There Is Now an Adam Yauch Park: And the Stories Behind the Names of 10 Other Brooklyn Places.
Squibb Park
This Brooklyn Heights park was rumored to be the one which would undergo a name change in order to honor Adam Yauch, but Kathleen Hanna (who, besides just being Kathleen fucking Hanna, is Adam Horowitz’s wife) soon squelched that conjecture, saying last year that her husband had “already begun working with the Parks Commissioner to fix up and rename State Street Park where Yauch actually played as a kid to Adam Yauch Park. It would be great to get people behind THIS idea as it won’t hurt the Squibb family and it would be awesome to fix up the bball court there as a tribute.” But so anyway, who is the Squibb family? And who is the Squibb that this park is named for? Well! I’ll tell you. Squibb Park is named for Edwin Robinson Squibb (1819-1900), a doctor and innovator who founded Squibb Pharmaceuticals, which would later become Bristol Meyers Squibb. Squibb is known for having been the first person to figure out a way to distill ether for safe use as an anesthetic and also for having impeccable standards of cleanliness when it came to medical care, standards that he tried to make industry-wide. The site of the current playground is also the site of one of his first laboratories. And if you stand in the middle of the playground and breathe in really deeply you just might pass out from ether residue. No, you won’t. That part’s not true at all, but the rest of it is!
Squibb Park; Middagh St. between Columbia Heights & Furman St., Brooklyn Heights