The city giveth, and the city taketh away. So it was that Edward I. Koch received a bridge on Monday, and Dr. Theodore L. Kazimiroff lost a boulevard.
Dr. Kazimiroff, to the unacquainted, was a dentist, naturalist, amateur archaeologist and the first official historian of the Bronx. He once, legend has it, extracted a tooth from the mouth of a live lion in the Bronx Zoo.
Until Monday, he was also the namesake of a few scenic blocks of Bronx thoroughfare running along and through the New York Botanical Garden, a stretch officially known as Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff Boulevard since 1981.
Three decades of posterity came to an ignominious end when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, hours before he added Mr. Koch’s name to the Queensboro Bridge, signed a bill that stripped Dr. Kazimiroff, who died in 1980, of his street and restored the historic name of Southern Boulevard. [NYTimes.com]
I guess if Dr. Kazimiroff’s name was Smith or Jones, or some other easier name that that weird guy at the Botanical Garden could spell, the sign wouldn’t be changed. This is clearly a case of name discrimination, and there is no room for this in a city that is as diversified as ours. After 30 years, someone not mentioned in the article is having a problem with the name Kazimiroff ? There’s some sort of weird politics involved here, the sort that goes along well with the lifestyle of that weird guy at the Botanical Garden.