{"id":377833,"date":"2026-10-20T12:04:07","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T12:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/377833\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T12:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T12:04:07","slug":"why-nyc-just-named-a-street-after-nathaniel-hawthornes-daughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/377833\/","title":{"rendered":"Why NYC just named a street after Nathaniel Hawthorne\u2019s daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

At 45, after terrible losses of her own, Rose Hawthorne began opening her home to strangers with cancer.<\/p>\n

New Yorkers are pretty used to walking past street signs bearing the names of famous people, but anyone passing the corner of East 68th Street and First Avenue might want to look up at the latest one. Rose Hawthorne Way<\/a> has just arrived in Manhattan, and the woman behind the name had the sort of life that makes you wonder why you may not have heard of her before.<\/p>\n

The location itself reveals part of the story. Today, some of the world’s most advanced cancer care takes place just steps from the new street sign. Yet 130 years ago, when Rose began caring for poor people with cancer, patients without money or family could find themselves left to fend for themselves and face death alone.<\/p>\n

In fact, the renaming of the street took place on the anniversary of the day her work began. On October 1, 1896, Rose welcomed her first cancer patient into her home, setting in motion what would eventually become the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne. She was 45 years old, and the path that had brought her to that first patient was borne through personal tragedy.<\/p>\n

An unlikely nurse<\/p>\n

Rose Hawthorne was hardly an obvious candidate for the life she chose at 45. The daughter of The Scarlet Letter author Nathaniel Hawthorne, she had grown up between America and Europe in a family where writers, artists and intellectuals were part of the scenery. She was married to another writer, George Lathrop, and had written and published herself.<\/p>\n

But Rose’s privileged beginnings offered little protection from what came later. Her only child, Francis, died of diphtheria before his fifth birthday, and her marriage to Lathrop became increasingly difficult as he struggled with alcoholism. Although the couple had converted to Catholicism in 1891, they eventually separated in 1895.<\/p>\n

Rose had every reason to be consumed by what had happened in her own life. Yet somehow, in the middle of all that pain, she was still looking outward.<\/p>\n

She learned about a poor seamstress with cancer who had been sent to the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island because she had nowhere else to go, and the woman’s situation affected her deeply. Rose began looking more closely at what happened to New York’s poorest cancer patients and discovered people facing a terrifying illness with little money, little care and sometimes nobody to accompany them. So she decided to do something about it.<\/p>\n

As a middle-aged woman, Rose trained as a nurse at New York Cancer Hospital and began caring for people with incurable cancer herself. As she later shared<\/a>: <\/p>\n

A fire was then lighted in my heart, where it still burns. . . I set my whole being to endeavor to bring consolation to the cancerous poor.<\/p>\n

From one patient to many<\/p>\n

On October 1, 1896, all that determination finally came to bear fruit. Rose welcomed her first patient, a homeless woman suffering from cancer of the face, into the rooms she had rented on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She needed nursing, certainly, but she also needed somewhere to belong, and Rose gave her both.<\/p>\n

Soon there were more knocks at the door. More patients came, and so did women willing to roll up their sleeves and help Rose care for them. Nobody was charged, no matter how long they stayed or how much care they needed, and what had begun with one woman and a few rented rooms gradually grew into something far bigger.<\/p>\n

In 1900, Rose became Mother Mary Alphonsa and founded the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, dedicating the rest of her life to the people she had once been told had nowhere to go. She continued the work until her death in 1926, but the door she opened never really closed: the sisters still care for people with incurable cancer today, without charging patients or their families.<\/p>\n

Almost a century after her death, in 2024, Pope Francis declared Rose venerable, moving her cause for sainthood forward. And now New York has given her another, rather different, honor.<\/p>\n

Her father’s name has been printed on millions of book covers; Rose’s is now on a street sign beside one of the world’s best-known cancer hospitals. For a woman who, at 45, decided that being poor should never mean having to face cancer and death alone, Rose Hawthorne Way seems exactly where her name belongs.<\/p>\n

Read about the latest trial her sisters are facing:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At 45, after terrible losses of her own, Rose Hawthorne began opening her home to strangers with cancer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":["post-377833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377833","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=377833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}