For traffic reporters, linguists and some Dutch purists, however, the gridlocked highway also poses a serious phonetic hazard nearly as perilous as its bottlenecks.
After decades of pronouncing Van Wyck like “candlestick,” an enlightened few now call it the “Van Wike,” which some Dutch say is the more proper pronunciation.
But even that is in dispute.
Agnes Treuren, an officer in the Dutch Consulate in New York, insisted that both pronunciations were emphatically wrong. “It is ‘Fon Weig,’ with the last syllable pronounced like leg or beg,” she said, before adding: “I have never been on the Fon Weig Expressway. I live on the Upper East Side.”
The latest tongue-twisting debate has been reignited in some phonetically correct circles because of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan for the $3 billion Willets Point development in the shadow of Citi Field, which opponents complain will make the already congested Van Wyck unbearable. They have gone to court to press the city to build two ramps to ease traffic on the expressway, which is once again being mispronounced — by lawyers on both sides, and even the judge — with reckless abandon.
The 9.3-mile highway, which was designed by Robert Moses and built from 1947 to 1963, connects the Whitestone Expressway with Kennedy Airport. It was named after Robert Anderson Van Wyck, who in 1898 became the first mayor of New York as a five-borough city.
But whatever Ms. Treuren and other Dutch natives might think, the descendants of the mayor have no doubt about the correct pronunciation of the highway that bears their name. “It rhymes with like — not lick,” said Bronson Van Wyck, 38, a party planner for the billionaire set, whose great-great-great-grandfather was a cousin of Robert Van Wyck.
Mr. Van Wyck’s cavernous apartment contains a 600-page tome on the Van Wyck lineage, which is perched on a bookshelf near a small drawing of the Archangel Michael by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (“pronounced dike”).
Sighing with the resignation of someone who has also grappled his whole life with a first name that sounds like a last name, he lamented that at least half of New Yorkers seemed to mangle the family name.
“Robert Van Wyck himself pronounced it Van Wike; that is what the family says,” said Mr. Van Wyck, the president of Van Wyck & Van Wyck, an event production and marketing company whose clients have included George Soros and Rupert Murdoch. “That is the correct way.”
The eminently proper Mr. Van Wyck, whose ancestors settled in New York in the 1660s when it was New Amsterdam, traced the bungling of “Van Wyck” to 1963, when local radio traffic reporters unschooled in the intricacies of Dutch pronunciation clung stubbornly to the more roll-off-the-tongue “Wick.”
In a city filled with linguistic perils (think HOW-ston, not HEW-ston), the matter of phonetic faux pas resurfaced in recent weeks after the killing of Osama bin Laden, which prompted television reporters to descend on Vesey Street next to ground zero and to mispronounce it live on air as VES-see (it is VEE-zee, some local residents say).
Traffic and phonetic experts said generations of New Yorkers had been stumped by the Van Wyck — even those without a driver’s license.
Tom Kaminski, managing editor of traffic and transit information at WCBS-AM (880), said that in the pantheon of mispronounced New York landmarks, Van Wyck was neck-and-neck with the Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Queens and Brooklyn and was named in the 1940s for Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian hero of the Revolutionary War.
Mr. Kaminski, whose grandparents came to New York from Gdansk in 1908, said “ ‘Kosciuszko’ was routinely botched by traffic reporters who tended to say “Kos-kee-OOS-ko” rather than the more correct Polish pronunciation “Ka-SHOO-sko.”