Between 1959-1964, when I was a kid in Bay Ridge, the city bruited the Gowanus Expressway through my neighborhood, which connected the BQE and the Belt Parkway junction at 65th St. and the Verraz(z)ano Bridge—just missing our apartment building. I was fascinated with the bridge construction, digging in the dirt in the park across 6th Ave. in imitation of the trench being dug for the expressway, and watched the towers going up and the cables being strung.
Future generations will have no direct remembrance of the VB being built, but I have it and those memories will die with me.
The name “Dyker” presents a bit of a puzzler for Brooklyn lexicologists. In the book Brooklyn By Name, Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss assert that Dutch farmers who built dikes to drain the area’s wetlands in the colonial era gave it its name. However Van Dyke is a common Dutch name and a family of that name did have a hand in its development in the mid-1700s. Dyker Heights was more strictly defined when the Gowanus Expressway was completed in 1964, as the neighborhood’s boundaries can be set at 86th St. (and the Dyker Park Golf Course, where Tiger Woods’ father Earl played) the expressway, 65th St., and 14th Ave. It’s overwhelmingly residential and the only business streets are Fort Hamilton Parkway, 13th Ave., and parts of 11th. The neighborhood’s best-known and most heavily chronicled during the Christmas season, when many locals construct extravagant displays, especially along 84th St. between 11th and 12th Aves.
Further north, the service road that was created along the Gowanus Expressway connecting 7th Ave. and 67th St. with 6th Ave. and 65th St. was dubbed “Eirik Place.” It skirts the edge of Lief Ericson Square. I’ll preface my comments about Eirik Place by saying that the name of the famed 10th-century Norse explorer can be, and is, spelled in numerous ways, because Ericson himself used Runic characters to write his name—if he wrote at all.
When street signs were first installed to designate the route in 1964, the name was spelled “Eirik” which was pronounced, as far as I know, “EYE-rick.” This green and white sign, considerably faded now, probably went up in the 1980s.
But there’s considerable disagreement about the spelling. This “Erik Place” sign at 6th Ave. is relatively new, as it was installed in the late-2010s.
This MTA map of the area renders it as “Erick” but that’s plainly wrong. It’s also incorrect about 65th St. between 5th and 6th Aves. bearing the name, which it doesn’t.
Meanwhile, Google Maps lists “Erik” which may be where the new Department of Transportation sign got the spelling. Paper maps like Hagstrom (except for the latter-day computerized version, which got it right with “Eirik”) bothered with it.
There doesn’t need to BE an official spelling, since, like Dyker Place, no property abuts it and it has no addresses. But three spellings for such a short Place is weird.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)