In Jam on Van Wyck? Try to Say It Right
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
The Van Wyck Expressway. For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, the highway poses a phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks.
By DAN BILEFSKY
Published: May 25, 2011
New York Times
Localization, LLC Translation Services
For most New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors, the Van Wyck Expressway is a notorious traffic hazard that induces high blood pressure among travelers trying to get to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport.
For most New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors, the Van Wyck Expressway is a notorious traffic hazard that induces high blood pressure among travelers trying to get to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport.
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Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of New York City, 1898-1901, is the man for whom the expressway was named.
For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, however, the gridlocked highway also poses a serious phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks.
After decades of pronouncing Van Wyck like “candlestick,” an enlightened few now call it the “Van Wike,” which some Dutch say is the more proper pronunciation.
But even that is in dispute.
Agnes Treuren, an officer in the Dutch Consulate in New York, insisted that both pronunciations were emphatically wrong. “It is ‘Fon Weig,’ with the last syllable pronounced like leg or beg,” she said, before adding: “I have never been on the Fon Weig Expressway. I live on the Upper East Side.”
The latest tongue-twisting debate has been reignited in some phonetically correct circles because of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for the $3 billion Willets Point development in the shadow of Citi Field, which opponents complain will make the already congested Van Wyck unbearable. They have gone to court to press the city to build two ramps to ease traffic on the expressway, which is once again being mispronounced — by lawyers on both sides, and even the judge — with reckless abandon.
The 9.3-mile highway, which was designed by Robert Moses and built from 1947 to 1963, connects the Whitestone Expressway with Kennedy Airport. It was named after Robert Anderson Van Wyck, who in 1898 became the first mayor of New York as a five-borough city.
But whatever Ms. Treuren and other Dutch natives might think, the descendants of the mayor have no doubt about the correct pronunciation of the highway that bears their name. “It rhymes with like — not lick,” said Bronson Van Wyck, 38, a party planner for the billionaire set, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a cousin of Robert Van Wyck.
Mr. Van Wyck’s cavernous apartment contains a 600-page tome on the Van Wyck lineage, which is perched on a bookshelf near a small drawing of the Archangel Michael by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (“pronounced dike”).
Sighing with the resignation of someone who has also grappled his whole life with a first name that sounds like a last name, he lamented that at least half of New Yorkers seemed to mangle the family name.
“Robert Van Wyck himself pronounced it Van Wike; that is what the family says,” said Mr. Van Wyck, the president of Van Wyck & Van Wyck, an event production and marketing company whose clients have included George Soros and Rupert Murdoch. “That is the correct way.”
The eminently proper Mr. Van Wyck, whose ancestors settled in New York in the 1660s when it was New Amsterdam, traced the bungling of “Van Wyck” to 1963, when local radio traffic reporters unschooled in the intricacies of Dutch pronunciation clung stubbornly to the more roll-off-the-tongue “Wick.”
In a city filled with linguistic perils (think HOW-ston, not HEW-ston), the matter of phonetic faux pas resurfaced in recent weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden, which prompted television reporters to descend on Vesey Street next to ground zero and to mispronounce it live on air as VES-see (it is VEE-zee, some local residents say).
Traffic and phonetic experts said generations of New Yorkers had been stumped by the Van Wyck — even those without a driver’s license.
Tom Kaminski, managing editor of traffic and transit information at WCBS-AM (880), said that in the pantheon of mispronounced New York landmarks, Van Wyck was neck-and-neck with the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Queens and Brooklyn and was named in the 1940s for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian hero of the Revolutionary War.
Mr. Kaminski, whose grandparents came to New York from Gdansk in 1908, said “ ‘Kosciuszko’ was routinely botched by traffic reporters who tended to say “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” rather than the more correct Polish pronunciation “Ka-SHOO-sko.”
In the case of Van Wyck, he said he had confidently used “wike” for more than 20 years, ever since a member of the Van Wyck family called him in 1989 to set him straight. But he said the correct pronunciation remained elusive. “Ask any New Yorker and they’ll say Houston like ‘How-ston,’ ” Mr. Kaminski said. “It is only people not from here who think it’s like the city in Texas. But Van Wyck still causes confusion.”
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
"It rhymes with like — not lick,” says Bronson Van Wyck, a relative of Mayor Robert Van Wyck.
Say What?
What are some New York City place names that stump you? Tell City Room how you pronounce them.
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
The Van Wyck Expressway, heading along with the AirTrain shuttle to Kennedy Airport, was designed by Robert Moses.
Other proponents of the “Van Wike” school of pronunciation like Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens borough historian, attributed the “wick” aberration to the fact that Dutch names in New York had been Anglicized after the Netherlands ceded Nieuw-Nederland, its 17th-century colonial province, to the British in 1664. He noted that Flushing — indisputably pronounced today like a “flushing toilet” — had once been called Vlissingen after a town on the Dutch-Belgian border, while Flatbush had been Vlacke bos.
Even the recorded announcement on the E line subway in Queens announces the stop, Jamaica-Van Wyck, as Van Wick. Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, explained that the authority had no special pronunciation czar or committee to rule on whether station announcements should follow a Queens, a Brooklyn or even a Dutch-sounding twang.
“When deciding pronunciation for station names, the primary goal is to always be correct,” he noted. “Equally important, however, is the popular pronunciation, as in the case of Van Wick.”
Some in Queens complained that the chronic erring was part of a long history in which well-known monuments in the borough were mispronounced or, worse, called something else altogether.
Dan Andrews, a spokesman for the Queens borough president, Helen M. Marshall, said the disagreement over Van Wyck was reminiscent of the Queensboro Bridge, the steel muse of Simon and Garfunkel, which was recently named after former Mayor Edward I. Koch.
“No one ever said Queensboro Bridge on the radio; they always called it the 59th Street Bridge,” he said, with a hint of annoyance. “Now it’s the Eddie Koch Bridge. Yet the Brooklyn Bridge is called the Brooklyn Bridge. Van Wyck is part of the same story.”
Robert Moses himself may have had the last word on the pronunciation. Legend has it that after someone once questioned him after he had called the expressway Van Wick, he thundered: “I’m Robert Moses. I can call it whatever I damn please!”
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