ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the renaming of streets opens a space in which the symbolic struggles over remembrance and erasure are anchored in specific sites that serve as places of memory. It examines New York's streetscape as a "memorial arena" in which multiple layers of socio-spatial exclusion are at work in the production of commemorative landscapes. The chapter focuses on the project to rename the numbered avenues on the Upper West Side during the latter-nineteenth century, and explores the history of renaming Harlem's streets to commemorate civil rights leaders a century later. As the city of New York grew from the small Dutch trading post of New Amsterdam in the seventeenth century to the expansive metropolis of today, its cultural landscape witnessed dramatic material and symbolic transformations. By the end of the 1870s and beginning of the 1880s, the West Side Association began lobbying the municipal authorities to legally rename the West Side avenues.
