DYER Avenue, seen here from West 38th Street, is an unlikely candidate for a Forgotten New York item, as it’s one of the most car-trafficked roads in New York City. Indeed it’s nearly impossible to walk along the road as its sidewalks are just one or two feet wide. It’s even impossible to drive straight along its entire length. Its existence is tied in with the Lincoln Tunnel, as it was built along with the opening of the tunnel in 1937, necessitating the condemnation of a number of properties between West 30th and 42nd Streets between 9th and 10th Avenues. Dyer Avenue is the only major named avenue west of Park Madison Avenue between 14th and 59th Streets, though Hudson Boulevards East and West, short streets in the Hudson Yards area, were added in 2015.
The origins of Dyer Avenue’s name have been disagreed about in print. First, the wrong origin. Henry Moscow’s 1978 The Street Book is an invaluable resource, but he’s occasionally wrong. Moscow says it was named for William Dyre, NYC mayor in 1680, customs collector and one time owner of Ellis Island. In fact, Dyre was unpopular because of the taxes and import duties he levied. I’m unsure why Moscow thought this Dyre was the guy.
Meanwhile, Sanna Feirstein seems to have the right idea in Naming New York, from 2000. She argues that Major General George Rathbone Dyer was the guy. As chairman of the board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, he approved the creation of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and passed away while the latter was under construction. Feirstein does err, though; she called it “Dyer Street.”
Don’t be too disappointed about William Dyre, though. He has his own avenue. In fact I have a nearly irresistible urge to type “Dyre” in this piece because it’s familiar to #5 train riders as the station at the end of the line, way up in Baychester near the city line. The Bronx has a whole block of avenues named for colonial-era mayors, and Dyre is one of them.
More about Dyer Avenue in this FNY post from 2021.
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1/12/25
5 comments
Dyer Avenue in quieter times circa 1938
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-3837-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
In the old photos you can clearly see the very odd looking low pressure sodium light fixtures. These were the first generation low pressure sodium lights that became commercially available about 1932. 650 General Electric M-2 fixtures were used to give the golden glow to the the Golden Gate Bridge. Over 2500 of these fixtures were used on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway, making it the longest sodium vapor lighted highway in the USA. There were some articles in the Times detailing test installations on some Bronx streets, but the horrid yellow monochromatic light limited the use of these low pressure sodium lights to highways.
The problem with the first generation low pressure sodium lamps was that even twenty years after their introduction, GE had only managed to get life of the lamps up to four thousand hours, less than a years worth of street lighting service. Contrast that with mercury vapor lighting, also introduced about 1932, that had reached an average life of nine to twelve thousand hours by 1958.
About 1960 the Belt Parkway’s sodium fixtures were replaced with mercury luminaires. GE discontinued the manufacture of the original low pressure sodium lamps in the early 1970’s. The Golden Gate Bridge received replacement custom high pressure sodium fixtures with amber tinted lenses to simulate the color of the original lights.
When the Lincoln Tunnel was built and Dyer Avenue was created, it was named to follow the Manhattan grid system, with Avenues going north and south and streets going east and west. The same cannot be said of its cross-town cousin, the Queens -Midtown Tunnel. To provide access, a new thoroughfare was cut from East 35th Street to East 41st Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. To follow the norm, it would have been named “Tunnel Access Avenue” as it went north and south. The “powers-that-be” did not do that, however, and called it “Tunnel Access Street”, either in purposeful defiance, or out of total ignorance.
I find it interesting that it has an actual name despite only being made for going to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Pete, great “get”. Now, if one was sufficiently motivated, one could check “Gergle” Street View and see that at least two of those buildings on the left have somehow managed to survive, even today. Scrolling back through the available dates, one can see that the white-ish building (clipped by the right-hand frame in the right-hand shot) was with us into the 2010’s, but it, and anything else on the right, appears to have since vanished.