Ramones Way — Forest Hills High School

The intersection in front of Forest Hills High School in Queens was officially renamed Ramones Way in October 2016, acknowledging that all four original Ramones — Joey (Jeffrey Hyman), Johnny (John Cummings), Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin), and Tommy (Tom Erdelyi) — attended Forest Hills High School and grew up in the surrounding middle-class Queens neighbourhood. The Ramones took their name not from a person but from a persona: Paul McCartney had briefly used the pseudonym Paul Ramon in 1960, and the name captured something about the band's desire to present as a gang rather than four individuals with different ideas about music and life.

Forest Hills in the 1960s and early 1970s was a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood of Eastern European immigrant families, respectable and aspirational, and the young men who would become the Ramones were in various ways misfits within it — troubled, odd, devoted to music that the neighbourhood's culture neither encouraged nor particularly understood. The fact that all four of them found each other and found punk rock in the same middle-class Queens suburb, before there was really any such thing as punk rock, is one of popular music's more unlikely origin stories.

Forest Hills High School is an active public school in the Forest Hills Gardens neighbourhood of Queens. The street sign outside it has become a point of pilgrimage for Ramones fans making the Queens circuit — the high school, the apartment complexes nearby where the members grew up, the ramp at Thorneycroft Apartments a few blocks away where the band first began to coalesce as a group. The rename in 2016 came forty years after the band's debut album and fourteen years after the last original Ramone died.