Named after 86th Street, one of Manhattan’s wide crosstown streets.
The 1811 plan made 86th Street one of fifteen streets 100 feet wide, and a sunken transverse road carries it across Central Park. West 86th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue was renamed Isaac Bashevis Singer Boulevard after the Polish-born Jewish American writer, Nobel laureate in 1978, who lived for many years in the Belnord, one of the street’s apartment blocks.