The Women In Male Dominated Streets
Data from the NYC Department of Records shows the gender disparity in our urban landscape
Data from the NYC Department of Records shows the gender disparity in our urban landscape
Last week, a stretch of road in Plainview, Long Island was renamed after Omar Neutra, who grew up in Plainview before joining the Israeli Defence Forces. He was killed on October 7th, 2023. This comes at a time when New York, especially NYC, is at the epicenter of widespread crackdown against Pro-Palestinian student protestors, especially non-citizens.
When is comes to naming urban markers after people, who decides whether someone is honored or not? What constituents community engagement and who is a local "hero" and who is not?
In New York City, honorarily named streets, also called secondary or co-named streets can be found at hundreds of locations across all five boroughs. Earlier this year, the NYC Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS) made the data used to create a map of the honorary street names in NYC publicly available. Analysis of this dataset, containing such honorary designations enacted over two decades, revealed that women were grossly underrepresented in our urban landscape, compared to men.
According to Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, a visiting scholar from Spain at Harvard University, and an international expert on gender in urban landscape and architecture, the naming of streets is far from a neutral civic tradition.
“Naming a street is recognition in the same way that monuments in public spaces serve as recognition. It implies that at a certain moment in time, the people who have the power to make those decisions, have a certain view of what deserves to be recognised through a mechanism as important as street naming,” she said, adding that it’s often used in today’s times as a political tool.
In NYC, although it is not required to alter the city map with the honorary names, the naming itself is an official process, requiring a bill that must be passed by the City Council and signed by the Mayor into a local law.
From the DORIS dataset of over 800 honorific street names, I manually categorized them as streets honoring men, women or groups of individuals. The latter includes streets named to honor institutions such as Ballet Hispánico as well as communities such as the Sikhs or Puerto Ricans. A very small segment of the street names honored a man and woman together and some were also renamed for beautification reasons – for example 141st Street in Queens to “Boulevard” – which is categorized as miscellaneous.
While the population of men and women in NYC is fairly equal, only 22% of honorary street names commemorated women, whereas the ones commemorating men were nearly thrice that.
Looking at the number of streets commemorating men or women annually, it is clear that the gender gap is not just an overall statistic but is apparent in every individual year too. Since 2001, there hasn’t been a single year where the number of streets commemorating women has been more than or equal to the number of men being honored.
In only four of those years have women been commemorated even half the times as men have, with 2018 having the smallest gender gap, with 10 streets honoring women and 15 honoring men.
Visualizing the gender distribution across New York City's honorific street naming landscape
3 out of every 5 honorarily named streets in New York City commemorate men. This pattern is fairly consistent over all five boroughs, with Staten Island and Brooklyn leading the charge with the highest proportion of male-honoring street names. Staten Island has the least number of honorary street names (only 40) while Brooklyn has the most (258). Therefore the higher density of male honorific street names is more significant there.
The street names honor men of all kinds. Local heroes, activists, first responders and police officers killed on the job as well as artists who contributed gainfully to the community. A recent edition to the list was the renaming of a Pelham Bay street in Bronx to honor deceased Carmine Zeppieri, owner of the beloved Zeppieri and Sons Italian Bakery.
Only 1 in 5 streets with honorary names commemorate women in New York City. Amongst the five boroughs, Manhattan has the largest percentage of streets celebrating women whereas Staten Island and Queens have the lowest.
While this is a sobering statistic, Sánchez de Madariaga holds out a ray of hope.
“It is important to bridge this gap. But at the same time, from an international point of view, I'm pretty sure that this number it's higher than in most countries around the world - and other cities around the US too,” she said. According to her, there has been a great push for more female representation in city property over the last 25 years and a 1 in 5 ratio of women being represented in street names might signal a metaphorical changing of the guard in who we choose to represent.
First African-American fashion designer for Saks Fifth Avenue
The colorful life of Ellen Stewart, so driven by grit and determination, can be reductively be seen in two parts - her fashion design career and her artistic director career.
Born in Chicago, she moved to New York City in the late 1940s, looking to be a designer. By her own vivacious account, after being rejected for a job downtown, she walked into the huge Saks Fifth Avenue store. Serendipitously, she ran into Edith Lance, Saks’ custom corsetier, who needed help trimming threads of brassiers and since Stewart could do that, Lance immediately put her to work.
This was an era when African-Americans at Saks we required to wear blue smocks at work. Stewart often wore her own designs to work and soon they started to attract a lot of buyer attention when she took her smock off during lunchtime. Noticing this, Lance insisted that Stewart deserved a job as a designer, but Sophie Gimbel, the store owner, derogatorily refused to have a “colored” woman design for her department. In response, Lance made Stewart the designer of her department instead, despite push back from management and buyers alike.
Eventually, Stewart quit Saks (some accounts attribute this to the push back she received) and decided to start a theatre company on the suggestion of a friend. Freelancing as a dress designer for the likes of Henri Bendel and Bergdorf Goodman on the side, she conceptualized La MaMa, an experimental theatre club that was a key player in the Off Off-Broadway movement of that time, and is still a New York institution today. Her central ideology was to create a space that emphasised artistic freedom and identity without commercial pressure and she produced plays addressing topics such as race, sexuality, gender and political oppression despite severe push back from the community.
Sources: NYT, amNY, Beyer Blinder Belle
Owner of the much-loved Carrot Top Pastries in Inwood and Washington Heights
Affectionately dubbed the “Queen of Carrot Cake”, Renee Mancino moved from Cleveland to NYC in 1970 to pursue forensic medicine. When she was 15, she was sentenced to a year’s residency in reform school for truancy but came out with a determination to apply to medical school. And while she was accepted into Columbia Medical school, she was unable to attend due to a car crash from which she never fully recovered.
She initially began baking carrot cakes in the 1970s to raise money for her daughter’s medical school tuition. Mancino opened her first storefront in 1980 and eventually built up a reputation for not just her carrot cakes, but all other pastries too. In 2012, she won the News’ “Best of New York” carrot cake contest. Mancino’s customers included some of Manhattan's finest restaurants, fancy-food stores, Stevie Wonder, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Richard Pryor and many other celebrities.
However, baking aside, what set her truly apart was her commitment to community. She always donated her baked goods to local little league teams, schools, churches, mosques and other organizations. She was known throughout her community for her friendly, generous and determined spirit.
“She was the heart of Carrot Top. People would come in and she’d talked to them for an hour, two hours, five hours,” he said. “That girl had a heart of gold,” Robert Mancino, her husband of almost 35 years and a retired NYC cop, said to DNAinfo. The duo met when Robert responded to an injury call and Renee was at the location.
Dorothy Staniec, Mancino’s sister-in-law, recounts how much she enjoyed technology and always had the latest iPhone even though she never really knew how to text. According to Staniec, Mancino took classes at the Apple store and brought baskets of homemade carrot muffins for the employees, every time without fail.
In November 2014, suffering from stage four cancer, depression and crippling financial pressure from renewed lease negotiations with their landlord, NY Presbyterian, Mancino died by a self-inflicted gun wound. Following her death, a memorial service was held at the Riverdale Funeral Home where hundreds of people gathered to listen to speeches and honor her memory. Social media was flooded with an outpouring of support for the woman who had always treated her community as an extension of her own family.
Sources: NYC DORIS (directly adapted portions), NY Post, DNAinfo, Gothamist
100 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, Jennings did the same on a streetcar
In July 1854, a twenty-something schoolteacher Elizabeth Jennings, boarded a segregated streetcar operated by Third Avenue Railroad Company, on the way to church. At that time, public transport in NYC, including omnibuses and streetcars, were privately owned and often did not accept African-American passengers.
When the conductor confronted her, Jennings ignored him and refused to leave and find other transportation that accommodated African-American passengers. In the face of her resistance, the conductor eventually succeeded in forcing her off the bus with the help of a policeman.
In 1855, the New York Tribune carried an account of the incident.
“The conductor undertook to get her off, first alleging the car was full, when that was shown to be false. He pretended the other passengers were displeased at her presence. But [when] she insisted on her rights, he took hold of her by force to expel her. She resisted. The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person. Quite a crowd gathered. But she effectually resisted. Finally, after the car had gone on further, with the aid of a policeman they succeeded in removing her.”
Elizabeth penned a letter of her experience that she read at her family’s church, causing massive outrage in the Black community. She harnessed media attention by publishing her accounts and many New York papers of that time carried accounts of her discrimination.
She sued Third Avenue Railroad Company, the conductor and the driver of the streetcar and was legally represented by Chester A. Arthur, the future 21st President of the United States. The court ruled in Jennings’ favor, Third Avenue Railroad was ordered to desegregate its streetcars and she was awarded $250 in compensation, which, adjusting for inflation, is close to $10,000 in today’s times.
Later in her life, Jennings continued to teach and helped found the first kindergarten for African-American children, operating out of her own home.
Sources: Museum of the City of New York, New York Transit Museum
About 15% of the street names honor institutions, communities, incidents, men and women both. The greatest density of these can be found in Manhattan and Queens, which also has a disproportionate number of miscellaneous renamings included.
Religious organizations feature prominently, including churches celebrating milestone anniversaries (St. Malachy's 100 years, Nativity B.V.M. Church's centennial), mosques (Jamaica Muslim Center), synagogues (Park East), and temples (Hindu Temple Society/Ganesh Temple). Cultural heritage is celebrated through ethnically-specific streets like "Little Thailand Way," "Bangladeshi Bazaar” and "Sylhet Corner" acknowledging immigrant communities' contributions.
As New York City continues to evolve, so too does the opportunity to reshape our understanding of history and contribution. As Sánchez de Madariaga mentioned, New York City may not have bridged the gender gap inherent in its own streets, but in the larger scope of the world, it is paving the way forward for more representation.
Sánchez de Madariaga believes that bridging the age-old gap requires continuous political commitment and perseverance in calling for the representation of minorities in political office or positions of power. According to her, naming things in public after someone or something is a way of ascribing value to that individual and their contributions - it is a way of keeping history alive. We need to think carefully as a society about who we give power to and how they might use it, for example, who they think a “hero” is, she says.
“Problematic naming has existed for ages. It is a way of manipulating people almost into thinking that whatever that individual did was good, even though it might not be. Even separately from this, we must not stop having democratic elections, public campaigns, mobilizing, organizing and talking to our representatives to keep asking for change," said Sánchez de Madariaga.