N.Y. state Sen. James Skoufis (D-Woodbury) is pushing to restore the original name to Tappan Zee Bridge after it was renamed by disgraced New York governor (and former presidential aspirant) Andrew Cuomo in homage to his late father, Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Bring back the Tappan Zee Bridge!
There's a relevant, unknown, backstory published by a columnist for the now-defunct Albany Knickerbocker evening News some 40 years ago. Long forgotten, but the column was about one of my early exploits. ... I, only, am escaped alone to tell thee.
I grew up in the capital of New York State, dear Albany, before decamping to Washington, D.C., to join the Reagan Revolution. By virtue of some good old-fashioned honest political graft, I was friendly with several operatives within the esteemed Corning Democratic political organization.
Mayor Erastus Corning II had helped Mario Cuomo appropriate the gubernatorial election fair and square from my political mentor, Lewis E. Lehrman.
Shortly after Mario Cuomo was elected governor, I ran into my favorite Albany Democratic operative, the distinguished Dennis Ryan, browsing beside me in the Bryn Mawr used bookstore. I had been a senior operative for Lehrman in the recently concluded, Lehrman-Cuomo gubernatorial race.
Mario had won by a nose. Plain as the nose on Mayor Corning's face.
Hey, just politics. Nothing personal!
Side by side with Dennis, I observed that "The 'South Mall' was officially named after the governor who had engineered it, the Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza. In the creation of the Republican Rocky's 'Edifice Complex' was a strange-bedfellows ally, Democratic Mayor Corning.
Continuing:
"Mayor was an instrumental factor in Mario Cuomo's election as governor. The tallest building of the Plaza, the tallest skyscraper between New York and Montreal, is just called the Tower Building. Why not ask the governor to rename it in honor of Mayor, while Mayor is still alive to enjoy the tribute."
"Fine idea," said Dennis, a true blue Corning loyalist. "I'll call the governor's secretary tomorrow." Sure enough, the very next week Gov. Cuomo held a press conference announcing the naming of the Tower Building to be renamed the Erastus Corning Tower.
That was an honor that Mayor Corning had doubly earned, both by his role in the Plaza's creation and by his valuable political alliance with Mario Cuomo. The renaming of the Tappan Zee Bridge for Mario, however, was a horse of a different color.
The Tappan Zee name is a name imbued with local history. It pays homage to the Tappan Indians and to the region's early Dutch settlers. It also is strikingly mellifluous.
They commenced building this three mile span in the very year of my birth, 1952. Mario, then age 20, and had nothing to do with it. It thus would be more fitting for Andrew to have renamed it the Ralph Benko Bridge in homage to my glorious birth.
However, in all humility, my vote, if I had one, would be to stick with the name Tappan Zee Bridge.
The rebuilding of the bridge began in 2013, almost 20 years after Gov. Mario Cuomo had left office, and was completed in 2017, two years after his death. Unlike the naming of the Tower Building after Erastus Corning, the man in whose homage it was renamed had nothing to do with building this structure.
The renaming of the Tappan Zee bridge in honor of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's late father was not an earned honor. It was an act of stark political nepotism.
Few New Yorkers and former New Yorkers (like me) would ever accuse any Cuomo, including Mario, of humility. That said, Cuomo-père had a finer sense of appropriateness than that of Cuomo-fils.
I contend that Mario would have been embarrassed at being given this unearned honor. Gov. Mario Cuomo was a noble soul. Our one encounter, in which I handed him a copy of supply-side swami Jude Wanniski's watershed book "The Way the World Works," which he instantly recognized as Jack Kemp's inspiration, was affable.
Mario Cuomo made real contributions to politics and history. Just ... nothing about a bridge.
Stealing the name Tappan Zee from off this bridge was a slight to the Lenape Tappan tribe who lived in the Hudson Palisades. It's a slap to the memory of New York's Dutch colonists who named this portion of the Hudson the Tappan Zee (Dutch for sea). And it is a cultural slight to Washington Irving, who mentions the Tappan Zee repeatedly in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
Let the State of New York now do justice rather than wallow in the wake of political nepotism rooted in Aaron Burr's noble Tammany (named in homage to the Lenape Chief of Chiefs and Chief of the Turtle Clan!) Hall tradition.
Restore the name Tappan Zee Bridge!
Ralph Benko, co-author of "The Capitalist Manifesto" and chairman and co-founder of "The Capitalist League," is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply-Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $94T. Read Ralph Benko's reports — More Here.
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