Is It Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard or 7th Avenue? - Question - NYTimes.com

How Official Is Official?
By MICHAEL POLLAK
Published: October 15, 2010
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Q. Frederick Douglass Academy is on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 149th Street. Yet the city’s Department of Education lists the address as 2581 Seventh Avenue. Why the old name?

A. Not every agency is on the same wavelength regarding the avenue north of Central Park that is named for the former Harlem congressman. To the Education Department, 2581 Seventh Avenue is the official mailing address, said a spokeswoman. The Postal Service agreed: 2581 Seventh Avenue is its standardized address for the school. But to the Department of City Planning, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard is the correct name.

Mail will be delivered whichever name a letter writer uses because the post office keeps a record of widely used “alias” names for streets, said Darlene Reid-DeMeo, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service. “Unless the street is renamed officially by the city, the address will remain as the original address in our database,” she said. She theorized that Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard was an honorary name only. But it isn’t; it’s official, according to the Planning Department, which keeps the ultimate authority, the city’s official street maps. The Powell honor dates from 1974. The same official change is true for two other avenues north of Central Park: Frederick Douglass Boulevard, formerly Eighth Avenue; and Malcolm X Boulevard, formerly Lenox Avenue. A department spokeswoman said the City Council had enacted the changes, making them not just honorary but legal.

The original names, however, may be in the same landmark space in the minds of longtime New Yorkers as Sixth Avenue and the Triborough Bridge. And the commercial center of Harlem, officially Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is still 125th Street to many Harlemites.

“The names were approved as map changes,” said Jacob Morris, director of the Harlem Historical Society. So why the discrepancy? “Official inertia,” he suggested.

Is It Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard or 7th Avenue? - Question - NYTimes.com.