Fiorello La Guardia was a great mayor of New York — he even has an airport named after him — but he made some boneheaded errors. Some years after the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan was razed, La Guardia and the city council decided to rehabilitate the neighborhoods around the thorough-fare, which had become run down from hosting the elevated train. And so, in October 1945, they officially rebranded Sixth Avenue as Avenue of the Americas. City planners must have found the cosmopolitan-sounding name exciting. New York City was emerging as the global capital, on the cusp of the American Century: home to the new United Nations and soaring International Style skyscrapers, a hub of commerce, a dynamo of artistic creativity. But this act of renaming by fiat, against the grain of public opinion, failed spectacularly. A survey ten years later found that, by a margin of 8 to 1, New Yorkers still called the street Sixth Avenue. “You tell someone anything but ‘Sixth Avenue,’” a salesman explained to the New York Times, “and he’ll get lost.” Generations of visitors have noticed signs that still say “Avenue of the Americas” and wondered fleetingly about its genesis and meaning, but for anyone to say it out loud today would clearly mark him as a rube. Names change for many reasons. While designing Washington, DC in the late eighteenth century, Pierre L’Enfant renamed the local Goose Creek after Rome’s Tiber River. It was a bid for grandeur that earned him mainly ridicule. After Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes saw fit to cleanse federal public works of association with the most unpopular man in America, making the Hoover Dam into the Boulder Dam. With independence in 1965, Rhodesia ditched its hated eponym to become Zimbabwe, and its capital, Salisbury, became Harare. When it was conquered by the Viet Cong in 1975, Saigon was reintroduced as Ho Chi Minh City, however propagandistic the appellation still sounds. On Christmas Eve, 1963, Idlewild Airport became JFK. In 2000, Beaver College, tired of the jokes, chose to call itself Arcadia. (Et in Beaver ego.) Even old New York was once New Amsterdam. Like the misbegotten Avenue of the Americas moniker, though, new names do not always stick. Who but a travel agent calls National Airport “Reagan”? Where besides its website is the New York Public Library known as “the Schwartzman Building”? In 2017, the Tappan Zee Bridge formally became the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, thanks to its namesake’s son, but everyone still calls it the Tappan Zee. (Few knew that for the thirteen years prior it had been named for former New York governor Malcolm Wilson; in fact, few knew that someone called Malcolm Wilson had been governor.) Everyone also still calls the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge the Triborough and the Ed Koch Bridge the Queensborough. Political events prompt changes, too. When in 1917 German aggression forced the United States into World War I, atlases were summarily revised. Potsdam, Missouri became Pershing. Brandenburg, Texas, became Old Glory. Berlin, Georgia became Lens — but after the war, with the rush to rehabilitate Germany, it reverted to Berlin. (During the next world war this Berlin declined to change its name again, though 250 miles to the northwest Berlin, Alabama rechristened itself Sardis.) In 1924, the Bolsheviks saddled splendid St. Petersburg with the chilling sobriquet Leningrad — “after the man who brought us seventy years of misery,” as tour-bus guides tell their passengers. Only with Communism’s demise could city residents reclaim their old appellation. The revision — and re-revision — of place names is thus a common enterprise. But how and why those in control choose to re-label streets, cities, schools, parks, bridges, airports, dams, and other institutions has always been a strange, unsystematic process — subject to changing social norms, political fashions, historical revisionism, interest-group pressure, the prerogatives of power, consistent inconsistency, and human folly. The current craze for a new public nomenclature, in other words, is far from the straight-forward morality play it is often made out to be. How we think about it and how we go about it deserve more deliberation than those questions have received. 
Today’s nomenclature battles mostly turn on a specific set of questions: about race and the historical treatment of non-white peoples. Every day, in the United States and abroad, new demands arise to scrub places, institutions, and events of the designations of men and women who were once considered heroes but whose complicity (real or alleged) in racist thoughts or deeds is now said to make them unworthy of civic recognition. Not only confederate generals, upholders of slavery, and European imperialists are having their time in the barrel. So too are figures with complex and even admirable legacies, as diverse as Christopher Columbus and George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, Junipero Serra and Charles Darwin, David Hume and Margaret Sanger — even, although it sounds like parody, Mohandas K. Gandhi. What has led us to set so many august and estimable figures, along with the more flagrantly reprehensible ones, on the chopping block? It helps to look at the criteria being invoked for effacement. To be sure, advocates of renaming seldom set forth clear, careful, and consistent sets of principles at all. Typically, the arguments are ad hoc, each one anchored in some statement, belief, political stance, or action of the indicted individual, the wrongness of which is presumed to be self-evident. But occasionally over the years, governmental committees, university panels, or other bodies have gamely tried to articulate some criteria. Their language is telling. One body that recently made plain its standards for naming was a Washington, D.C. mayoral “working group” with the ungainly label “DCFACES.” (An ungainly name is an inauspicious quality in a body seeking to retitle streets and buildings.) That acronym stands for the equally ungainly “District of Columbia Facilities and Commemorative Expressions.” In the summer of 2020, DCFACES released a report declaring that any historical figure would be “disqualified” from
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