'Jimmy Breslin Way' Honors Pulitzer Prize-Winning Writer

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NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Legendary newspaper columnist and author Jimmy Breslin and died last year at age 88.

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This morning, 42nd Street between 2nd and 3rd avenues was named "Jimmy Breslin Way."

The area is near the former Daily News building where Breslin's writing earned him accolades and awards including the Pulitzer Prize in 1986.

American author and journalist Jimmy Breslin smiles while seated at his newspaper office desk, New York City. (Photo by Michael Evans/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

Breslin was a fixture for decades in New York journalism. It was Breslin, a rumpled bed of a reporter, who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the '60s; who became the Son of Sam's regular correspondent in the '70s; who exposed the city's worst corruption scandal in decades in the '80s; who was pulled from a car and stripped to his underwear by Brooklyn rioters in the '90s.

With his uncombed mop of hair and sneering Queens accent, Breslin was like a character right out of his own work, and didn't mind telling you.

Books by Breslin include The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight about a Brooklyn mafia family, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? about the struggling 1962 Mets, and The Good Rat: A True Story, another Mafia tale.