Walk almost anywhere in New York City and a name on a street sign can open a door to the past.
The city is bringing many of those stories into one place with new technology. A team of interns at the New York City Department of Records and Information Services is sorting through city archives to create a digital interactive map of all the honorary streets co-named after someone.
Anyone can click on a street on the map to learn the story behind the person.
“I’m hoping to keep a lot of these legacies alive,” said Amelie Shiro of the New York City Department of Records and Information Services.
“I’m helping to cement all of these stories in a digital format,” Shiro said. “This map allows people to slow down, connect with their neighbors, discover decades of city history that they might otherwise pass by.”
Some of the names are tied to roads many New Yorkers already know, including FDR Drive, named after the former president.
Others point much further back. At the tip of Manhattan, Peter Minuit Plaza is named for the man Harold Holzer, the Manhattan borough historian, described this way: “He was the first real estate dealer in New York and he made the biggest and best deal in the history.”
Minuit bought what was then called New Amsterdam from the native Lenape people for about $25.
“He started it all for white settlement and he ended it all for the native population, the beginning of the end,” Holzer said.
Farther north, Juan Rodriguez Way marks a man Holzer said “is considered the first nonindigenous settler of New York.”
Rodriguez was the city’s first immigrant who spoke multiple languages and worked as a translator.
In Washington Heights, Margaret Corbin Drive sits near the location where she fought in the Revolutionary War alongside her husband.
“And when he died at his post, she simply took over the cannon and she defended Washington Heights and was renowned for that and celebrated for that,” Holzer said.
Emily Warren Roebling is also honored on a city street. Holzer said she helped finish the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband became sick.
“It was Emily who went back and forth and transmitted his instructions to the engineers on site,” Holzer said.
In Greenwich Village, a nearby street carries the name of Sylvia Rivera.
“A fighter for human rights, who was in the streets,” Holzer said. “She would hang out at Stonewall and she was there when the riots and the uprising began and there’s a legend that she threw the first bottle at police.”
The map also includes hundreds of streets named after 9/11 victims and first responders, including Keithroy Maynard, a second-generation Brooklyn firefighter who fought for representation in the department.
“The throughline in all of this is that the peoples’ voices, diverse voices, matter,” Holzer said.
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