ALBANY — A Republican activist in Westchester County with ties to Bruce Blakeman’s campaign has told associates that if the Nassau County executive becomes governor, he will take Governor Mario M. Cuomo’s name off the bridge everyone north of the city still calls the Tappan Zee.
The line is not in a policy book. It has not been uttered at a podium. It has the particular life of a promise made to be repeated: short enough for a county dinner, legible to anyone who has paid the toll since 2017 and refused, on principle, to use the name on the sign.
“He’ll wipe Cuomo’s name off the Tappan Zee,” the longtime party footsoldier said, in an account of the conversation that spread this week through Republican circles in the Hudson Valley and on Long Island. A spokesman for Mr. Blakeman did not confirm it. He did not knock it down.
The bridge in question is the twin cable-stayed span that carries the Gov. Thomas E. Dewey Thruway across the Hudson between Tarrytown and South Nyack, opened in stages in 2017 and 2018 to replace the 1955 crossing. The old bridge was the Tappan Zee, a name braided from the Tappan people and the Dutch word for sea. The new one, by a law signed by the man who built it, is the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, for the three-term governor and the father of the governor who signed the bill. The renaming was Andrew M. Cuomo’s to make.
The resentment has belonged, ever since, to everyone else.
Locals did not switch. Truckers did not switch. The GPS services held out for a while and then surrendered; the people who live in Nyack did not. Republican legislators have filed bills to restore the old name in more than one session, and the bills have died in committee, which is where a Democratic Legislature sends an argument it does not wish to have. The signage went up. The habit did not move. For a certain kind of voter the bridge is a small, daily proof that Albany can change what a place is called without changing what anyone calls it.
Mr. Blakeman’s advisers appear to have noticed. He is running against Gov. Kathy Hochul, who served as Mr. Cuomo’s lieutenant governor and then succeeded him, and who has spent five years putting distance between her administration and his without ever quite escaping the shadow of it. A Marist poll this week had her ahead, 53 percent to 42 percent. The lead is a city lead. In the suburbs the race was tied. A promise about a bridge is not a housing plan. In Rockland and Westchester, and in the parts of Nassau that still commute by way of the Thruway, it is a cleaner sentence than most of what either candidate has said about the M.T.A.
The mechanics are simpler than the politics. The name is a matter of state law. A governor cannot sandblast it. He can propose a bill, and he can sign one, if a Legislature will pass it. Mr. Blakeman’s allies talk as if the second part will take care of itself, which it will not in the Capitol as currently composed. What they are describing is the use of the office, not a draft. Wipe is a verb for a sign, not a statute. It is also the right verb for the feeling the name still produces on the west bank of the river, where the Cuomo Bridge is regarded as a monument a family built to itself with a toll.
Ms. Hochul has not been eager to relitigate it. The bridge was finished on her predecessor’s watch, with her in the lieutenant’s office, and the state has spent the years since defending the tolls, the construction bills and the decision to attach a governor’s surname to a crossing people already had a name for. To restore Tappan Zee would be to concede that the renaming was what its critics said it was: an act of vanity imposed on a piece of infrastructure that did not need a dynasty. To defend Mario Cuomo’s name is to spend a day of a re-election campaign in an argument with 2017.
Her office declined to engage the specifics of a promise no one in the Blakeman campaign has made in public.
There is a further awkwardness, which the adviser’s line does not bother to resolve. Mario Cuomo, the man on the sign, was not the governor who named the bridge. He was the father. The son named it, after a fashion of American politics that treats a public work as a headstone. Stripping the name undoes the son’s gesture more than the father’s record. Along the river this distinction is understood and considered irrelevant. The name on the gantry is Cuomo. That has been enough.
Whether Mr. Blakeman would spend political capital on it, in a first year that would also contain a budget, a Legislature and the ordinary emergencies of the state, is the sort of question insiders answer with a shrug. The shrug is the point. He does not have to do it in January. He has to be heard as the man who would. In a race being fought on sanctuary policy, congestion tolls and the suspicion that Albany governs the suburbs as a dependency of the city, a bridge people already refuse to call by its legal name is an inexpensive way to sound like one of them.
The Tappan Zee, meanwhile, carries the traffic either way. The signs say Cuomo. The drivers say what they said before the signs. Eight years on, neither has won the argument.
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