americas'' would roll freely from the corrugated New York tongue. One reader wrote to The New York Times in September 1945 to voice a common sentiment: ''To me it has been Sixth Avenue since I was a lad -- it will be Sixth Avenue as long as I live. No power on earth can make me say to a cabman, 'Thirty-fourth Street and the Avenue of the Americas, please.''' Exactly, thought Mr. Madovoy. He had driven a cab for several years, and never once did someone direct him to someplace called Avenue of the Americas. Nor had his father and grandfather ever uttered the words ''Avenue of the Americas.'' That they had little cause to do so in Brooklyn does not weaken the point. It's the principle! About the only ones who refer to Sixth Avenue as the Avenue of the Americas are the aforementioned Avenue of the Americas Association and the aforementioned Times. On Oct. 13, 1945, The Times reported that a speeding Pontiac sedan struck and killed an upstate New York woman as she was ''crossing the Avenue of the Americas at Carmine Street.'' It has been so ever since. Allan M. Siegal, an assistant managing editor at The Times and guardian of its style, argued that, for better or worse, Avenue of the Americas is the street's official name. In an e-mail message he wrote, ''I guess my answer would be that the city doesn't edit our paper, and we don't rename their streets.'' This does not mollify Mr. Madovoy. He left four long messages on the voice mail of this columnist, three for another Times columnist, and other messages for other Times reporters. One began with no introduction, no salutation, just this: ''Yeah, on Sept. 21, 1945, the City Council renamed Sixth Avenue the Avenue of the Americas, a name that never took. Now The Times always calls it Avenue of the Americas even when it sounds ridiculous. '' And the more he talked, the more it seemed that he was the only person in this city who even utters that avenue's awkward name. |
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h ... A9639C8B63
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Few Emblems of Americas Remain on Their Avenue
By DAVID GONZALEZ
| The Americas have nearly vanished from Avenue of the Americas. Lampposts up and down the street were once festooned with round signs showing the national seals of all the nations in the Western Hemisphere. But almost all the signs, also called medallions, are gone now, and the few that remain are faded and streaked with rust stains. Were the signs banished in a fit of that native impulse to reduce the Americas to America, as in the United States of? Maybe they fell victim to a hometown craze that prefers banners promoting nightclubs, fashion and the All-Star Game. Or perhaps somebody decided that there is no need for national symbols when there are plenty of people from the Americas living and working in New York. Actually, the signs were taken down in the early 1990s when many of the lampposts along the avenue were replaced. A spokesman for the city’s Department of Transportation said several years later that the agency was reviewing how to restore and replace the signs. The wait continues. In the intervening 16 years, civil wars have ended in Central America, Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile was indicted on human rights charges, then died, and Cuba has a different leader (still named Castro). A current spokesman for the Transportation Department, Craig Chin, said the city had no plans to replace the signs. “In the interest of safety, we have removed some medallions, but the spirit of the avenue will live on with the Avenue of the Americas street signs attached to lampposts alongside the Sixth Avenue signs,” he said. The surviving medallions remain on lampposts only from Canal Street to Washington Place and from West 56th Street to Central Park South. An informal survey found that the seals of some countries, like the Dominican Republic, had vanished altogether, even if that nation’s countrymen and -women are here in great numbers. Honduras and Costa Rica have two surviving signs each. Cuba has three, including one in Greenwich Village whose sorry state seems an echo of that country: rusting, with a surveillance camera nearby. Back in the 1940s, the suggestion to rename Sixth Avenue, as most New Yorkers still call it, was a big deal. Civic and business boosters backed the change as part of a plan to promote trade with the rest of the hemisphere. The idea was to line stretches of Sixth from Canal to 57th Street with various markets of different nations “in buildings physically and psychologically designed for this purpose,” according to an article published in The New York Times on June 12, 1941. The actual renaming ceremony took place in October 1945, attracting thousands of onlookers and the president of Chile. An editorial in The Times praised the change as “helping solidify good relations” among all the nations of the hemisphere. “The new name, still a little awkward on the lips of old residents, will be a welcome one to the many Pan-American visitors who now flock to New York,” the editorial concluded. “The Avenue of the Americas symbolizes a bond of social union which should long outlast such strains as those imposed by the current upheavals in Argentina and Venezuela.” The signs are mostly gone, but some things are constant. Venezuela is still in upheaval. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/nyreg ... venue.html
