Yesterday morning, as I perused the news, I was greeted with a wonderful story: the intersection of Delancey and Essex Streets on New York’s Lower East Side had been renamed Yancy Street and Jack Kirby Way. And Jack Kirby’s family was there for the naming ceremony! It was all captured on Instagram by Marvel Comics editor in chief CB Cebulski.
Jack Kirby was born nearby at 147 Essex Street, a building that still stands. (I assume he was born in a hospital, but such “birthplaces” are commonly noted as landmarks in cities throughout the world.) The building is something of a pilgrimage for cartoonists visiting New York, and folks have been trying to get a commemorative plaque on the building for a while. More on that below, but Marvel also noted the event in their PR:
On July 9, the corner of Delancey and Essex in New York City joined the Marvel Universe for a day. In honor of the seminal artist and creator Jack Kirby, Delancey Street was renamed Yancy Street/Jack Kirby Way.
Jack “King” Kirby, a legendary artist and prolific storyteller, is responsible for some of the most iconic characters in the world, including Captain America, Iron Man, Ant-Man, the Hulk, and of course The Fantastic Four. Beyond designing art and creating stories that would inspire and entertain for decades, he also pulled from his own life as a New Yorker as inspiration for the fictional world that would become the Marvel Universe.
Marvel and the City of New York erected a commemorative sign celebrating the inspiration that Delancey and the neighborhood gave Jack Kirby, born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917. Born just a block away on Essex Street, Kirby drew from his Lower East Side upbringing in his comics — especially in the life of Ben Grimm, who grew up on “Yancy Street.”
Members of the Kirby family were also there to celebrate the sign’s unveiling, with granddaughter Jillian Kirby noting that so much of the Fantastic Four drew from the Kirby family’s own history: “Grandpa Jack saw himself in the Thing, Ben Grimm being named after our great-grandfather… [The Fantastic Four] is so grounded in the Kirby family. Sue Storm [was also] named after our aunt Sue.”
Now you may have already noticed the caveat in the above, but even as I rejoiced at this recognition of Jack Kirby, the seminal genius of American comics, a few things seemed odd to me. First, it was strange that I hadn’t heard of this before hand, since commemorating Kirby and his ties to the LES have been a goal of a number of folks for a while, and renaming a street in NYC is a big enough deal that this might have been noted in advance.
The second thing is that the street sign was FF Blue and not NYC city street green. There are lots of streets in NYC that have this block or that block named after some notable person or entity. (There is literally a petition going around to rename the block I live on after a young woman who was murdered here last year – I don’t think it will pass, but nice thought.) These signs are all regulation green. So what gives?
If you read the first line in the PR, it was only Kirby Street for a day. Really only a few hours. I saw posts about this shared hundreds of times on FB, and the most famous names in comics celebrating this honor. But it was ephemeral.
And in one post by museum curator Patrick Reed there is this exchange with Columbia University Curator for Comics and Cartoons Karen Green: Loooooong overdue! I tried for a couple of years to work with the city council member for that district to get a plaque on the building in which he was born, but she never even replied to my proposals. This makes me feel just a bit better!”
To which Reed replied: “Well, it was only a one-day special op. But hopefully this helps the pitch for a permanent naming get fast-tracked.”
As alluded to above, myself and a few Beat writers also tried more than a decade ago to at least try to get the paperwork going to get a plaque on Kirby’s birthplace, but apparently this is a super complicated business that also involves real estate, the most precious commodity in New York City. If even the great Karen Green couldn’t get any traction for this, it is indeed a tough sell. It kind of irks me a little because not that far away is a plaque memorializing the building where jazz great Charlie Parker died of a drug overdose. (The coroner mistook the 34-year-old Parker’s body for that of a man of 60.) It’s a notable moment in NYC history for sure, but so is the birth of the man who gave us Captain America, the FF, Black Panther, and maybe even Spider-Man.
I reached out to Reed, who co-curated the much acclaimed Jack Kirby: Heroes and Humanity show at the Skirball Center in LA, for more information, and he confirmed that that this was a one day photo op, but that The Kirby Museum & Research Center continues efforts to get the city to do a proper street renaming. “But it’s NYC, so nothing like that ever happens easily,” he said. “See the YEARS it took to finally get the corner of Ludlow where the Paul’s Boutique cover pic was taken renamed for the Beastie Boys.”
Indeed that was a decade long effort, although the results were triumphant.
Is there anything we, the fans can do to help this effort? “Just keep talking about it, petition the city and the community board, and build a groundswell,” says Reed.
So there is work to be done, my friends. In the meantime, I’m happy that Kirby got the recognition he deserves, but bummed that it was so brief. But this is a cause we all need to rally around! It’s street renaming time!
In Manhattan, absolutely!
There’s also a street in Ottawa, Canada, currently named “Trump Avenue” that I would like to see renamed to something else. Jack Kirby seems as good a choice for that as any other child of the Five Boroughs that I can think of!
You DO understand that this was a promotion for the FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS film?
If Sesame Street can get its own street named in NYC then Kirby definitely deserves it!
Scott: of course.
Interesting to see that nowhere is Joe Simon or Stan Lee mentioned for their work on Captain America and The Fantastic Four. There’s little point in fixing one oversight if you create two more in the process.
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