QNS (via Time Out magazine) reports a street in Spider-Man/Peter Parker’s hometown of Forest Hills, Queens, has been partially renamed Spider-Man Way. New York City Council officials attended the ceremony at the intersection of Ingram Street and Ascan Avenue on Monday, October 12, along with Mark Ditko, the nephew of Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, and Nick Lowe, the editor of Marvel’s Spidey comics.
The decision to rename the intersection was introduced by City Council member Lynn Schulman, following advocacy from New York State Assembly member Sam Berger. In an interview with JNS, Berger noted the idea not only honors New York’s most famous fictional resident, but seminal Jewish comics creators like Ditko, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby, as Forest Hills is a predominantly Jewish area.
Speaking at the ceremony, Berger said, “Peter Parker isn’t a billionaire living in a tower. He isn’t an alien descending from space. He’s a kid from Queens who has homework, bills to pay, family problems, and a thousand reasons to say he can’t help today, and yet, time and time again, he shows up. That’s the neighbor we want to be. That’s the community we want to build, and that’s the legacy we want to pass on to our children.”
Spider-Man Way is located nearby 20 Ingram Street, which was established as being where Uncle Ben and Aunt May raised Peter Parker in 1989’s Amazing Spider-Man #316-17 (by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane), where Venom discovers a change-of-address slip in Peter’s jacket. The building (which, unlike its comics counterpart, is a stone Edwardian-style house), was coincidentally the home of a real Parker family, and as a result of the comics’ reveal, receives fan mail from all over the world to this day.
The move comes shortly after the corner of Manhattan’s Delancey and Essex Streets was renamed Yancy Street/Jack Kirby Way earlier this year. With Marvel Comics set to relocate from its longtime home of New York to Burbank, California, next year, it’s certainly one way (no pun intended) for the publisher’s history with the city to remain intact. Lowe, a resident of Queens himself, commented, “We couldn’t be more delighted to see that connection made permanent today. As a Queens resident myself, I see Aunt Mays and Uncle Bens all over the place.”
You can check out more photos from the day on the New York City Council’s Flickr account.
