2 Harlem Streets Getting Renamed For Civil Rights Activists

HARLEM, NY — Two different streets in opposite corners of Harlem will soon bear the names of bygone civil rights activists, thanks to a new bill approved by the City Council.

The corner of West 145th Street and Riverside Drive will become known as "Hubert T. Delany Way," while East 111th Street and Madison Avenue will be known as "Hiram Maristany Way," under the bill passed by the Council on Thursday — which also ceremonially "co-named" more than 70 other streets around the city.

Here's what to know about the two Harlem honorees.

Hubert T. Delany

Delany, who died in 1990 at age 89, was a judge, prosecutor, civil rights activist and leader of the Harlem Renaissance.

A native of North Carolina, Delany moved to Harlem as a young man and thought in the neighborhood's public schools. He married Clarissa Scott Delany, a poet and social worker who herself became a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance before her untimely death.

A board member of the 135th Street YMCA, the National Urban League and the NAACP, Delany spent five years as an assistant U.S. Attorney before Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appointed him to the city's family court.

By 1943, Delany was living at 467 West 144th St., when then-First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited his home for a reception benefitting orphaned children.

Though he was praised for his "understanding, independence and humanity" as a judge he was ultimately denied reappointment to the bench in 1955 by Mayor Robert F. Wagner, who cited his "left-wing views," according to Delany's New York Times obituary.

The Times later reported that Delany had been accused of having links to "left-wing and pro-Communist groups," while Delany said the mayor had disapproved of his outspokenness for civil rights.

"Many public figures and other newspapers defended his rulings and his appeals for wider civil rights and liberties for blacks and other minorities," the Times reported upon Delany's death.

The bill to co-name the 145th Street block was introduced by Councilmember Shaun Abreu.

Hiram Maristany

Maristany was described as "the people's photographer" of East Harlem upon his death in March at age 76.

A founder and official photographer of the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords, Maristany documented the group's civil rights campaigns during the 1960s and '70s — including the famed 1969 "Garbage Offensive," in which residents protested the city's poor sanitation efforts in El Barrio by piling the neighborhood's streets with refuse, then setting the heaps on fire.

In 1969, he helped his fellow artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz found El Museo Del Barrio, and contributed to the museum's visual language during its early years, according to organizers. He later served as El Museo's director from 1974 to 1977, where he organized multiracial artist exhibitions to foster coalition-building.

"When I documented, I was not doing it from the outside in, but from the inside out," Maristany told the New York Times in 2019. "I knew if I don’t take these images, we’re going to leave it to someone who doesn’t know the first goddamn thing about us, and they’re going to define everything there is to know about us."

Maristany's co-naming was introduced by Councilmember Diana Ayala.

Street co-namings are typically marked by ceremonies in which the street's new signs are unveiled, but no such events have been announced yet for Maristany or Delany.