Van Wyck? Van Week?

Robert A. Van Wyck, mayor of New York City, 1898-1901, is the man for whom the expressway was named.

For most New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors, the Van Wyck Expressway is a notorious traffic hazard that induces high blood pressure among travelers trying to get to and from John F. Kennedy International Airport. For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, however, the gridlocked highway also poses a serious phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks. After decades of pronouncing Van Wyck like “candlestick,” an enlightened few now call it the “Van Wike,” which some Dutch say is the more proper pronunciation.

But even that is in dispute.

Agnes Treuren, an officer in the Dutch Consulate in New York, insisted that both pronunciations were emphatically wrong. “It is ‘Fon Weig,’ with the last syllable pronounced like leg or beg,” she said, before adding: “I have never been on the Fon Weig Expressway. I live on the Upper East Side.” But even that is in dispute.

Really? And how did she get from the airport to the upper east side of Manhattan? Helicopter?

The 9.3-mile highway, which was designed by Robert Moses, built from 1947 to 1963 and connects the Whitestone Expressway with Kennedy Airport, was named after Robert Anderson Van Wyck, who in 1898 became the first mayor of New York as a five-borough city.

Tom Kaminski, managing editor of traffic and transit information at WCBS-AM, said that in the pantheon of mispronounced New York landmarks, Van Wyck was neck-and-neck with the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Queens and Brooklyn and was named in the 1940s for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian hero of the Revolutionary War. Mr. Kaminski, whose grandparents came to New York from Gdansk in 1908, said “ ‘Kosciuszko’ was routinely botched by traffic reporters who tended to say “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” rather than the more correct Polish pronunciation “Ka-SHOOS-ko.”

I only changed my way of pronouncing that one in recent memory.

Other proponents of the “Van Wike” school of pronunciation like Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens Borough historian, attributed the “wick” aberration to the fact that Dutch names in New York had been Anglicized after the Netherlands ceded Nieuw-Nederland, its 17th-century colonial province, to the British in 1664. He noted that Flushing — undisputedly pronounced today like a “flushing toilet” — had once been called Vlissingen after a town on the Dutch-Belgian border, while Flatbush had been Vlacke bos.

Some in Queens complained that the chronic gaffing was part of a long history in which well-known monuments in the oft-overlooked borough were mispronounced or, worse, called something else altogether. Dan Andrews, a spokesman for the Queens borough president, Helen M. Marshall, said the disagreement over Van Wyck was reminiscent of the Queensboro Bridge, the steel muse of Simon and Garfunkel, which was recently named after former Mayor Edward I. Koch.

It is Queensboro; says so on the Bridge. It connects 59th Street to Queens, so provincial Manhattanites can come out and see the sights, taste the foods, and get a life.
 
 “No one ever said Queensboro Bridge on the radio; they always called it the 59th Street Bridge,” he said, with a hint of annoyance. “Now it’s the Eddie Koch Bridge. Yet the Brooklyn Bridge is called the Brooklyn Bridge. Van Wyck is part of the same story.”


Robert Moses himself may have had the last word on the pronunciation. Legend has it that after someone once questioned him after he had called the expressway Van Wick, he thundered: “I’m Robert Moses. I can call it whatever I damn please!”