The City of Yonkers will honor legendary actor and former Yonkers resident Art Carney with a street renaming in his honor. The Yonkers City Council approved a resolution Tuesday to rename a portion of Westchester Avenue between Margaret Place and Pennsylvania Avenue as “Art Carney Place.”
In 1946, Carney moved to 294 Westchester Ave. and 100 Wrexham Road with his wife, Jean, and raised their three children, Eileen, Brian and Paul. The Carneys resided in Yonkers until the late 1960s.
During his time in Yonkers, Carney, acted in his most famous role, as the simple-minded, effusive and charismatic Ed Norton, who played a foil to Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden on the situation comedy “The Honeymooners” from 1951 to 1957.
We spoke to Carney’s son Brian, who had great memories about growing up in Yonkers. “When I was born, they bought the house on Westchester Avenue in 1946 and we lived there for 14 years,” he said. “We then moved to Lawrence Park West… I attended PS 15 in Crestwood and then School 8 on Bronxville Road, and then Walt Whitman middle school xxxxx. We used to go sleigh riding on the big hills at School 15, and I remember having a ball with all of my friends in the neighborhood.
“My father owned a 1957 Buick Roadmaster and we used to drive around town in it. Some of my dad’s favorite haunts were in Tuckahoe, like Danny’s stationery store where we used to get Briar’s Ice Cream,” he continued.
“I have great memories of Crestwood, playing baseball in the street and lining up the leaves on the road. I played basketball and baseball at School 15, and I still go back to the neighborhood a couple of times a year and some of my friends are still there. It’s amazing that they still live there, but they do because it’s a great little neighborhood. I can’t think of a better place to live and grow up.”
Carney explained that his parents divorced, married other people, but divorced again and got remarried and lived at the Lawrence Park West address behind the president’s home of Sarah Lawrence College.
Carney was born in 1918 in Mt. Vernon into a large Irish-American family. His acting abilities became known early as he performed acts for his family, one of which was cleverly named “Art for Art’s Sake,” and in school, he won talent contests with his spot-on impersonations.
In 1942, Carney began working on the CBS show “Report on the Nation” where his repertoire of impersonations included president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Commanding Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. In 1944, his stint on “Report on the Nation” was interrupted when he was sent to France after joining the Army.
His tour of duty abruptly ended when shrapnel from an enemy attack shattered part of his leg. Carney spent nine months in the hospital and suffered from a permanent limp he spent the rest of his acting career trying to mask.
Carney also appeared on Broadway in 1965, where he played the original Felix Unger, the compulsive neat freak in the Neil Simon play “The Odd Couple.” His other Broadway credits include roles in 1957’s “The Rope Dancers” and 1961’s “Take Her, She’s Mine,” as well as 1968’s “Lovers.”
Carney’s most memorable big-screen role was in “Harry and Tonto,” for which he won an Oscar for his performance.
The City of Yonkers will honor Carney for his “genius of comic-timing, earning a great deal of respect and admiration from his contemporaries, including Gleason and comedian Sid Caesar; and although Carney never considered himself a comedian, he will always be regarded as one of the finest comic actors in television history and as a pride of the residents of Yonkers.”
Carney died Nov. 9, 2003 at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife, Jean, three children, six grandchildren and one great-grandson. One month before he died, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
Council Majority Leader Michael Sabatino, who is friends with Brian Carney through a childhood friend, said, “When I learned from Brian that Art Carney and his family lived in Yonkers for over 20 years . I told Brian he should consider having Yonkers rename the street where they lived. After all his dad is American icon, and it’s a tribute Yonkers should be proud to be a part of”
The date for the street renaming has been set for October 2 at 330pm on Westchester Avenue, between Margaret and Pennsylvania Streets.
