At last! I have beautiful news to report.
Jack Kirby, a legend now, was born Jacob Kurtzberg on August 28, 1917, at 147 Essex Street on New York’s Lower East Side, in a packed neighborhood that early-20th century writers sometimes called Poverty Hollow: one of the densest, poorest neighborhoods in the US. That Essex Street address is north of Delancey Street, south of Houston, just a couple of hundred yards from the corner of Rivington, and maybe a 15-minute stroll from the East River. Jakie (Kirby) would spend much of his boyhood on Delancey, and, in 1934, join the newly formed NYC branch of the Boys Brother Republic headquartered on East Third Street, about half a mile from his birthplace. The Lower East Side was the crucible of his imagination and his talent, as immortalized in his late-career autobiographical comic “Street Code” (1983). Delancey Street he mythologized as “Yancy Street” in his classic Fantastic Four run, a tribute that continued in the recent film The Fantastic Four: First Steps (dir. Matt Shakman, 2025).
More broadly, Kirby interpreted and sold New York City to millions of readers who, like me, never knew the city when we were growing up. The NYC of Marvel is, at root, a version of Kirby’s New York. It’s about time that NYC acknowledged that debt.
So I’m delighted to report that the New York City Council has chosen to christen a block of Essex Street Jack Kirby Way! The street sign unveiling and dedication happen tomorrow, Monday, May 11, on the northwest corner of Essex and Delancey at 12:00 noon Eastern time. Here’s what the Council had to say last December:
The New York City Council hereby approves the co-naming of Essex Street between Delancey and Rivington Streets Jack Kirby Way, in honor of Jack Kirby, an outstanding New Yorker and a pioneering artist who co-created the Marvel Universe, helped inspire the Pop Art movement, and immortalized the Lower East Side in his work.
Author, producer, and curator Roy Schwartz has been co-leading the street-renaming campaign, and his website has the details. In addition to Schwartz, other speakers at tomorrow’s ceremony will include NYC Council Member Christopher Marte, Marvel editor Nick Lowe, comics scholar and former DC Comics publisher and president Paul Levitz, famed comics artist Jim Steranko, and, from Jack Kirby’s family, Tracy, Jeremy, and Jillian Kirby.
Collaborating with Schwartz on this campaign has been my colleague Karen Green, Curator for Comics and Cartoons at Columbia University, who has been hoping to secure the city’s official acknowledgment of Kirby for a long time. Karen’s work building and promoting the comics collection and archive at Columbia has made her a beloved and uniquely connected figure in the comics field, and it’s great to see that her collaboration with Roy Schwartz has led to this moment. In truth, many, many people, including the leaders of the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center, had to lean in and lend their energy to make this possible and promote the unveiling.
As I said, beautiful news. Dig this writeup by Samantha Baskind for the Smithsonian magazine.
I wish I could be there!
Kirby Studies 