Why is Scoop Jackson’s Name on a New York City Playground?

Something curious popped out at me recently on Google Maps: the fact that Henry M. Jackson, U.S. Senator from Washington State for 30 years (1953-1983) and two-time presidential candidate (in 1972 and 1976), is immortalized by a public facility in New York City named in his honor: Henry M. Jackson Playground. It’s a former schoolyard equipped with basketball, volleyball and handball courts and something the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation describes as a “mini-running track,” which is hard to visualize.

This struck me as odd. Jackson, who died in 1983, was a man of many parts, but he was not especially noted for playfulness. It’s hard to imagine him on a basketball court, say, or playing four square. Dodgeball, maybe.

If the Democratic senator had any special connection to New York City, it seems to have gone unrecorded. He was born in Everett, where there’s understandably a city park named after him and in it the Senator H.M. Jackson Picnic Shelter complete with barbecue grill, apparently nameless. But as for New York, the young “Scoop,” as he was known, never went through a bohemian phase, hanging out in Greenwich Village and taking the A Train up to Harlem to hear Billie Holiday. He never moved out of his childhood home on Grand Avenue in Everett, but lived there with his unmarried sisters for several years.

And it’s not as though Jackson doesn’t have his name on a lot of other things besides a picnic shelter. There’s Henry M. Jackson High School, home of the Timberwolves, in Mill Creek, and of course The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, where a sculpted bust of the senator is on display outside. There’s a Henry Jackson Society and Henry M. Jackson Foundation, which funds efforts to limit global warming, defend human rights and promote “values-based leadership,” whatever that is. Bet you didn’t know about the Henry Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine, but maybe you’ve been to the Henry M. Jackson Visitor Center at Paradise in Rainier National Park. (Note that although the Trump administration has urged national park visitors to report woke signage to be rectified, buildings named for Democrats have not been targeted. Not yet.)

So what led the Big Apple to want to memorialize Scoop? The answer requires some historical context and an appreciation for the colorful quirkiness that New York City can accommodate, even among its leaders.

Jackson Playground is on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a district once crowded with immigrants who arrived in successive, desperate waves: Irish fleeing a potato famine and Germans avoiding the fallout from a failed revolution in the 1840s; southern Italians driven by grinding poverty; Chinese seeking work after California’s gold mines were played out and the transcontinental railroad was completed; Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution in such numbers that, by 1900, the Lower East Side was the most crowded neighborhood on the planet. This was back when the Statue of Liberty stood for something.

After World War II, much of the district was transformed by so-called urban renewal, i.e., slum clearance. Whole blocks of cramped tenements and other crumbling infrastructure were bulldozed, especially around where Jackson Playground is today. It’s in a quarter known as Cooperative Village, called that not because of the residents’ geniality so much as for their living arrangements, in high-rise housing cooperatives that line Grand Street just south of the Williamsburg Bridge as it nears the East River.

Here, four massive, brick co-op complexes comprise 4,500 apartments in 12 buildings, erected mostly in the 1950s by labor unions. Scoop’s playground is across Grand Street from a co-op originally sponsored by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and named after its founder, Sidney Hillman.

The co-ops were intended as affordable worker housing, but apartments there are not so affordable anymore. Beginning in the 1980s, all four co-ops abandoned their rules limiting the equity of owners, thereby allowing them to sell their apartments at market rates. Of course, prices skyrocketed, and the sort of residents for whom the co-ops were intended mostly moved on. To Florida, often. Their pieds-à-terre were taken over by the likes of Richard Fortus, a guitarist for the hard rock band Guns N’ Roses, and satirical novelist Gary Shteyngart. Both bought into the Seward Park Cooperative, two blocks from Jackson Playground, in the 2000s. They also have since moved away, but transient newcomers like them have stimulated further alterations to the surrounding streetscape. Where pushcarts and mini-synagogues once stood, there now are nail salons, bike shops, a Trader Joe’s and a Target discount department store. Such is progress.

The denaturing of the Lower East Side contrasts sharply with the historical charm across town in Greenwich Village, where preservationists—inspired by journalist Jane Jacobs and her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities—defeated development schemes put forward by planner Robert Moses, who wanted to put an expressway through the Village.

City planners who succeeded in leveling most everything on the Lower East Side may have felt a twinge of regret, not to say Jewish guilt, at wiping out large swaths of immigrant history. Maybe that’s why they named many of the area’s new plazas and other public facilities in honor of local heroes from the hallowed past, some of whom might have been forgotten entirely otherwise. For example, it seems that no one knows how a place next to Jackson Playground, Rheba Liebowitz Square, got its name, or precisely who Rheba was; in the words of one annotated list of the city’s many honorary squares, “Rheba is one of the last people on Earth to not exist on a Google search.”

Nearby is Samuel Dickstein Plaza, two blocks of Pitt Street renamed in 1963 after a member of Congress who represented the Lower East Side during the 1930s and early ‘40s. He was otherwise largely forgotten until 1999, long after his death, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and the files of Stalin’s secret police came to light, revealing that Dickstein while in Congress had been a well-paid Russian spy. This revelation provoked pleas from neighbors of Samuel Dickstein Plaza for the city to rescind the street’s designation as such, but the city has strict rules on such things, and the designation stands.

Trust me, we’re getting close to the origins of Jackson Playground.

Urban renewal created many new Lower East Side parks and playgrounds, which invariably were given eponymous names that illuminate the neighborhood’s colorful history. Within a few blocks of Jackson Playground, for example, is a park named for not one but two men named Luther Gulick—a physical education teacher who’s called “the godfather of basketball” (although the sport’s patrimony is disputed) and his nephew, an exponent of scientific management in government.

Then there’s Lillian D. Wald Playground, after the nurse and social reformer who founded an early social-services agency, Henry Street Settlement, for immigrants. Ahearn Park is named for John Ahearn, a state legislator and Tammany Hall sachem known for “his intense political game-playing,” as the city’s parks department delicately puts it. Ahearn was Rep. Samuel Dickstein’s Tammany Hall sponsor.

What is now Jackson Playground was a schoolyard until it was opened to the public in 1978, but it stood out until 1997 as a glaring exception to the well-established tradition of naming such spaces after someone. That it came to be named for Scoop, despite his lack of local connections, is entirely the doing of one man, Henry J. Stern. He stood out as an unusually colorful character in a city full of them, and he had a quirky passion for naming.

A New York City native, Stern “entered Harvard Law School at 19, and he can instantly spout the square root of almost any number,” noted The New York Times. He was elected twice to the New York City Council, which had the power to name streets and where Stern came up with his first park name, Strawberry Fields, for a now-famous spot in Central Park.

He did two stints as the city’s Commissioner of Parks and Recreation for a total of 15 years under Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani. Those two could be oddballs, but Stern, who died in 2019, stood out as a truly inspired kook. One of his noteworthy acts was dressing up as a tree and having himself planted. Other parks commissioners might have had 10,000 trees labeled with their common and Latin names, as Stern did, but he did not stop there, as The Times reported in 1998:

So far, he has bestowed 3,327 nicknames, which he refers to as noms du parc, on everybody from Donald Trump (Tower) to park volunteers to welfare workers assigned to the parks to himself (Starquest). He has given new names to parks, including Triangle of the Cat, a traffic median at Garfield Avenue in Queens. He is erecting historical signs at parks, one of which includes a critique of the quality of puns told by a farmer who died 170 years ago.

The newspaper said Stern was searching in the Greek neighborhood of Astoria for traffic islands to name Isosceles and Pythagoras Triangles. “Henny Youngman did one-liners,” he said. “I try to do one-worders.”

In the matter of naming Henry M. Jackson Playground, Stern may have been influenced by Scoop’s authorship of the National Environmental Policy Act, his strong support for Israel or his efforts to help Jews emigrate from the Soviet bloc. I have found no evidence of that. Stern and his department explained that his choice was based on the names of the streets surrounding the playground. They are Henry Street, named for Henry Rutgers, a Revolutionary War patriot; Madison Street, after U.S. President James Madison; and Jackson Street, after President Andrew Jackson.

A spoilsport might point out that Scoop’s middle name was not Madison but Martin. I will not do that.