Review: Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names
Reviewed by Reuben Rose-Redwood and CindyAnn Rose-Redwood
Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past. Present, and Through Its Place-Names
By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Penguin Random House, 2021
256 pages
In the opening chapter of Joshua Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York: Discovering the City’s Past, Present, and Future Through Its Place-Names, the author observes that New York is a city “in love with stories about itself.” That the Big Apple has an overinflated sense of its own self-importance will come as no surprise to those familiar with the city’s reputation for narcissistic self-indulgence informed by the belief that New York is the center of the universe. Yet, if one thing is certain, it’s that the streets of New York do indeed contain a multitude of stories clamoring to be told. While each individual who’s ever lived, worked, or passed through New York has their own stories of the city, the names of New York’s streets, parks, plazas, landmarks, and other places serve as a repository of collective memories that together make up the storyscape of the city.
Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York takes readers on a journey through this land of stories by offering an account of the history and geography of place naming in New York City. Written largely with a popular rather than an academic audience in mind, this book is a collection of stories about how places in New York got their names — both past and present — combined with a personal narrative of the author’s excursions throughout the different boroughs of the city, which has the rhetorical feel of a city tour led by a knowledgeable journalist.
Names of New York is not the first book to explore New York City’s place names. Various encyclopedic reference books, generally consisting of alphabetized lists of street and other place names, have been published over the past few decades.[1] Jelly-Schapiro suggests that such encyclopedic approaches to the study of place names, or toponymy, “conjure a hobbyist or word hoarder – a figure seen as a compiler of useful trivia.” In contrast, Names of New York functions more as a companion volume to encyclopedic works by serving as an extended commentary on the back-stories of the city’s place names. The book contains eight chapters, beginning with an overview on “The Power of Names” (Chapter One) followed by chapters on Indigenous (Chapter Two), colonial (Chapter Three), and post-Independence (Chapter Four) place names as well as the names of islands (Chapter Five), neighborhoods (Chapter Six), and streets (Chapter Seven). The book concludes with a chapter on “Making Place: Names of the Future” (Chapter Eight), which explores recent movements to create a more inclusive cultural landscape through place renaming.
Although Jelly-Schapiro replaces the encyclopedic list with narrative prose, the main focus of Names of New York remains the same kind of “useful trivia” about place names that one finds in more conventional books such as Sanna Feirstein’s Naming New York: Manhattan Places & How They Got Their Names. However, Jelly-Schapiro brings toponymy to life by linking the past and present. For instance, when discussing the Indigenous place names of the Lenape people, the author takes readers with him to a Lenape language class near Union Square where “the island’s first tongue is stirring back to life” in the 21st century. Later in the book, we’re transported to a ballroom on W 65th Street where the CEO of Sesame Workshop informs a “crowd of smiling baby boomers” that the honorary name of Sesame Street would soon be bestowed upon W 63rd Street between Broadway and Central Park West, finally providing an answer to the age-old question, “Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” By interweaving historical narratives with present-day stories, Names of New York is an entertaining read and will appeal to New York history buffs, young and old.
But there are some aspects of the book that will, no doubt, be frustrating to scholars of New York and place naming more generally. First, while it is to be expected that non-academic books will often forgo meticulous footnoting, given that Names of New York is packed full of historical and geographical details, it would have greatly enhanced the usefulness of the book if it had at least some sort of minimal referencing of sources to assist those who may be interested in exploring the topic further. By comparison, Deirdre Mask’s The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power is similarly written for a popular audience but still includes a useful section of reference notes, aiding scholarship without cluttering the main body of the text. To be sure, Jelly-Schapiro does direct the reader’s attention to Gilbert Tauber’s website (http://oldstreets.com) as a primary source (“I’d been consulting Tauber’s wonderful website for years,” he observes), but surely this can’t have been the only source of information for the book as a whole.
More substantively, for a book highlighting the “power of names,” it is surprising to find no mention that the field of toponymy has undergone a major critical re-evaluation over the past few decades with recent scholarship examining the politics of place naming practices in diverse geographical settings, including New York. No longer is toponymy an antiquarian hobby of “place-name lovers” alone. In addition to the classic works of George Stewart and Yi-Fu Tuan to which Jelly-Schapiro tips his hat, contemporary geographers and other scholars have written extensively on the power of place naming.[2] An in-depth review of this literature was understandably beyond the scope of Jelly-Schapiro’s Names of New York, but it nevertheless seems a missed opportunity to not have at least made some effort to bring the insights of contemporary approaches in critical toponymy to bear on the naming of places in New York.
For example, Jelly-Schapiro acknowledges that Stewart’s classic account of American place names “contains more than a hint of American jingoism (and an outmoded lack of discomfort with settler colonialism).” Yet his own description of Indigenous dispossession itself paints a rather rosy picture of “bands of Lenape” voluntarily selling their land “at a time and for a price of their liking” to make way for “manifest destiny’s march to the Pacific.” A more critical approach to toponymic scholarship, informed by recent works in Indigenous and decolonial studies, would have certainly provided a more incisive critique of the power relations of settler colonialism generally and settler-colonial place naming in particular.
Such critiques notwithstanding, Names of New York is a welcome contribution to popular works on place naming in New York City and the places of memory that collectively make up the city’s cultural landscape. Jelly-Schapiro suggests that place names are not simply labels used to describe pre-existing places but are rather part of the place-making process and play a significant role in shaping a city’s sense of place. Moreover, as he reminds us, place names not only serve as “[p]ortals through which to access the past,” they are also “a means to reexamine, especially in times of ire and tumult, what’s possible.”
Much of Names of New York focuses on the historical origins and meanings of New York’s place names, but the book’s final chapter on the “names of the future” is the most relevant to the contemporary “times of ire and tumult” which we are currently witnessing. In response to recent calls to rename places that bestow honor on white supremacists, slave owners, and other dishonorable historical figures, one might expect, based on the seemingly progressive tone of the rest of the book, that Jelly-Schapiro would express support for such efforts of using the power of naming to reckon with the historical injustices of the past. Instead, the book concludes by warning readers of the “danger” arising from “condescending to the past” and suggests that this use of place renaming is detrimental to the need to “safe-guard our present.” After all, Jelly-Schapiro explains, what if our descendants in the future were to hold different values from our own and decide to remove the honorific commemorations of the present generation?
This is a common refrain from reactionary opponents of place renaming, and it demands the question of why present and future generations must be straitjacketed by the (ill-advised) commemorative decisions of the past? Cultural landscapes are not fixed and static but rather change over time. As such, if future generations no longer wish to remain complicit in bestowing honor on disreputable historical figures, they should have every right to withdraw those honors. Otherwise, as Marx long ago observed, the “tradition of all dead generations” will weigh heavily like a “nightmare” on the living.[3] As Jelly-Schapiro rightly contends, place naming serves not only as a connection to the past but also as a means of reimagining what is possible in the future. If that is indeed the case, then the purpose of place-name studies should not merely be to interpret the toponymic trivia of the world but to consider how place naming is itself a world-making practice that has the potential to transform the imagined geographies of everyday urban life.
Reuben Rose-Redwood is a Professor of Geography, Chair of the Committee for Urban Studies, and Associate Dean Academic in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Victoria in ləkʷəŋən territory (British Columbia, Canada). He has written extensively on the history of grid-plan cities and the cultural politics of place naming, with a particular focus on New York City. Among other works, he is lead editor of Gridded Worlds: An Urban Anthology (2018) and The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place (2018) as well as Managing Editor of Dialogues in Human Geography.
CindyAnn Rose-Redwood is an Associate Teaching Professor of Geography at the University of Victoria in ləkʷəŋən territory (British Columbia, Canada). Her research and teaching focus on the politics of social and cultural identities in relation to global migration, immigrant communities, and the international student experience in higher education institutions. She is lead editor of International Encounters: Higher Education and the International Student Experience (2019) and Associate Editor of the Journal of International Students as well as the International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.
[1] Moscow, Henry. (1990). The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan’s Street Names and Their Origins. New York: Fordham University Press; Feirstein, Sanna. (2001). Naming New York: Manhattan Places and How They Got Their Names. New York: New York University Press; Rogerson, Don. (2013). Manhattan Street Names Past and Present: A Guide to Their Origins. Red Oak, Iowa: Griffin Rose Press.
[2] For instance, see Berg, Lawrence and Vuolteenaho, Jani (eds.). (2009). Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place Naming. Farnham: Ashgate. Also, see Giraut, Frédéric and Houssay-Holzschuch, Myriam. (2016). “Place Naming as Dispositif: Towards a Theoretical Framework.” Geopolitics 21(1): 1-21; Rose-Redwood, Reuben, Alderman, Derek, and Azaryahu, Maoz. (eds.). (2018). The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place. New York: Routledge.
[3] Marx, Karl. (1937 [1852]). The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, translated by Saul K. Padover, accessible at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (last accessed June 25, 2021).