On October 2, 1945, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia — whom Zohran Mamdani has consistently cited as his “all-time” favorite New York City mayor — signed into law a city council bill renaming Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue to the Avenue of the Americas. Weeks later, he presided over a grand renaming ceremony, flanked by flags from across the western hemisphere and joined by Chilean president Juan Antonio Ríos, who installed the new street sign himself.
Renaming Sixth Avenue was a hyperlocal policy, but it was designed with geopolitical intent. La Guardia was firmly aligned with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt not only in his domestic New Deal agenda but also with FDR’s progressive foreign policy vision for the western hemisphere. Dubbed the “Good Neighbor Policy,” FDR attempted to reorient US policy in the Americas away from its long history of overt military intervention and toward a vision of cooperation, trade, sovereign equality, and New Deal–style social democratic economics.
The policy intended to forge hemispheric unity in the global struggle against fascism, a cause in which La Guardia fervently believed. Indeed, in addition to his now celebrated anti-fascist radio broadcasts to Italy, La Guardia also had a radio program that aimed to counter German and Italian propaganda in South America.
Naturally, the Good Neighbor Policy was motivated in part by US national interests — strengthening trade relationships, expanding markets, and preserving US hemispheric “leadership.” But in its commitment to sovereignty and peace, it was undoubtedly also a step that moved forward away from the occupations, coups, and gunboat diplomacy of administrations past.
Even today, the Good Neighbor Policy remains shorthand for an alternative to the US domination of Latin America. Just this year, New York Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez introduced a bill to end the Monroe Doctrine and establish in its place a “New Good Neighbor” policy.
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
La Guardia’s aim in pushing for the renaming of Sixth Avenue was to use his position as mayor of the “global city” to advance the Good Neighbor vision, particularly following the unexpected death of FDR earlier that year. At the renaming ceremony, La Guardia called the designation “an expression on the part of our people of the love and affection we have for our sister republics of Central and South America.”
He continued: “The Good Neighbor Policy has been talked about and kicked around for more than thirty years. But nobody took any action until the great President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”