#The frenzy for renaming would remove some of New York’s most iconic names

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Statue of Christopher Columbus in Central Park
Angel Chevrestt

Mayor Bill de Blasio is urging the federal government to rename a street at Fort Hamilton named for Robert E. Lee, stating that the city should purge itself of anything even remotely honoring slavery or denigrating any group.

The sentiment is understandable, the intention benign. But the question is: What’s the limiting principle, especially as activists begin to look around for other offensive names elsewhere in the city?

Topping many lists is anything named “Columbus.” We all know of the explorer’s crimes against the indigenous. But as even Gov. Andrew Cuomo has conceded, there is much to Christopher Columbus’ legacy than that. The raging mobs, however, have no time for nuance, so Columbus names would have to go.

Then there’s anything named “Stuyvesant” (neighborhood, high schools, etc.). The anti-Semitic Peter Stuyvesant said Jews were “usurers,” “a repugnant race” guilty of “deicide.” If Stuyvesant had prevailed, all Jews would have been booted from New Amsterdam.

Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park was named for the last British governor of New York. During the American Revolution, William Tryon’s behavior toward independence supporters was universally deemed “brutal,” “bestial” and “savage.” If Tryon had succeeded, there would have been no United States from which Robert E. Lee’s beloved Virginia might have seceded.

Apologies to ad execs on Madison Avenue, but that name has to go. Our fourth president was a slaveholder. He is the “Father of the Constitution,” a document that (to our shame) accommodated slavery and counted African-American slaves as “3/5th persons.”

Next is the Borough of Queens, named for Catherine of Braganza. Historians agree that even if Catherine wasn’t heavily involved in the slave trade, her Portuguese family and royal English husband enthusiastically were.

And what about the city’s very name, which it takes after the Duke of York, among the largest slavers. The duke was a principal of the Royal African Company, which shipped more slaves to America than any other entity. Indeed, to insure that human cargo could be properly identified, many slaves were branded with a “DY.”

As the attorney who sued the federal government to compel the refurbishment of Grant’s Tomb, I now urge Mayor de Blasio to be consistent and demand that that same government remove Grant’s Tomb from New York. After all, in a fit of rage against northern cotton dealers trading with the enemy, Ulysses Grant issued “General Order 11,” which clumsily expelled “all Jews” from his area of operations. Lincoln revoked the order, Grant forever was embarrassed and apologetic and he later proved to be one of the best friends Jews ever had in the White House.

To historical nihilists, though, the original stain remains, and there is no good act that can redeem them, or grant them mercy from judgment according to 2020’s moral standards. As Shakespeare’s Antony said over the body of Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Edward Hochman is a lawyer in New York.