New York City Council Votes to Name Bronx Street After Stan Lee

Stan Lee, famed co-creator of the Marvel Universe, will be honored with a street named after him in the Bronx. According to the New York Post, the New York City Council voted to approve a proposal to co-name University Avenue between Brandt Place and West 176th “Stan Lee Way.” The proposal still needs approval from Mayor Bill de Blasio. Lee formerly lived at 1720 University Place. He attended high school at DeWitt Clinton HS in the Bronx.

Lee died in November 2018. He and his artistic collaborators like Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby created the Marvel Universe and its most popular characters, including the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Avengers. After Lee’s death, Bob Iger, CEO of Marvel’s parent company Disney, said in a statement, “Stan Lee was as extraordinary as the characters he created. A superhero in his own right to Marvel fans around the world, Stan had the power to inspire, to entertain and to connect. The scale of his imagination was only exceeded by the size of his heart.”

Lee was 95 years old at the time of his death. Born Stanley Martin Lieber, Lee began working in comics in 1939, back when Marvel Comics was still Timely Comics but rose to prominence in the 1960s. He collaborated with Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four and birth the Marvel Universe as we know it. With Steve Ditko, he created Spider-Man and redefined what a superhero could be. From there, he helped create some of the most popular comic book, TV, a film characters ever, including the X-Men, the Avengers, Black Panther, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and Daredevil.

In an interview with ComicBook.com in 2015, Lee reflected on how he never could have expected his comics would spawn a multi-billion dollar, multimedia franchise across film, television, and video games.

“No, no, years ago when I was doing these comics, we’d give the comic books away free to people,” Lee said. “The printer would send us a lot of comics, more than we needed. A guy would come up to deliver sandwiches from the drug store. We’d say, ‘On your way out, you want to take these books with you?’ We would even give out original artwork, we never thought it would be worth anything! It’s changed.”

Do you hope the Bronx street is renamed after Stan Lee? Let us know what you think about it in the comments section.