The legendary horror filmmaker George A. Romero was honored Saturday with a street co-naming at Metropolitan Avenue and Metropolitan Oval in Parkchester.
Council Member Amanda Farias hosted the event in conjunction with the Department of Transportation, and the intersection was co-named “George A. Romero Way,” near where he was raised.
“George Romero’s legacy goes beyond film; he influenced generations of filmmakers and sparked meaningful conversations about societal issues,” Farias said. “It is an honor to recognize his roots here in Parkchester and ensure his contributions to cinema and culture are forever remembered.”
Romero forever altered the horror movie genre with his groundbreaking “Night of the Living Dead” series, which first introduced the plot of a zombie apocalypse that has since proliferated in the movie industry. Born in the Bronx in 1940, the “Godfather of the Dead,” as Romero became known, grew up in Parkchester, where he developed the creativity and love of film that would cement him as a cultural icon.
A filmmaker even from an early age, at 14 Romero was making his film “The Man From the Meteor,” when he was arrested for throwing a dummy off the roof of a building while shooting a scene. He went on to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study graphic arts. The university library now houses the George A. Romero Archival Collection.
Romero and some friends filmed the iconic “Night of the Living Dead” in 1967 with a budget of only about $100,000, according to the George A. Romero Archival Collection. Released in 1968, the film became a cult classic that shaped the horror genre. In 1999, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Romero died on July 16, 2017.
Romero inspired many Bronxites and horror fans like filmmaker Edwin Pagán, Founder-in-Chief of LATIN HORROR.
“When I watched “Dawn of the Dead” in 1978 at a local Bronx drive-in, I could not get enough of his ‘walking dead’ stories,” said Pagán. “His subsequent canon of work mirrored the zeitgeist of the times when the films were made, also making Romero a documentarian who embedded his narrative feature work with historical context.”
