During the years before World War I, the future park's name was shared by the neighborhood to its south. The area between Broadway and the Hudson River, as far south as West 179th Street, was known as Fort Tryon. By the 1940s the neighborhood was known as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson, a name that by the 1990s had given way to Hudson Heights. In the 1970s, a retired furniture salesman named Robert Hoffman led an initiative to rename Fort Tryon Park, following an interaction where Hoffman heard a group of tourists laugh upon hearing about the park's etymology. His efforts led Hope Irvine, a co-chairperson of Manhattan Community Board 12's Bicentennial Committee, to suggest Margaret Corbin's name for the park. The Cloisters objected to the entire park's renaming but reached a compromise to rename the park's southern entrance plaza and the main road. This led to the New York City Council voting to rename these features after Margaret Corbin in 1977.