Bennett Park In The Heights Is Getting Renamed By The End Of 2021

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, NY — For the first time, the New York City Parks Department announced that Washington Height's Bennett Park will be renamed in 2021.

The news about the renaming of the park at West 183rd Street and Fort Washington Avenue was one sentence in a bigger announcement from Parks about renaming 16 sites across the city in honor of the Black experience in NYC.

"The planned renaming is responsive to community and local community board requests for Parks to rename Bennett Park in honor of its indigenous history," a Parks Department spokesperson told Patch.

Conversation around renaming the Upper Manhattan park has circulated for years due to its namesake James Gordon Bennett. Bennett was the publisher of the New York Herald newspaper during the middle part of the 19th century and used the platform to push racist and segregationist views during the American Civil War.

In a Community Board 12 meeting about renaming Bennett Park — an agenda for the session read — "Given James Gordon Bennett's history of racism and racially inflammatory journalism, there is local interest in renaming Bennett Park."

The New York City Fire Department stripped Bennett's name from one of its highest honors in September 2020.

For more than a century, the James Gordon Bennett Medal was given to firefighters who performed incredibly heroic acts. However, it was changed two months ago to the Chief Peter J. Ganci medal, in honor of the highest-ranking uniformed member of the FDNY killed in the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The FDNY also cited Bennett's racist rhetoric as the reason for the change.

The specific timing for Bennett Park's renaming hasn't been defined yet, nor has a new name been chosen.