After thirty years of inconvenience, Fordham University and the New York Botanical Garden find themselves once again on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. The ill-considered renaming of a stretch of roadway after a dentist and local historian, Theodore Kazamiroff (accent the first syllable, if you can), has been reversed.

When the street was renamed for Dr. Kazimiroff, he said, the City Council went a step beyond an honorary designation and legally renamed the road. “Part of the problem was they never really consulted a lot of folks, including the U.S. post office,” Mr. Muriana said. “So the post office for years refused to recognize the Kazimiroff name and wouldn’t deliver mail.”

The Botanical Garden, which also supported the change, lists its address as 200th Street and Kazimiroff Boulevard, which resulted in daily phone calls from befuddled visitors, garden officials said. GPS devices had trouble, too. “They’d have to spell Kazimiroff perfectly accurately, including Dr. Theodore,” Mr. Muriana said.

But Lloyd Ultan, the current Bronx historian, dismissed the idea that the address had proved confusing, calling those charges spurious.

“What was asserted was that nobody could find Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff Boulevard, which I find hard to believe,” Mr. Ultan said.

Still, Dr. Kazimiroff remains an obscure figure to many Bronx residents.

“I’d say most people here don’t even know him,” said Kathleen A. McAuley, a director at the Bronx County Historical Society, which, as it happens, Dr. Kazimiroff founded in 1955.

We hold that changing street names from the top down is a Soviet-style wickedness. We wouldn’t have our Major Deegan any other way, even if we don’t know who the hell he was! (But don’t bring back Anderson Field.)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.