Bed-Stuy co-named a Brooklyn block “ODB Jones Way,” honoring Wu-Tang Clan founder Ol’ Dirty Bastard near his family home
Ol’ Dirty Bastard now has a piece of Brooklyn that carries his name for good. On Saturday, July 25, the corner of Franklin Avenue and Putnam Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant was officially co-named “ODB Jones Way,” a permanent tribute to the Wu-Tang Clan co-founder born Russell Tyrone Jones. Family, friends, and Council Member Chi Ossé gathered for the unveiling on a block that already held deep meaning for the Jones family, honoring a man whose voice helped define an entire era of New York rap.
The location was no accident. The new sign went up on the same block where ODB’s grandmother still lives, steps from a mural recreating the cover of his 1995 solo debut, Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version. ODB’s brother, Ramsey Jones, was on hand for the ceremony, and in footage captured by NYC photographer Howard Weiss, he explained the personal weight of the moment, standing on the ground that raised his brother.
From Fort Greene to Forever
Russell Jones was born in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn on November 15, 1968, just blocks from where the sign now stands. Alongside his cousins Robert Diggs (RZA) and Gary Grice (GZA), he helped build the Wu-Tang Clan in 1992, a nine-man collective that reshaped hip-hop with its raw production, kung-fu mythology, and unfiltered voices. ODB was the wild card, the one nobody could imitate, delivering what critics have called outrageously profane, free-associative rhymes in a half-rapped, half-sung style that was entirely his own.
His solo run made that voice unavoidable. Return to the 36 Chambers spun off “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Shimmy Shimmy Ya,“ cementing him as one of the most magnetic and unpredictable figures the genre ever produced. He died on November 13, 2004, two days before his 36th birthday, but his influence never left the borough.
Brooklyn Keeps Its Own
The co-naming is the latest way New York has moved to formalize ODB’s legacy. In 2023, the New York City Council designated November 15, his birthday, as “Ol’ Dirty Bastard Day,” a recognition that laid the groundwork for Saturday’s street tribute. The two honors together signal how seriously the city now treats a rapper once known mostly for chaos, reframing him as a cultural cornerstone worth preserving in the public record.
There is a fitting symmetry in who led the effort. Council Member Chi Ossé, whose district covers Bed-Stuy, is the son of the late Reggie Ossé, the beloved hip-hop attorney and journalist known as Combat Jack. For a politician raised inside the culture to hand ODB a permanent place on the map is its own kind of full-circle moment, one generation of Brooklyn hip-hop honoring another.
The Estate of Ol’ Dirty Bastard organized the co-naming in collaboration with Ossé’s office, drawing family, friends, and Central Brooklyn community members to the corner. For a neighborhood that has weathered decades of change and displacement, planting ODB’s name into the street grid is a way of holding the line, a reminder of who came from these blocks and what they gave the world.
Putnam Avenue will still be Putnam Avenue. But at Franklin, it is also something more now: a marker for the “Brooklyn Zoo“ MC whose sound, story, and spirit remain stitched into the neighborhood that made him.
