4 Midtown Streets Getting New Names: Tin Pan Alley, Perkins Place

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — From Tin Pan Alley to Frances Perkins Place, four streets in Midtown and Hell's Kitchen will soon be co-named in honor of bygone leaders and beloved figures after getting the City Council's approval on Tuesday.

Those four streets were among nearly 200 across the city that passed the Council's parks committee on Tuesday. Each new name was proposed by local groups or individuals and approved by a community board before reaching the Council, which signs off on co-namings near the end of each year.

Here's a rundown of each new street name in Hell's Kitchen and Midtown.

Frances Perkins Place

• Location: West 46th Street between Ninth and 10th avenues
• Background: Perkins, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, served as Labor Secretary under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945. Years before that, she worked at Hartley House, the Hell's Kitchen settlement house on West 46th Street. Meanwhile, Perkins's master's thesis at Columbia focused on malnutrition among students at P.S. 51 on West 44th Street.
• The idea of co-naming a street for Perkins was first raised by Hell's Kitchen political clubs in 2017.

Tin Pan Alley

• Location: West 28th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway
• Background: this stretch of 28th Street has been known as Tin Pan Alley for more than a century, referring to the music publishing offices that lined the block starting in the 1880s. The name's origin is unclear, though some say it referred to the cheap-sounding pianos that could be found on the block.
• A plaque commemorating the songwriting mecca sits on the corner of Broadway and 28th Street, while five of the street's buildings were designated as landmarks in 2019 following a preservation effort.

Sumner Redstone Way

• Location: intersection of West 44th Street and Seventh Avenue
• Background: Redstone, the billionaire media magnate, led Viacom and CBS until his death in 2020. This intersection sits directly outside ViacomCBS's headquarters at 1515 Broadway.

Wynn Handman Way

• Location: southeast corner of 56th Street and Seventh Avenue
• Background: Handman was the co-founder and artistic director of the American Place Theatre in Hell's Kitchen since its inception in 1963. He died from COVID-19 in April 2020 at age 97. The intersection being co-named sits outside Carnegie Hall.

Around the city, other co-namings passed this week honor Cicely Tyson in East Harlem, David Dinkins in West Harlem, Shimon Peres on the Upper West Side, and the bygone Coogan's bar in Washington Heights.