A Road by Any Other Name

By the end of their first year, most Harvard students can quickly rattle off the streets which cross Massachusetts Avenue south of the yard. Dunster, Holyoke, Linden, Plympton, Bow. A recent proposal by the Cambridge City Council would add a new name to the list: Halberstam.

A proposed renaming of Plympton Street would honor the journalist David L. Halberstam ’55, who died last year. Halberstam, a former managing editor of The Crimson, is no small figure in history. He covered the Civil Rights movement for The New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the early Vietnam War, and he wrote more than 20 books before he died in a car crash on the way to an interview almost a year ago. But changing the name of Plympton Street to honor this great man is neither fitting nor appropriate.

Though the name itself may not reference anyone significant from recent memory, like John F. Kennedy Street or even Dunster Street, Plympton has come to take on a meaning due to its association with what has happened there since 1875, when the street was first named. Located in the heart of the Harvard campus, the Harvard Book Store, The Harvard Crimson, The Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine, and five Houses (Adams, Quincy, Lowell, Leverett and Winthrop) touch the street. The name of the street, just like the name of one of the residential halls, is part of their shared history.

In addition, the affective attachment that residents and Crimson editors alike have developed to the name Plympton is itself significant. The president and managing editor of The Crimson have both gone on the record against the name change, and the sentimental fondness for Plympton that many other residents feel, while certainly not as significant as Halberstam’s legacy, should not be ignored.

Name changes are also generally a hassle and an expense. Aside from the obvious costs to the government for new street signs and official maps, Harvard, The Crimson, and businesses on the street would needlessly have to spend money and resources orienting customers and students to the new name. The hassle of dealing with at least a year of confused freshmen who need to find their way around when the street is referred to by two names is reason enough against it.

The landmark Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Plympton, a former hangout for poets like E. E. Cummings ’15, T. S. Eliot ’10 and Allen Ginsberg and one of only two for-profit poetry-only stores in the country, would have to spend money changing all of their mailing labels and packaging, and it may at first lose customers who have trouble finding the street with a different name. It could be enough to put the struggling bookstore, which was sold in 2006 after losing money for two years, out of business.

There are certainly other ways to honor Halberstam, as well as other journalists and Crimson alumni who deserve to be honored, as Halberstam’s wife pointed out in an interview. Halberstam himself would not be happy to know that a tribute to his memory would also snub his peers and possibly put a landmark out of business. A lover of tradition according to those who worked with him, he would probably have wanted to leave things the way they are.