Finding your way to Featherbed Lane (below photo, 1910), in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, means passing some seen-better-days streets that offer a history lesson about the borough’s early years.

Jerome Avenue, where Featherbed Lane begins, was named for flashy Gilded Age financier Leonard Jerome, who built the Jerome Park Racetrack here in 1866. (Jerome’s striking daughter, Jennie, was Winston Churchill’s mother.)

Macombs Road stems from the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge, an 1890 replacement of an earlier rudimentary bridge built by Robet Macombs, a miller, that crossed the Harlem River to Manhattan.

University Avenue, on the western end of Featherbed Lane, comes from New York University, which moved its main campus here from Washington Square Park in 1894.

In the 1970s, NYU realized the appeal of Greenwich Village and hightailed it back downtown.

But Featherbed Lane (third photo, from 1925) isn’t named for a tycoon, a bridge, or a school. In fact the origin of this evocative name is something of a mystery—with several alluring explanations.

The first is simple: that “during the Revolution, the inhabitants living along this road contributed their feather beds for the use of the Patriots,” wrote James Lee Wells in his 1927 book, The Bronx and Its People.

By contributed, it sounds like Wells means that local residents lent their beds to weary Continental Army forces. During the war, the western Bronx was a “tense and contested borderland between Patriot and Loyalist territories,” stated The Riverdale Press in a 2025 article.

Another explanation has to do with the softness of the street, according to Wells. “A second is that the road was so spongy a material that to walk on it was like walking on a featherbed.” (Map, fourth image, 1901)

On the other hand, the roughness of this road could hold the answer, “that to secure any degree of comfort in driving over it, it was necessary to have a feather bed in the wagon for a seat—but that would answer equally well for all colonial roads,” adds Wells.

Forgotten New York offered a more official origin of the street name, citing a now-removed historical marker once located at the grassy triangle at Featherbed Lane and University Avenue.

“The plaque explained the origin of this unusually named street: So called from story that farmers’ wives, in 1776, aided Americans to escape British by spreading featherbeds on the lane,” per a 2023 post.

All of these sound like possible explanations. But there’s another more salacious reason for Featherbed Road’s name, and it has to do with the 19th century sex trade in this region not yet annexed to New York City.

“The last theory suggests that the name dates from the 1840s, when the area was home (and office) to many prostitutes,” according to NYC Parks. Think about it: The Croton Aqueduct was underway, and perhaps local streetwalkers benefited from the temporary population boost of hundreds of laborers.

For whatever reason, the name stuck—despite an effort to rename it with “something nice,” as an 1896 New York Herald article put it.

“Ancient Featherbed Lane, changed from an old woods trail to a brand-new macadamized, curbstone street . . . is threatened with a disaster that means utter obliteration of the historic interests of which it is now centre,” reported the Herald.

These days, winding, gritty, mysterious Featherbed Lane is graced by tables and benches at Featherbed Triangle. Across from the Triangle is the Featherbed Lane Presbyterian Church, a 1927 Georgian relic of worn red brick and peeling ionic columns.

A quick walk from Featherbed Lane lies another street with another unusual name: Shakespeare Avenue. Read the backstory of this hilly stretch here.

[Top image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: MCNY, X2010.11.6668; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections]