'Justice' league: A street co-naming on 6th and Avenue B

Photos by Stacie Joy

On Saturday, community members and local elected officials celebrated the co-naming of Avenue B and Sixth Street "Avenues for Justice Way."

Avenues for Justice, founded here in the late 1970s, helps provide an alternative to jail for young adults, offering services such as job training, education and mentoring. 

Some history: 

Robert Siegal, a New York University law student, opened his Lower East Side apartment to local teens to use as a safe haven where he could help them with schoolwork and provide them meal tickets to the NYU cafeteria. After going to court and convincing a judge to keep one teenager out of jail, Siegal realized there was a more important service he could provide. 

In 1977, Siegal launched a court advocacy program to keep young people out of jail, collaborating with Angel Rodriguez, a longtime Lower East Side resident and youth worker at the local Boys Club. They named the program for Andrew Glover, a New York City police officer. PO Glover patrolled the Lower East Side and had steered young neighborhood residents away from crime by providing after-school activities until he was fatally shot in the line of duty in 1975. 

The Andrew Glover Youth Program is at 100 Avenue B between Sixth Street and Seventh Street.

A little earlier, Angel Rodriguez christened a replica of the street blade... 

In the early 1980s, Avenues for Justice opened its headquarters in the Manhattan Criminal Court ... and in 1999, AFJ established a second community center in Harlem.

You can read more about AFJ here.