Brooklyn Won’t Name a Street After Joe Paterno
This stretch of E. 23rd St. won’t be called Joseph Paterno Way
A proposal to rename a street in Sheepshead Bay after Joe Paterno, the Penn State football coach who retired after one of his former assistants was indicted for raping children, was struck down by the local community board, Brooklyn Daily reports. Paterno grew up on E. 23rd Street between avenues S and T, but the board’s chairperson said streets are only renamed after individuals who have an effect on the neighborhood. “What kind of impact did he have here?” she told the paper. “His career was at Penn State. The street renaming should take place in Pennsylvania.” Plus, you know, he presided over a department implicated in one of the worst cases of sexual abuse in recent memory.
Paterno coached Penn State’s football team for 46 seasons, winning a record number of games, before he retired at 85 after former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky was indicted in November for sexually assaulting boys between 1994 and 2009. Paterno was criticized for not alerting police when a graduate-assistant told him in 2002 he’d witnessed Sandusky abusing a boy. He died from lung cancer in January.