R, FK T, We’ll Call It What We Want

In the end, it may have been a gracious but hollow measure to rename the Triborough Bridge to honor Robert F. Kennedy:

What’s in a name, anyway? Would that which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name — oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?

The short answer seems to be, no.

“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory, I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”

The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.

Gov. David A. Paterson is expected to sign the bill making the name change official. His predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, suggested the bridge renaming in January. At that time, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the eldest of Robert Kennedy’s 11 children, said, “This has been a dream for quite a while.”

But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)

Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.

Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.

The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.

“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. How about Newark International Airport? No one calls it Liberty. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”

What about RFKTB? Like NKOTB, only more reverent . . .

Earlier: Few Will Have The Greatness To Bend The Span Between Queens And The Bronx.

Location Scout: Triborough Bridge.