Four years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to fix the Canyon of Heroes, one of the city’s most problematic public monuments. As of today, nothing has been done. It is time to return to the task, lest we continue to honor anti-Semites and despots in our streets.

The Canyon of Heroes is a half-mile stretch of lower Broadway in which granite inscriptions line the sidewalks every 30 feet. Each inscription honors a notable person for whom the city once hosted a ticker-tape parade. In 2011, the city’s Downtown Alliance called it “Lower Manhattan’s version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

Like the real Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Canyon of Heroes honors many true heroes — people like astronaut Neil Armstrong, pathbreaking tennis player Althea Gibson, and the essential workers who kept the city going during COVID-19.

But the Canyon of Heroes also celebrates Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who was one of the nation’s most notorious isolationists and anti-Semites in the 1930s; Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran whose brutal secret police arrested tens of thousands of political prisoners; and Park Chung-hee, the president of South Korea known for suspending his country’s democratic constitution and ruling with an iron fist for 17 years.

The most offensive inscriptions in the monument honor Pierre Laval and Marshal Pétain, Vichy French leaders who deported tens of thousands of Jews to Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust. The two inscriptions are also among the monument’s most prominent, located steps away from the “Charging Bull” tourist attraction at Bowling Green.

It is a historical fact that Laval and Pétain were fêted in ticker-tape parades in 1931, a decade before they aided Hitler. But allowing their names to hold places of honor all these years later, without providing any context, effectively whitewashes their violent anti-Semitic legacies.

In August 2017, amid a national debate over monuments sparked by the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, activists called on New York City to remove the Pétain inscription from the Canyon of Heroes. The then-mayor responded quickly, tweeting four days after the Charlottesville march that “The commemoration for Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain in the Canyon of Heroes will be one of the first we remove.”

But in January 2018, after a review process by an advisory commission, de Blasio walked back that commitment, declaring instead that “context such as wayfinding, on-site signage, and historical information” would be added to the Canyon of Heroes. A year later, the Downtown Alliance and the Museum of the City of New York quietly unveiled a webpage explaining the history of ticker-tape parades and offering a description of each parade honoree. Downtown Alliance vice president Andy Breslau called the webpage a response to City Hall’s request for “context.”

Four years later, no further action has been taken by the city. No inscriptions have been removed. No signage has been added. Laval, Pétain, Lindbergh, Pahlavi, Park and other figures of ill repute remain canonized as heroes on the streets of New York City.

Mayor Adams should finish up the business that de Blasio did not.

First, the city should finally construct the on-site historical signage it promised in 2018. While the Downtown Alliance’s webpage is a positive step, context must be physical and in-person in order for it to be effective. It could take the form of traditional historical signs placed along lower Broadway or it could be more contemporary. Why not, for example, embed QR codes on the sidewalk linking to the descriptions written about each ticker-tape parade by the Downtown Alliance and the Museum of the City of New York?

Equally important, the city should rename the Canyon of Heroes. Its granite inscriptions serve a valuable purpose in educating passersby about New York City’s rich history, but the “heroes” language wrongfully celebrates figures for whom many New Yorkers would no longer choose to throw a parade today. Adjusting the street signs along lower Broadway to say “Canyon of History” or even the neutral “Ticker-Tape Parade Route” would better reflect the true nature of the monument as a tribute to the city’s history of parades — not as a tribute to the specific men and women who received them.

In the midst of last year’s mayoral race, Adams nobly declared his intention to remove the names of slave-owners from New York City’s streets and buildings. A few years earlier, at a public hearing of de Blasio’s monuments commission, Adams asked the city to identify new historical figures worthy of recognition so that the city’s monuments become more “reflective of our diverse history and community fabric.” He should extend the same principles to the Canyon of Heroes.

Until signage is added and the monument is renamed, New York City will continue to honor — against all logic — bigots, despots and Nazis as our “heroes.”

Goldstein is a former Glass Leadership Fellow at the Anti-Defamation League and former program producer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.