What an amazing day. What an amazing day. I am so glad I was there to be part of the formal nicknaming of a street corner on the Lower East Side of New York. It was where a twelve-year-old kid named Jacob Kurtzberg once peddled newspapers and fruit to bring home a few dimes to help his family eat. That kid became Jack Kirby and a little after noon yesterday, that intersection — Essex Street and Delancey — gained the alternate designation of Jack Kirby Way.
Hundreds turned out to see it. I was up on the stage with a great vantage point to hear the cheering and see the looks on everyone's faces…the utter delight that this was happening and that they were present to witness it. I had a bit of trouble to get there — and with a bad knee to even get up on that traffic-blocking platform — but I wouldn't have missed it for…well, what Disney paid to buy the company Jack helped build.
I'm a bit uncomfy with the omission of two other names — Joe Simon's and Stan Lee's — but having been a lot more troubled by more than a half-century of seeing Jack be criminally undercredited, I'm not going to lose sleep over a little overcompensation. I'll write much more here in the coming days.
P.S. The Fox news video above — from a news broadcast on a Fox channel, not Fox News — identifies one speaker as “Paul Evans.” That's actually Paul Levitz. We expect factual errors from Fox News. We don't expect them from Fox news.