Is Your Street Jewish? A Brief History of New York City Place Names

Sometimes the simplest questions provide the strangest answers. For example, until recently, when I discovered there used to be a Kaplan Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, I couldn’t think of another New York City street with such a strongly Jewish name. With such history, how could that be?

“What about Hillel Place?” one might ask, referring to that block-long street connecting the Brooklyn College campus to the junction of Flatbush and Nostrand avenues. “Isn’t that a Jewish name?” Why yes, it’s very Jewish—and the longer answer will help define the parameters of our inquiry.

While the great Talmudic scholar Hillel dates back to the first century B.C.E., it wasn’t until the opening of Brooklyn College’s new Hillel building in 1959 that the street was renamed in his honor. Prior to then, it had been Germania Place, named after the Germania Real Estate Company, which began developing the previously rural area in the late 1890s. Before then, it was Woodbine Place.

So, Hillel doesn’t count. Nor do the city’s hundreds of honorary street co-namings, some of them Jewish, and notable as they otherwise are: Bella Abzug Way, Sholem Aleichem Place, Max Gordon Corner, Joey Ramone Place, Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard, Anna Sokolow Way, etc. Which leaves us with very little. The reasons aren’t too mysterious. First a Dutch colony, and then English, New York’s street names reflect this heritage with few deviations.

There was, in old Manhattan, one notable exception: Jew’s Alley, the colloquial name for Mill Street (later South William), where the city’s first synagogue, Shearith Israel, was built in 1730. The lasting currency of Jew’s Alley is attested to by its inclusion in certain city directories through the 1810s though—to cite just one example of how the city changes—”McDonald, Duncan, Mariner, 12 Jew’s Alley” doesn’t sound overly Jewish to me.

As for street names reflecting the success of mid-19th century German immigrants—Havemeyer (sugar refining) and Schaeffer (beer) streets in Brooklyn being two prominent examples—while one can never be completely certain which Austro-German surnames are Jewish, history says it’s safe to presume them gentile.

Indeed, there may be only three streets that have always been Jewish, all in the Co-Op City section of the northeast Bronx. Previously home to the short-lived Freedomland amusement park (1960-1964), when it was subsequently developed as middle-income co-operative housing, its streets would reflect the ideals of the radical Jewish labor movement that helped birth the project.

Adler Place, for example, was almost certainly named for historian, organizer, and Jewish Theological Seminary President Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), though the possibility it honors the renowned Yiddish stage actor Jacob Adler (1855-1926) also exists.

Asch Loop was surely named after the immensely popular Yiddish writer Sholem Asch (1880-1957), whose son Moses (Moe) founded the immensely influential Folkways Records.

Einstein Loop, of course, celebrates theoretical physicist—despite his foundational role in the creation of the atomic bomb—and pacifist Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

Fellow travelers to Co-Op City will find familiar gentile names too: Debs Place, for Socialist hero Eugene V. Debs; Dreiser Loop, reformer and novelist; Louisa May Alcott; Carver Loop, for Black scientist and inventor George Washington Carver; and Casals Place, for Spanish cellist and prominent anti-fascist, Pablo Casals.

Public School 82, Kaplan Avenue, Jamaica

I found it, completely by accident, in a newspaper: Public School 82, Kaplan Avenue, Jamaica. What?! I’m a Kaplan! My maternal grandfather, Mordko (later Max) Kaplan, was born in Kozienice, Poland, in 1912. A concentration camp survivor and partisan, after the war Max married another survivor, my grandmother Frida, born in Daugaupils, Latvia, in 1916. They met in a Displaced Persons Camp in Linz, Austria, where my mother and uncle were born. In 1948, the family emigrated to Memphis, Tenn., where their sponsor, Max’s cousin, a real estate man, Jack Kaplan, lived. On Nov. 11, 1954, they became naturalized American citizens.

So, this one was personal. Who was this Kaplan, and what happened to this street that no longer existed?

Answering the latter question was easy, because PS 82 is exactly where it was, only instead of being at the corner of Kaplan and Hammond avenues, today it stands at 144th Street and 88th Avenue. (Its official address is 88-02 144th St.)

After the 1898 consolidation of New York, Queens initiated a new street-naming system to eliminate the duplicate street names of its constituent towns and villages and to simplify, somewhat, the borough’s geography. Henceforth—with myriad complications and anomalies—thoroughfares running east-west became avenues, with their numbers increasing from north to south, while those running north-south became streets, with their numbers increasing from west to east.

Such changes took a few decades to fully effect, however, and through the mid-1920s, newspaper classified ads still referred to Kaplan Avenue, not 144th Street. It was a nice, and convenient, place to live, with many neat, detached houses. The Jamaica Avenue elevated was a block away; the Long Island Rail Road terminal a little farther.

As for Kaplan, his name was Nathan, a prominent real estate speculator in Greenport, LI, and then Jamaica, since the 1870s. Later that decade, he and his family moved to Brooklyn, where he seems to have led a life of quiet prosperity. In 1892, a 19-year-old daughter named Lena died. Subsequently, Kaplan had an apartment at 385 Clinton Ave. in Clinton Hill, and an office downtown on Court Street.

Otherwise, his life is outlined by decades of real estate transactions and blurred by the affairs of those who shared his name, including Jewish gangster Nathan “Kid Dropper” Kaplan (or Caplin), spectacularly shot to death—in front of his wife and while under police guard—outside the Essex Market Courthouse on Aug. 23, 1923, by one Louis Cohen. But that’s a story for another time.

Though I’ve been unable to find a detailed obituary for our Nathan Kaplan, evidence suggests he died on Jan. 30, 1923, and is buried in Brooklyn’s Jewish Washington Cemetery.