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

It isn’t always easy to fix a historical mistake, no matter how obvious. Once a decision is locked in, inertia takes over and it can be difficult to work up the momentum and smash through at the exact right time to undo something that’s been done. But it doesn’t mean no one should ever try, which is why I submit to you that it’s time to take Robert F. Kennedy’s name off 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 right now at this very moment? The answer of course is that Robert Kennedy Jr.’s whole deal has spilled into the 2010s bike wars, with the revelation that Kennedy put a dead bear cub in Central Park and staged the corpse dumping to make it look like the bear was the victim of a speeding cyclist. This, along with a “presidential campaign” buoyed by insights like “They made Covid so it wouldn’t kill Jews” is enough, I think, to reopen the case as to whether the Triborough Bridge needs a Kennedy name slapped on it.

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

That technically changed on the day in 2011 that the Queensboro Bridge was named after Ed Koch, but even official Department of Transportation presentations on plans for that bridge seem to conveniently forget it has a new namesake. We have no such luck with the RFK Bridge though. Official MTA documentation lists the bridge as such, from official traffic counts to the full size subway map I have in the wall of my office (the same map marks the Queensboro Bridge as just the Queensboro bridge).

Ed Koch, say what you will about him, was a City College graduate, 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 was running for president three years after getting sworn into a six-year term. Yes, I am aware of why he never finished out the term.

But is that our problem? Is that our fault? Is that a reason we need to extend Kennedy worship 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. Looking beyond Robert Kennedy’s brief time as New York’s junior senator, what qualified him for local sainthood? His time spent as a lieutenant for Joe McCarthy? Or maybe his role in trying to blow up Fidel Castro and give Cuba back to the Mafia? Certainly a guy who asks J. Edgar Hoover to put James Baldwin under more FBI surveillance is a man who we should toss a perfectly good bridge name away for.

Very little about naming the Triborough Bridge after RFK was explained or justified when it happened in 2008. Eliot Spitzer just threw the rechristening into his State of the State, explaining that the renaming the Triborough Bridge the RFK Bridge would “continue spreading the ripples of hope his service generated.” Is that what happened here? Do you now feel inspired by “ripples” of “hope” when you look at the Triborough Bridge? 

As it happens, things could have apparently been even worse for us. Spitzer was reportedly prepared to name the Hudson River Park after George Pataki, the three-term governor who preceded Spitzer, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because Pataki wasn’t planning on showing up to the speech. Naming things after people who don’t deserve it seemed to be Spitzer’s second-greatest crime (his greatest crime was being a bad, possibly even dangerous client towards sex workers).

The legislation authorizing the name change was similarly bereft of anything justifying the name change. The case was thus: One, the Kennedys lived in Bronxville (NOT A PART OF THE BRONX) and he went to public school there for three years. Two, as a senator, RFK helped start the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. The rest is stuff he did for the country as a whole. Well fine, let the Justice Department name an office building or a wiretapping center after him, this is not my problem.

We are yoked to this family for seemingly no good reason, save for the fact that Baby Boomers can’t see anything but an angelic aura around all of them. What has a Kennedy done for you in the last twenty years? Thirty? Forty? And yet we live here in this world where this klatch of lecherous Bay Staters always seems to have someone in the chamber threatening to or actually running for president.

Should the sins of the child reflect back on to the parent? In the case of this wastrel, falconing son and the parent’s relatively brief time in New York, yes.