NEW York City is marked by clusters of streets with a theme-based naming scheme. Many of the northeast Bronx streets are named for early NYC mayors beginning in the 1600s; Brooklyn Heights has a fruit tree scheme; Staten Island has classical composers in Clifton and astronauts in New Springville. In the Bronx’s Spencer Estates, just south of the Isaac L. Rice-inspired electronics street theme, there’s a cluster of streets such as Parsifal Place that are named for characters or place names in Wagner operas or Wagner family members, including Lohengrin, Valhalla, and Siegfried. This was apparently the idea of Eugene Rosenquist, president of the Westchester Electric Light Company, who owned the estate in the area through which these streets run.
“Parsifal” is the Anglicized form of Parzival, from the Wagner opera premiered at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany in 1882. “Parzival” is itself a “Germanized” form of Percival, who was one of the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table who joined in the quest for the Holy Grail used b y Christ at the Last Supper in Jerusalem. That character, in turn, was adopted from a Welsh legend concerning a knight named Paradur. That’s a lot of spellings for the same guy!
More from the eastern Bronx on this FNY page.
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12/7/22