New York deserves to be free of the Kennedys: bring back the Triborough

Better things are possible

What has a Kennedy done for you in the last twenty years? Thirty? Forty?

It’s not always easy to undo a historical mistake, no matter how obvious. Once a decision is made, inertia takes over and it can be hard to build up the momentum and break through at the right moment to undo what’s been done. But that doesn’t mean no one should ever try, and that’s why I propose that it’s time to remove Robert F. Kennedy’s name from the span that connects East Harlem, the South Bronx, and Astoria, and restore the bridge to its original, glorious name: The Triborough.

But why am I complaining about this now? The answer, of course, is that Robert Kennedy Jr.’s whole deal spilled over into the bike wars of the 2010s, with the revelation that Kennedy a dead bear cub was placed in Central Park and the dumping of the body was staged to make it appear as if the bear was the victim of a speeding cyclist. This, along with a “presidential campaign” fueled by insights such as “They created Covid so it wouldn’t kill Jews“enough, I think, to reopen the case as to whether the Triborough Bridge needs a Kennedy name.

Now, I’ve always felt that RFK’s name shouldn’t be on the Triborough, if only for the simple reason that the Triborough is both a great name for a bridge and describes exactly what it does: provide access to the Bronx, Queens, and Manhattan. Three boroughs, one bridge. In that sense, it always fit in with New York City’s other great East River bridges, which relied solely on the names of their functions to convey their grandeur.

That formally changed on the day in 2011 that the Queensboro Bridge was named after Ed Koch, but even official presentations from the Ministry of Transport about the plans for that bridge seem to conveniently forget that it has a new namesake. However, we are not so lucky with the RFK Bridge. Official MTA documentation lists the bridge as such, from official traffic counts to the large subway map I have hanging on my office wall (on the same map, the Queensboro Bridge is only shown as the Queensboro Bridge).

Ed Koch, say what you will about him, was a graduate of City College, represented New York in Congress and was a three-term mayor. Robert Kennedy was a one-term senator from New York who cynically moved here to run for Congress and then three years after he was sworn in, he ran for president for a six-year term. Yeah, I know why he never finished the term.

But is that our problem? Is that our fault? Is that a reason we should extend the Kennedy cult in this city beyond the airport? Don’t even get me started on Idlewild being a better name for an airport than JFK, we’ll be here all night. If we look beyond Robert Kennedy’s brief stint as New York’s junior senator, what qualified him for local sainthood? His time as lieutenant to Joe McCarthy? Or perhaps his role in trying to blow up Fidel Castro and give Cuba back to the mafia? Sure a man who asks J. Edgar Hoover to place James Baldwin under increased FBI surveillance is a man for whom we should come up with a great bridge name in the future.

There was very little explanation or justification for naming the Triborough Bridge after RFK when it happened in 2008. Eliot Spitzer just threw the rebaptism into his State of the Statein which he explained that renaming the Triborough Bridge the RFK Bridge would “continue to spread the ripples of hope that his service generated.” Is that what happened here? Do you feel inspired by “ripples” of “hope” now when you look at the Triborough Bridge?

Coincidentally, things could have been even worse for us. Spitzer was reportedly willing to name the Hudson River Park after George Pataki, the governor who preceded Spitzer and who served three terms, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because Pataki had no intention of coming to the speech. Naming things after people who don’t deserve them seemed to be Spitzer’s second greatest crime (his greatest crime was that he a bad, possibly even dangerous client towards sex workers).

The legislation that authorized the name change was similarly devoid of anything that would justify the change of nameThe case was this: First, the Kennedys lived in Bronxville (NOT PART OF THE BRONX) and he went to public school there for three years. Two years, as a senator, RFK helped found the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. The rest he did for the entire country. Well, let the Justice Department name an office building or a wiretap center after him, that’s not my problem.

We’ve been associated with this family for no good reason other than the fact that baby boomers can’t see anything but an angelic aura around them. What has a Kennedy done for you in the last twenty years? Thirty? Forty? And yet here we are in this world where this klatch of lusty Bay Staters always seems to have someone in the room threatening with or actually run for president.

Should the sins of the child be reflected back on the parent? In the case of this spendthrift, falcon-ridden son and the parent’s relatively short time in New York, yes.