![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/featherbedlanejeromeave1910nypl.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nJerome Avenue, where Featherbed Lane begins, was named for flashy Gilded Age financier Leonard Jerome<\/a>, who built the Jerome Park Racetrack here in 1866. (Jerome\u2019s striking daughter, Jennie, was Winston Churchill\u2019s mother.)<\/p>\n Macombs Road stems from the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge, an 1890 replacement of an earlier rudimentary bridge<\/a> built by Robet Macombs, a miller,<\/a> that crossed the Harlem River to Manhattan.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n In the 1970s, NYU realized the appeal of Greenwich Village and hightailed it back downtown.<\/p>\n But Featherbed Lane (third photo, from 1925) isn\u2019t named for a tycoon, a bridge, or a school. In fact the origin of this evocative name is something of a mystery\u2014with several alluring explanations.<\/p>\n The first is simple: that \u201cduring the Revolution, the inhabitants living along this road contributed their feather beds for the use of the Patriots,\u201d wrote James Lee Wells in his 1927 book, The Bronx and Its People<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u201ctense and contested borderland between Patriot and Loyalist territories,\u201d stated The Riverdale Press<\/a> in a 2025 article.<\/p>\n Another explanation has to do with the softness of the street, according to Wells. \u201cA second is that the road was so spongy a material that to walk on it was like walking on a featherbed.\u201d (Map, fourth image, 1901)<\/p>\n On the other hand, the roughness of this road could hold the answer, \u201cthat to secure any degree of comfort in driving over it, it was necessary to have a feather bed in the wagon for a seat\u2014but that would answer equally well for all colonial roads,\u201d adds Wells.<\/p>\n Forgotten New York offered<\/a> a more official origin of the street name, citing a now-removed historical marker once located at the grassy triangle at\u00a0Featherbed Lane and University Avenue. <\/p>\n \u201cThe plaque explained the origin of this unusually named street:\u00a0So called from story that farmers\u2019 wives, in 1776, aided Americans to escape British by spreading featherbeds on the lane,\u201d per a 2023 post<\/a>.<\/p>\n All of these sound like possible explanations. But there\u2019s another more salacious reason for Featherbed Road\u2019s name, and it has to do with the 19th century sex trade in this region not yet annexed to New York City.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last theory suggests that the name dates from the 1840s, when the area was home (and office) to many prostitutes,\u201d according to NYC Parks<\/a>. Think about it: The Croton Aqueduct was underway, and perhaps local streetwalkers benefited from the temporary population boost of hundreds of laborers.<\/p>\n For whatever reason, the name stuck\u2014despite an effort to rename it with \u201csomething nice,\u201d as an 1896 New York Herald<\/a> article put it.<\/p>\n \u201cAncient 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,\u201d reported the Herald.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n A quick walk from Featherbed Lane lies another street with another unusual name: Shakespeare Avenue. Read the backstory<\/a> of this hilly stretch here.<\/p>\n [Top image: NYPL Digital Collections<\/a>; third image: MCNY, X2010.11.6668<\/a>; fourth image: NYPL Digital Collections<\/a>] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Finding your way to Featherbed Lane (below photo, 1910), in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, means…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-287774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n