Joshua Jelly-Schapiro asked me to meet him on Frieda Zames Way, which is not an easy place to find on Google Maps.
No street view photos, no subway wait times — nothing to feed our iPhone-era inclination to know exactly where we’re going,
all the time. As any serious investigative journalist would, I immediately turned to the internet, where a website called Oldstreets.com informed me that Frieda Zames Way is just an honorary name for the very workaday stretch of East 4th Street that lies between First Avenue and Avenue A.
When I finally made my way there on a blustering, unseasonably chilly afternoon, Jelly-Schapiro told me that the corner named for Zames is responsible for our most accessible catalog of New York City’s honorary street names. When a neighborhood resident wanted to know who exactly Zames was (a pioneering disability rights activist, in case you were wondering), she called the borough’s historian, who then commissioned retired urban planner Gilbert Tauber to compile a list of the 1800 or so honorifics adorning street corners across the city — the very list I’d stumbled across on Oldstreets.com.