NYC’s Triborough Bridge renamed for Robert F. Kennedy

Several generations of Robert F. Kennedy’s family gathered today for a ceremony renaming one of the city’s major bridges in honor of the slain senator and U.S. attorney general.
Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, sons Joseph and Robert Jr., and daughter Kerry were joined today by dignitaries including former President Bill Clinton in a park at the foot of the Triborough Bridge. They were joined by his niece, Caroline Kennedy.
"I love that the city he knew and cared about returned his devotion," Ethel Kennedy said in prepared remarks.
Kennedy, who would have turned 83 on Thursday, was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The senator "was about wanting to make life better for others," said Gov. David Paterson, who handed Ethel Kennedy a framed copy of the bill he signed renaming the bridge.
Kennedy "operated on a grand scale," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "He united us as New Yorkers and as Americans. America would not be the country it is without Robert F. Kennedy and all the Kennedys."
The bridge, which opened in 1936, is the first major public work dedicated to Kennedy in the state he represented from 1965 to 1968. It is a complex of three spans that connect Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens.

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http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1133449
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Triborough Bridge to be named for Robert Kennedy

New Yorkers soon will be able to take the RFK on their way to LGA and JFK.

On Nov. 19, the Triborough Bridge will formally be renamed the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in honor of the late New York senator, who was assassinated 40 years ago while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"I really can't imagine a more appropriate way to honor his memory in his state, because he did reach out to so many people and did literally bridge so many divides," Kennedy's daughter, Kerry Kennedy, said at a news conference Thursday at the MTA's Manhattan offices, during which details of the name change were released.

The renaming of the bridge in honor of Kennedy was the brainchild of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. His successor, Gov. David A. Paterson, pushed for the State Legislature to adopt the plan, which it did in August.

Paterson said Thursday he was "honored" to sign the measure into law and fully expects that "the RFK name will quickly catch on with New Yorkers."

The bridge will be the first major public works project named after Kennedy, who grew up in the Bronx and Westchester County, and represented New York in the U.S. Senate from 1965 until he was shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in June 1968, just after Kennedy won the California Democratic primary.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chief Elliot Sander said yesterday that the renaming was "the real deal" and required eliminating references to the Triborough Bridge on nine large road signs and 40 smaller toll plaza signs, and replacing them with the bridge's new name. The new signs will start going up on Nov. 14.

"This is a fitting honor for a distinguished and truly great American and New Yorker," Sander said.

To help spread the word about the name change, advertisements are being placed on the backs of 6 million MetroCards, and 1,400 advertisements have started to go up in subway cars, along with 3,800 advertisements in buses. The ads, as well as a large banner on the bridge, will feature famous quotes from the Democratic senator.

The project is a partnership with the Robert F. Kennedy Center For Justice & Human Rights, which brought in CBS to underwrite the cost of the ads.

A formal renaming ceremony will be held in Astoria Park in Queens, at the foot of the bridge, on the morning of Nov. 19 - the day before Robert F. Kennedy would have celebrated his 83rd birthday.

Kerry Kennedy said she expects several members of her family to attend. While suggesting that her uncle, ailing Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, would not be able to attend, she said he is "thrilled" that the bridge is being renamed after his older brother.

Built in 1936, the Triborough Bridge was one of the first major projects spearheaded by New York planner Robert Moses. The bridge, which connects Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, carried some 62.5 million vehicles last year and currently is undergoing a $1-billion rehabilitation.

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http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-nyrfk0712149713nov07,0,185296,print.story

A Kennedy plumbs life as a Catholic

Catholicism ran deep at the home of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy.
Prayers before and after every meal, when a family trip was beginning, when something got lost. Bible readings after dinner. St. Christopher medals around the neck. St. Francis pictures on the wall. Virgin Mary statues in the corner. Mass schedules by the bedsides. And Mass every Sunday, until Bobby was killed in 1968; then it was daily.
"It was central to my upbringing - I mean, we woke up in the morning, and we were down on our knees, consecrating the day to Lord Jesus," recalls Kerry Kennedy, 49, the seventh of the 11 children of the Kennedy couple. "And then before bed, we'd spend about 20 minutes with the entire family saying prayers together."
But today, like many Catholics, Kennedy has a hard time reconciling her own views with some of the teachings and actions of her church; in fact, she often can't. So Kennedy decided to talk with well-known Americans about their often complicated relationships with the Catholic faith; the result is a revealing book being released tomorrow.
The book, "Being Catholic Now," offers an unusually intimate view of how much being raised Catholic shapes the identity of many prominent Americans, but also how much tension many feel with the institutional church.
(...) Bill O'Reilly, the FOX News personality, told Kennedy, "Cardinal Law is a villain. I got him removed from office in Boston. I pounded him relentlessly, because he was not doing what he should have for the protection of children in this country."
(...) Kennedy, who was born in Brighton, raised in Virginia, and now lives in New York, said she does not view her book, which includes interviews with conservatives and liberals, as an attack on the church. A human rights lawyer, Kennedy is raising her three daughters in the Catholic faith, attending Mass regularly, and teaching religious education at her parish, and she says the more she realized that other Catholics struggle with their church, the less isolated she felt.
"I was feeling conflicted because my Catholicism is so deeply important to me - it was my sense of connection to the Almighty, to humanity, to my heritage, my upbringing," she said during an interview in Hyannis Port, where she and other members of the Kennedy family have summered for decades. "And my Catholicism informed my view of the world, and the work that I do every day on social justice issues. And yet, so often when I went to church, I was confronted with words and symbols that were anathema to my values."
(...) Many of those Kennedy interviewed praised the Catholic church for imbuing them with a sense of spirituality and community and concern for justice. But Kennedy found multiple recurrent themes among many of the people she interviewed - concern about the role of women in the church, concern about the handling of the abuse scandal, opposition to the church's teaching on birth control, and even frequent unhappy references to the way the specter of hell was used to discipline them when they were children.
(...) Kennedy said she is at odds with the church hierarchy over many issues - abortion rights and women's ordination among them. Her views do not make her extraordinary; polls suggest that an overwhelming majority of American Catholics support women's ordination and that American Catholics reflect the general public's split over abortion.
Kennedy is divorced from Andrew Cuomo, but said her divorce has not been an issue for her in Catholicism because she has not remarried; however, she said, she considers the debate over whether politicians who support abortion rights, such as her uncle Senator Edward M. Kennedy, should be allowed to receive Communion "a terrible mistake" by "a few wayward bishops."
But Kennedy also said that in her travels around the world as a human rights advocate, she concluded that in "virtually every country I've gone to, the Catholic church is on the cutting edge of social change."
"I was witnessing the mighty spirit, and the tremendous capacity of this institution which was so much a part of my history, and my family, and my sense of spirituality, and my vision of social justice . . . and then coming back and hearing bishops who were protecting their turf instead of protecting children and playing Three-card Monte with the pedophile priests and blaming it on people who are gay," she said. "So it was important to me to resolve that."

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/09/08/a_kennedy_plumbs_life_as_a_catholic/?page=full

Family Honors Robert F. Kennedy At Brown Palace

The Democrats are celebrating their historic nomination this week as Barack Obama becomes the first African American candidate from a major party to run for president.

But the party is also celebrating its heritage and the Kennedy family has been the focus of several events.Many of the Kennedys joined other dignitaries to honor the legacy of another member of the family, Robert F. Kennedy, on Wednesday.

There were Kennedys everywhere: Ethel, Patrick, Robert Jr., Kathleen and Max were all at the event.

(...) "The life he lived was based on hope and bringing the people together," Max said. "If you look just at that one photograph of my dad with Cesar Chavez breaking bread together … I think that encapsulates the idea of the United States coming together for the first time."

"He was also one that stepped outside the establishment," Rev. Al Sharpton said. "To oppose the war in Vietnam he showed courage, he showed vision and ultimately it cost him his life."

The event was held by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, an organization that focuses on human rights and social justice.

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http://cbs4denver.com/entertainment/robert.f.kennedy.2.805849.html

LA park to stand as tribute to Robert F. Kennedy

With a band of traditional Korean drummers, a Latin dance group and a martial arts exhibition, city officials broke ground Wednesday on a small urban "pocket park" at the site where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 40 years ago.
Few in the group of more than 200 people who turned out to witness the event seemed to know much about Kennedy, other than that he was shot to death at the site of the old Ambassador Hotel after winning 1968's California presidential primary.
But many said they thought a park would be a fitting tribute to the late senator and a valuable resource to the crowded, multiethnic community where public schools are in short supply and public spaces so hard to find that people breaking for lunch in the area often have to sit on sidewalks or lean against buildings as they eat.
"I'm too young to remember, but I thought the words said about him today were very touching," said Dore Burry, who works at the nearby Koreatown Youth and Community Center.
Most of those words came from Damian Carroll of the political group San Fernando Valley Young Democrats, who said one of the organization's goals was to carry forth Kennedy's commitment to ending poverty, promoting civil rights and rebuilding inner city areas like the one where the park is going up.
Carroll, the last of nearly a dozen speakers at the groundbreaking was also one of the few to actually mention Kennedy by name. He quoted from a 1966 speech the senator gave in South Africa when he was one of the few U.S. politicians of his time to publicly oppose that country's apartheid system of racial segregation.
"Few will have the greatness to bend history but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation," Kennedy said. "Each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Those words will be etched in stone near the park's entrance.
(...)

Over subsequent years, the hotel, whose visitors once included every president from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon, fell on increasingly hard times, as did the neighborhood. When the hotel was demolished in 2006 to make way for schools it had been closed for several years.
As part of a neighborhood overhaul, three new public schools serving students from kindergarten through 12th grade are going up on the site where the hotel once stood. The park will serve as one of the entrances to the schools, with a portrait of Kennedy carved in marble and the words to his speech welcoming visitors.
The park hasn't been formally named yet, but a model put on display at the site Wednesday proclaimed it "Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park," and Paul Schrade, a Kennedy family friend, said that is what the family would like.
The park comprises only a third of an acre, not much larger than a moderate-sized residential home lot. That has led to some complaints from nearby residents, including one anonymous blogger who sarcastically thanked officials "for sparing a driveway."
But Carlos Smith, who lives across the street in another L.A. landmark, the venerable Gaylord Apartments, said he was satisfied.
"You don't want it too big," he said. "It's for the neighborhood. Bigger brings in too much traffic and too many drug guys."
Like others in the neighborhood, Smith, 52, said he knew little about Kennedy.
"I know Robert Kennedy got shot there, of course," he said gesturing to the skeleton of a school building going up where the hotel once stood.
"That was a sad thing," he added. "But it's a nice thing that a park has come out of it."

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http://www.pe.com/ap_news/California/CA_RFK_Park_355968C.shtml

Ted Kennedy is in Denver

Barack Obama's campaign is hoping for a surprise convention appearance from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, the ailing party elder whose January endorsement electrified Obama's campaign, and who has sought to pass his family's torch to the young senator from Illinois.

(...) "Things are day to day," said the Kennedy source said, saying Democrats shouldn't count on his presence.

His spokeswoman, Melissa Wagoner, called an appearance "extremely unlikely."

But another two people familiar with the plans said Kennedy was likely to appear, with one saying he has a "better than 50 percent" of making it to the convention.

(...) "My three children are here, lots of cousins are here, obviously many of the Robert Kennedys are here," Caroline Kennedy said on Meet the Press Sunday. "It's the 40th anniversary of [Robert F. Kennedy's presidential] campaign, so I think for all our family, this is incredibly emotional."

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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0808/12777.html