How a former country road in the Bronx called Featherbed Lane got its evocative name

Finding your way to Featherbed Lane (below photo, 1910), in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, means passing some seen-better-days streets that offer a history lesson about the borough’s early years. Jerome Avenue, where Featherbed Lane begins, was named for flashy Gilded Age financier Leonard Jerome, who built the Jerome Park Racetrack here in 1866. (Jerome’s striking daughter, Jennie, was Winston Churchill’s mother.) Macombs Road stems from the nearby Macombs Dam Bridge, an 1890 replacement of an earlier rudimentary bridge built by Robet Macombs, a miller, that crossed the Harlem River to Manhattan. University Avenue, on the western end of Featherbed Lane, comes from New York University, which moved its main campus here from Washington Square Park in 1894. In the 1970s, NYU realized the appeal of Greenwich Village and hightailed it back downtown. But Featherbed Lane (third photo, from 1925) isn’t named for a tycoon, a bridge, or a school. In fact the origin of this…