What Exit Was That, Joe DiMaggio?

By CALVIN TRILLIN

In my constant search for an honor I might decline, I announced some years ago that I didn't want a service area on the New Jersey Turnpike named after me. It seems unlikely that the Turnpike Authority, which had honored a number of Garden State luminaries in that manner, would turn to an ordinary driver who is not from New Jersey, but I thought that nipping the idea in the bud was the sort of thing a prudent citizen did in preparing for his eventual demise. So I was surprised to learn last week that Joe DiMaggio--a man who raised preparation to an art form, a man who planted himself in center field so perfectly for each batter that he was customarily able to catch fly-balls at chest level--died without stating publicly that he did not want his name associated with the West Side Highway.

The West Side Highway is the road that runs along the Hudson River--or, really, stumbles along the Hudson River--on the western edge of Manhattan. By chance, it once gave me a strong intimation of mortality. In 1973 portions of the highway collapsed, triggering years of arguments about replacing it with a gargantuan project called Westway and then more years of constant construction whose purpose has never been apparent. Sitting in a traffic jam maybe 15 years after the original collapse, I was suddenly hit with the realization that I was not going to live to see the West Side Highway back in regular operation.

For New Yorkers, in other words, having your name on the West Side Highway is the equivalent of having your name on the IRS building where taxpayers are instructed to show up, in possession of all financial records and receipts for the previous 14 years, to talk about their audits. This may be the reason that until last week I never heard anyone mention the official name of the road (or at least half of it, from 72nd Street down): the Miller Elevated Highway. Even New Yorkers will cut a guy some slack sooner or later, and I like to think that they've never used the real name because they've been thinking, "O.K. Joyce Kilmer's poetry might have been so bad that he deserved to be memorialized on the Jersey Turnpike by unleaded regular and rest-stop cheeseburgers, but what could a man have done that was bad enough to deserve association with this?"

Julius Miller, a former Manhattan Borough President, was mentioned in passing last week because Mayor Rudolph Giuliani--living proof that not all American boys absorbed Joe DiMaggio's example of doing whatever you do with grace and dignity--took the occasion of Joltin' Joe's death to push the idea of naming the West Side Highway the Joe DiMaggio Highway, and Governor George Pataki resisted that in favor of a freeway in the Bronx. The agendas reflected in the argument were theirs, of course, rather than DiMaggio's; Pataki wants the Bronx Bombers to stay where they are, and Giuliani would like to see Yankee Stadium on the West Side of Manhattan, next to what used to be poor Julius Miller's elevated highway.

If recent New York history is any guide, none of us will live to see the resolution of this. The one comfort we can take as we go to our rewards is that this argument, being purely symbolic, will presumably have no effect on traffic.