A TC Style Change: Officially North Moore
I hate typing periods when I don’t have to, and for all these years in the neighborhood, though I *said* North Moore, I always typed N. Moore in deference to the lore of Nathaniel Moore. Well, no more. (get it?) I am resurrecting a TC post on the matter from a decade ago as well as a New York Times deep dive from none other than David Dunlap.
It’s North Moore and so it shall stay.
In 1984, The Times interviewed six people about the topic, including our own Hal Broom and James Stratton, one of the founders of Puffy’s. The verdict: it was named North Moore to distinguish it from the Moore Street that runs one block between Water and Pearl, which was indeed named for a famous Moore — Benjamin Moore, father of Clement Clarke, Episcopal Bishop of New York, rector of Trinity Church and president of Kings College (the birthname of Columbia). Nathaniel Moore never amounted to much, and indeed he was 7 years old when the street was named.
In the ’80s, a number of city maps and documents identified the street as Nathaniel Moore, and the Board of Estimate — a citywide governing body that was abolished in 1990 by the US Supreme Court — approved resolutions using the name Nathaniel. But they were misguided. The Times confirmed this with the Department of City Planning, an archivist for Trinity Church, a curator of Columbiana at Columbia University, and they city’s corporation counsel.
“It’s just a housekeeping aberration,” Hadley W. Gold, the first assistant corporation counsel, told the Times with a shake of his head. “N means North where I come from.”
