A new street sign went up on the Upper East Side this month, and the officer whose name is on it never lived to see the neighborhood he patrolled turn into what it is today. He walked a beat here in the 1920s, he died from injuries he suffered on duty, and for nearly a century there wasn’t a single marker anywhere on the street to say so.
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That changed at a ceremony announced by the 19th Precinct, which shared the news on X and on Facebook. The corner of East 83rd Street and Third Avenue now carries a second name: Patrolman Paul J. Schafer Place.Schafer was assigned to the 19th Precinct, the same command that covers the Upper East Side today. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, he was struck by a motorcycle while on patrol on December 31, 1929, and died of his injuries eight days later, on January 7, 1930 at Lenox Hill Hospital. He was 57 years old, which made him considerably older than the officer most people picture when they hear the word patrolman. The memorial page lists his last name as Shafer, without the “c,” as do the NYPD’s own roll of fallen officers and the Police Benevolent Association’s memorial list. The street sign and the precinct both use the Schafer spelling.
That gap between his death and the honor is what the precinct kept coming back to in its posts, calling the 96-year wait long but describing the recognition as earned and permanent.
It wasn’t only the length of the wait that made the day unusual. The precinct said Schafer’s grandson attended, along with descendants reaching down another three generations past that, which is a stretch of family history that almost never shows up at a co-naming. Most of these ceremonies happen within living memory of the person being honored. This one happened well outside it, with relatives who know Schafer only as a story that got handed down.
The precinct credited City Council Speaker Julie Menin with sponsoring the co-naming. Street co-namings in New York run through the local Council member, typically starting with a community petition and a resolution from the local community board before the Council passes them as a package bill.
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Third Avenue looked nothing like this in Schafer’s day. An elevated train line known as the Third Avenue El ran on steel supports directly above the street, with a station at 84th Street, barely a block from the corner that now carries his name. It stood there for another 25 years after he died. The last train ran in May 1955, according to the Gotham Center.The precinct’s own name was almost brand new at the time. The station house at 153 East 67th Street had gone by a few different numbers since it opened in 1887, and it only became the 19th Precinct in 1929, the same year Schafer was struck. Per the Landmarks Preservation Commission, it’s been the 19th ever since, and the officers who gathered at 83rd and Third this month still work out of that same building.
“Rest easy, Patrolman Schafer,” the precinct wrote.
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