Rant: Please Stop Renaming Queens' Bridges, Mayor Bloomberg!

The 101-year old iconic Queensborough Bridge is now "The Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge". What?! Why?!

The City Council voted to rename the Queensborough/59th Street Bridge after former NYC Mayor Ed Koch last Wednesday. Mayor Bloomberg first announced plans to rename the bridge in honor of Koch's 86th birthday last December, but no one thought it would actually happen... until it did. 

Borough representatives and residents have since expressed their outrage and disapproval of the new name. Regardless of one's feelings about Koch's 1978-1989 terms as Mayor, Queens supporters and the majority of New Yorkers (according to several polls) believe the change is inappropriate and disrespectful to a borough that is already too often overlooked and forgotten.

Although the bridge connects millions of New Yorkers from Long Island City to 59th Street in Manhattan and back everyday, no one would ever dare think about renaming the Brooklyn Bridge or the Manhattan Bridge. So, why the exception for the Queensborough Bridge? For absolutely no reason at all, except for the fact that Mayor Bloomberg would like to give Ed Koch a nice gift for his 86th birthday.

We've already lost the fittingly named Triborough Bridge (which connects Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan) to the name "The Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Bridge" in 2008, although no one actually calls it by the new name anyway. In this case, the aesthetic change came with an economic one, as the city had to spend $4 million to rename it and added a hiked up toll fare. Who knows how much Ed Koch's signs will cost us? At least his name is a bit shorter.

What did Ed Koch and Robert F. Kennedy do specifically for Queens, anyway? The borough saw no improvements or enhancements from their direct actions, so why should their names be tacked on to our arches? Why should inanimate structures be named after human beings at all? It simply takes too long to say... in the fastest city in the world.

Mayor Bloomberg, please don't mind the 3 million people that live in Queens who won't care at all that their tax dollars keep going toward millions spent on reprinting maps and road signs and not towards improving the quality of life in their surroundings. It doesn't matter at all. The people don't matter at all. Please change our entire borough name while you're at it. Just for kicks, you know?