Joey Ramone Place

The intersection of East 2nd Street and the Bowery in Manhattan's East Village was officially renamed Joey Ramone Place in 2003, two years after his death on April 15, 2001, from lymphoma. Joey Ramone — born Jeffrey Hyman in Forest Hills, Queens, in 1951 — was the singer and public face of The Ramones from their formation in 1974 until their dissolution in 1996: a six-foot-six figure in ripped jeans and sunglasses, permanently hunched over the microphone, delivering songs at the intersection of Brat Pack swagger and genuine teenage alienation with an enthusiasm that made a virtue of musical limitation.

The naming of the street corner acknowledged the neighbourhood's connection to the band and to punk rock more broadly. CBGB, where The Ramones played more than any other venue, was a short walk south on the Bowery. The East Village of the 1970s was the physical and social context in which the Ramones' music made sense: cheap rents, abandoned buildings, a population of artists, addicts, and working-class families coexisting in a neighbourhood that the rest of the city had largely written off. The Ramones' music had that neighbourhood's energy — confrontational, funny, brief, inexhaustible.

Joey Ramone Place is a street sign at a functioning intersection on the Bowery, one block from CBGB's former location and a few blocks from the apartment buildings where Ramones members lived during the band's active years. The sign is frequently photographed by tourists and music fans. Joey Ramone's grave is at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, under his birth name. The street corner in the neighbourhood where the band made its name is, for many of his fans, the more fitting memorial.