Although he’s a ubiquitous figure from mid-November until December 26th, little’s known of the daily existence of Santa Claus, who brings toys to good children every Christmas Eve by dragging his bulk, accompanied by sacks full of trinkets, down chimneys, even in homes that have no chimneys. We know that his mode of transport will please environmentalists as no oil had to be fracked out of the earth’s mantle to power his chosen mode of transport; instead, he employs eight, sometimes nine, reindeer, beasts found in northern Scandinavia. Our knowledge of Mr. Claus comes mainly from the art of Thomas Nast, the poetry of Clement Clarke Moore, and the music of singing cowboy Gene Autry. But what is Mr. Claus’ story? How was he appointed this role? Who owns his factory, purported by legend to be north of the Arctic Circle? How is it funded?
The legends abound. A fourth-century Greek bishop, Saint Nicholas of Myra, acquired the reputation of generosity that continued over the centuries until the Dutch built a further legend and contracted his name to “Sinterklaas,” and the British further adjusted this name and spelling to English pronunciation. The tradition spread to the States, and the three mages mentioned above crystallized the legend. However, many think that Mr. Claus walks the earth still; in the 1880s, Virginia O’Hanlon knew it and NY Sun editor Francis Church confirmed it. Mr. Claus, however, has remained totally resistant to modern media as the centuries have passed. He’s never appeared in the pages of Vanity Fair, on the sets of Kimmel, or on the internet domains of Facebook or Twitter. For Mr. Claus, mystery is his greatest advantage.
While Mr. Claus has repeatedly been purported to have been seen coming “right down Santa Claus Lane,” no street of that name exists within the five boroughs of New York City. However there are a scattering of streets around town that remind one of Christmas, the anniversary of Jesus Christ’s birth that inspired Claus’ generosity.
There’s a loose logic to the naming of the north-south avenues in Bushwick and Ridgewood that hark back to the Dutch colonial era. There’s St. Nicholas Ave. as well as Knickerbocker and Onderdonk Aves., as well as Irving Ave., which came along later on; it was named for Washington Irving, who wrote about Ichabod Crane and Rip Van Winkle, figures in Dutch Colonial New Amsterdam: originally Hamburg Ave., it was renamed because of anti-German sentiment during World War I.
Above, we see some of the “street art” that appears on the rubric “Bushwick Collective” that centers around the junction of St. Nicholas Ave. and Troutman St. In this case, the spray can Van Goghs have repainted the name of a previous business, Putnam & Company, though the copy beneath the first line has been allowed to continue to fade.
Saint Nicholas, despite his Greek origins, is especially revered in northern Europe. He was the patron saint of New Amsterdam, the colony established by the Dutch in the 1620s, and the name of the first church established in the colony. St. Nicholas Ave., which zigs and zags around northern Manhattan from Central Park to Inwood, partially overlays an older road that was once a Native-American trail but later employed by colonists and named Kingsbridge Rd. as it led to the toll bridge spanning Spuyten Duyvil and now is honored by innumerable Bronx neighborhoods. The routes of St. Nicholas Ave. and W. 125th St. were also laid out in addition to the preexisting older road, which became “St. Nicholas Avenue” in 1901 in the same spate of renaming that produced Columbus, Amsterdam and West End Aves., which had previously been 9th, 10th and 11th Aves.
There are two other streets named for St. Nicholas in Manhattan: St. Nicholas Terrace, which runs along the west side of St. Nicholas Park, and St. Nicholas Pl., uptown at W. 155th near where the Polo Grounds had been.
The word “noel” is derived from the French word for “birth,” ultimately from the Latin; English employs the root in the words “native” and even “natural.” It has over the centuries been employed to mean Christmas carols and by extrapolation, the holiday itself. Oddly, the word is two syllables in this context, and as a man’s name, just one. The feminine form keeps the two syllables.
In Brooklyn, Noel Ave. is way down there: it’s in the south end of Gerritsen Beach, the insular neighborhood tucked between Marine Park and Shell Bank Creek, the waterline pictured here. Here, Noel Ave. interrupts a set of streets named in alphabetical order, from Abbey Ct/, Beacon Ct., through the M street, Madoc Ave. Noel Ave. appears between the F and G courts, Frank and Gain. Gerritsen Beach is divided into two halves by a creek inlet, with only Gerritsen Ave. connecting them.
Back up north we go, this time to northern Bushwick, in a warren of streets south of Flushing Ave. and east of Bushwick Ave. in the heart of Brooklyn’s old Brewery District. The gargantuan Denizen Bushwick houses, seen here, sit on the former plot of the Rheingold Brewery, on Noll St. and Flushing Ave. The now-defunct brand sponsored Mets games in the 1960s and 1970s.
Broad Channel’s only two churches, St. Virgilius Roman Catholic and Christ Presbyterian are a half block away from each other on Noel Rd. and Church Rd. The Catholic church and school are modest buildings dating to 1924. The St. Virgilius convent, which appears similar to a regular residential building save for the presence of a cross above the front door, is a few blocks away at Noel and Lanark Rds. St. Virgilius merged with St. Camillus on the peninsula in 2008; when Christ Presbyterian was damaged by fire and storms, St. Virgilius welcomed its congregation.
The positioning of Noel Rd. is unusual, as it’s the only named east-west road in Broad Channel. The island has its own street numbering system independent from the rest of Queens (as does the Rockaway peninsula) with East and West roads from one through 22, divided into east and west sectors by Cross Bay Blvd. However Noel Rd. runs east and west between 7th and 8th (see the Google map). How did this come about? That’s another mystery.
Noel St. runs for a few blocks in southeast Staten Island in Eltingville and Woods of Arden north of Hylan Blvd. and close to several protected nature parks including Blue Heron and Arbutus Woods. Also nearby is the historic Frederick Law Olmsted House, currently under renovation into a public space. This is a pleasant residential area with some new housing like that shown here.
The Bronx entry in the Christmas streets category (and with that spelling, it’s stretching it) is dead-end Noell Ave., found on Tillotson Ave. just west of the busy Conner St. on the edge of Co-Op City. The dead end borders a car wash attracting motorists with a giant hand and a warehouse.
The city once had bigger plans for Noell Ave., mapping it in 1949 through what became Freedomland and is now Co-Op City but was then planned for the never-built Curtiss Airport. In 1949, all the streets in the area existed only on paper.
Merry Christmas!
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)