CB4 Shoots Down Petition to Rename Part of W. 50th St. For Capt. “Sully”

With the 15th anniversary of the “Miracle on the Hudson” arriving next January 15, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger will be returning to New York, where he is likely to receive a hero’s welcome for safely crash landing a passenger jet on the Hudson River. However, he will not be receiving a street corner renamed in his honor, after a proposal to do just that on W. 50th St. & 11 Ave. was shot down by Community Board 4.

Sullenberger was the captain of US Airways Flight 1549–a regularly scheduled 2009 flight, headed from LaGuardia to Charlotte and Seattle–when it slammed into a flock of birds shortly after takeoff and promptly lost engine power. In a feat of aerodynamic gymnastics, Sully (along with his co-captain, Jeffrey Skiles) managed to glide the 155-passenger plane onto the Hudson River without causing a single fatality. The incident captured the world and was eventually made into a critically acclaimed 2016 biopic, starring Tom Hanks and directed by Clint Eastwood.

When it came to not offering Sullenberger any further acclaim in the form of a local street sign, CB4 member Jesse Greenwald was blunt. “Although we do support his heroic efforts of landing a plane on the Hudson, he did not land it on W. 50th St,” he correctly noted. In an intriguing twist, he suggested that perhaps Sully should seek to leave his imprint on the river he landed on, displacing English navigator Henry Hudson’s namesake in the process. “The man has been dead for 400 years. It’s time,” he quipped.

The decision is likely to come as a rough blow to Sully’s team of advocates, namely Linda Lipman of the PR firm Hiltzik Strategies. In a September meeting before CB4’s Transport Committee, she appeared joyous as she recounted her experience of the petitioning process: “I went into three or four of the shops on [W. 50th St.] We were embraced by everybody as soon as I said ‘Sully.’” She then proclaimed that she had traveled to local schools, and that “every teacher was so extraordinary” in their support of the renaming. Lipman claimed that the proposal had collected 60 signatures.

In response to Lipman’s testimony, Greenwald subtly foreshadowed of the denial he would ultimately spearhead. While clarifying that “we’re certainly inspired by what happened that day,” he wanted to know if Sullenberger had “any ties to the community beyond landing in the Hudson River.” Specifically, he asked Lipman if she knew whether Sully had “spent any significant amount of time living in, working in, residing in, and driving to Hell’s Kitchen.” Lipman conceded that he hadn’t, but that “I can tell you that he will be back in New York” for the big “Miracle” anniversary.

Reached for comment by Chelsea News, CB4 District Manager Jesse Bodine simply pointed to a “Secondary Street Sign” policy, which was adopted by the board in 2007 and still appears to determine renaming criteria. Sullenberger’s proposal seems that it could match two out of the three requirements laid out in the policy for achieving a street sign. He indeed has “an extraordinary record of public service to the community, the city, state, country or the world,” and according to Lipman he had “strong local support” from nearby businesses (in fact, the policy specifies that this local support must not be offset by any dissenters. It is not immediately clear if any relevant locals opposed the plan).

The stumbling block for Sullenberger may have been requirement A), which notes that “the person or entity must have had a long standing presence and association with the community in the vicinity of the proposed sign.”

Bodine said that a letter outlining the denial would be sent out to the NYC DOT and City Council Member Erik Bottcher next week.

The Hudson River has a storied history of reattribution. While Hudson made his down the waterway just after 1600, he seemingly didn’t receive citable naming rights for the expedition until 1740 (the Dutch had control of Manhattan, then known as New Amsterdam, until 1664). Of course, Indigenous communities had inhabited the banks of the river well before European colonization. The Lenape called it Muhheakunnuk, or “The River That Runs Both Ways.”