This was previously called New York Street back in 1900. It was born thirteen years earlier as Eureka Avenue on developer Ralph Rogers’s “New York tract”. (The tract, ironically, had a different New York Street where Irvington Place now lies.) Its name being altered to York Boulevard came about in 1909. Property owners demanded the change, claiming that the street was one hundred feet wide and thus qualified as a proper boulevard. They also argued that too many envelopes addressed to “New York St.” were getting mailed to New York state. Sure. This was probably just a front for a more aesthetic desire for the change: the neighborhood had earned the nickname “Poverty Flats”, and its main drag being dirty old New York Street didn’t help. York Boulevard simply had a more elegant ring to it.
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