## Her Name on the Street
In 2007, a block of Park Row — at the junction with Spruce Street, in lower Manhattan, near the area where Elizabeth Jennings boarded the fateful Third Avenue Railroad car in 1854 — was co-named “Elizabeth Jennings Place.” The campaign to rename the street was led by students at P.S. 361, which is itself a testament to the role of educational communities in recovering and honoring this history.
The renaming was a 153-year-delayed acknowledgment of what happened in the neighborhood in 1854 and what came of it. It placed her name on a physical location in the city where her story unfolded, making her absence from the city’s everyday commemorative landscape at least partially less complete.
Amy Hill Hearth published a biography, “Streetcar to Justice,” in 2018. Jerry Mikorenda published “America’s First Freedom Rider” in 2019. The biographies reflect a renewed scholarly and popular interest in Elizabeth Jennings’s story, an interest that has been building as historians have worked to recover the lives of people whose contributions to American history were underrepresented in earlier accounts.
In 2019, New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray announced a planned statue of Elizabeth Jennings near Grand Central Terminal, as part of a broader initiative to add statues of women to the city’s public spaces. The status of that project as of this writing — whether it has been completed, is under construction, or remains planned — requires verification against current sources; proposed public art projects move at variable speeds and are sometimes delayed or altered.