The Honor of Co-named Streets

People have been honored here in New York with co-naming of streets or places for them. Look for the special green signs below the regular street signs and check out nycstreets.info/honorstreet

Margaret Sanger Square

The intersection of Bleecker Street and Mott Street once honored Margaret Higgins Sanger (1879-1966), a public health nurse who witnessed countless women die of self-inflicted or back-alley abortions. In 1916 she opened America’s first birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. It was shut down nine days later and Sanger was charged with obscenity and jailed for 30 days. After decades of further legal battles, her clinic eventually became part of Planned Parenthood of New York City and in April 1992, PPNYC moved its headquarters to 26 Bleecker Street at the termination of Mott Street.

Sanger drew a sharp distinction between birth control and abortion and was opposed to abortions throughout the bulk of her professional career, declining to participate in them as a nurse. She believed that while abortion might be a viable option in life-threatening situations, it should generally be avoided. Given the connection between contraception and working-class empowerment, Sanger came to believe that only by liberating women from the risk of unwanted pregnancy would fundamental social change take place. She launched a campaign to challenge governmental censorship of contraceptive information through confrontational actions. Sanger remains a prominent figure in the American reproductive rights and feminist movements. She did not tolerate bigotry among her staff, nor would she tolerate any refusal to work within interracial projects.

Margaret Sanger Square was designated by the city in 1993. Sanger has since been criticized for supporting eugenics, although some historians believe her support of negative eugenics, a popular stance at that time, was a rhetorical tool rather than a personal conviction. In 2020, Planned Parenthood disavowed Sanger, citing her past record with eugenics and racism, despite opposing interpretations of her work.  In 2021 the New York City Council approved the removal of the street sign marking Margaret Sanger Square.

Her writings, The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, are curated by New York University and Smith College. The Margaret Sanger Clinic at 17 West 16th Street in Chelsea, where she provided birth-control services in New York in the mid-twentieth century was designated a New York City Landmark in 1976 and a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

Historic texts from Wikipedia and http://www.nycstreets.info; Photo by Brian J. Pape, AIA.