Lettered Streets

[Roadman66]

How come there is no Avenue E or Avenue G in Brooklyn, New York?

[allniter89]

because those arent letters   

[Roadman66]

is that a joke?

[agentsteel53]

is that a joke?

it is precisely as serious as your post.

[NE2]

Actually not a bad question. Here's a start: http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/glenwoodpark/ http://books.google.com/books?id=EihNAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA539

[Roadman66]

thanks, NE2

[Duke87]

Several avenues in the sequence were given other names, usually beginning with the same letter.

A → Albermarle
B → Beverley (or "Beverly", according to the IRT)
C → Clarendon
E → Foster
G → Glenwood
Q → Quentin

Similarly, Washington DC has "Eye Street" instead of "I Street" to avoid confusion with 1(st) Street, and skips J because there was already a Jay Street in town before the grid was laid out. They also have no B Street since Constitution and Independence Avenues are where they should be.


Also, for the future question... Park Avenue and Park Avenue South replace (most of) 4th Avenue in Manhattan, renamed as such after the trains were put under the street in a tunnel thus creating a wide street with a park-ish median - supposedly to encourage the New York Central Railroad to do similarly with the rest of the line. Lexington and Madison break the sequence because they were added in later. Note how the distance between 3rd and Park and between Park and 5th is the same as between 5th and 6th, 6th and 7th, etc.

[Michael in Philly]

^^I Street in Washington is officially written with the letter I.  "Eye" is a common unofficial spelling, to avoid confusion with 1.

I'm not sure where you get the idea J Street was avoided so as not to conflict with Jay Street.  For starters, there wasn't a Jay Street, or anything else, "in town before the grid was laid out."  There wasn't even a town.  It wasn't clear yet in western languages that I and J were separate letters:  J didn't exist in Latin, it developed as a way of writing I when it functioned as a consonant, a Y sound; in Italian, it's still called "I lunga" - "long I" - and only used in words of foreign origin.  (I'm a language geek too....)

[Scott5114]

Similarly, Washington DC has "Eye Street" instead of "I Street" to avoid confusion with 1(st) Street, and skips J because there was already a Jay Street in town before the grid was laid out. They also have no B Street since Constitution and Independence Avenues are where they should be.

To my knowledge, that's not true in the case of I Street:


The one time I've visited DC our hotel was pretty close to I Street. The other blades in DC use Helvetica, but all of the I Street ones use a thick, serif I as in the picture to distinguish more from the 1 (which is pretty distinct from the I in Helvetica anyway, but devoid of context it could be seen as a 1). As for J Street, the story I've always heard was that whoever was naming the street grid had a beef with John Jay (who was at one point Chief Justice of SCOTUS; I'm not sure if he was at the time said beef was occurring), and thus omitted "J" from the grid in order to slight him.

[Michael in Philly]

^^Urban legend.

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/jstreet.asp

http://askville.amazon.com/street-Washington-DC/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=5959893

[Brandon]

Chicago has a series of lettered avenues on the southeast side (East Side neighborhood).  IIRC, they go from A to O.  Otherwise, toward the west, they're not lettered, but they tend to start with words starting with "A" and go westward to words starting with "P".

[Michael in Philly]

^^I spared you the so-called Second, Third and Fourth alphabets in D.C....

[Bickendan]

Portland has the Alphabet District as follows:
SW/SE Ankeny
W/E Burnside
NW/NE Couch (pronounced cooch)
NW/NE Davis
NW/NE Everett
NW/NE Flanders
NW/NE Glisan (gleesan)
NW/NE Hoyt
NW/NE Irving
NW Johnson/NE Oregon
NW Kearney/NE Pacific
NW Lovejoy/NE Holladay
NW Marshall/NE Multnomah
NW Northrup/NE Wasco
NW Overton/NE Clackamas
NW Pettygrove/NE Halsey
NW Quimby/NE Weidler
NW Raleigh/NE Broadway
NW Savier/NE Schulyer
NW Thurman/NE Hancock
NW Upshur/NE San Rafael
NW Vaughn/NE Tillamook
NW Wilson/NE Thompson
[NW Roosevelt] no X/NE Sacramento
NW York/NE Brazee
[NW Reed] no Z/NE Russell

[Quillz]

Some cities don't have a 13th street due to superstition.

[1995hoo]

Some cities don't have a 13th street due to superstition.

Whereas DC even has a 13-1/2 Street NW. Used to be an important shortcut back in the 1980s (less so now due to newer construction).

[OCGuy81]

Portland has the Alphabet District as follows:
SW/SE Ankeny
W/E Burnside
NW/NE Couch (pronounced cooch)
NW/NE Davis
NW/NE Everett
NW/NE Flanders
NW/NE Glisan (gleesan)
NW/NE Hoyt
NW/NE Irving
NW Johnson/NE Oregon
NW Kearney/NE Pacific
NW Lovejoy/NE Holladay
NW Marshall/NE Multnomah
NW Northrup/NE Wasco
NW Overton/NE Clackamas
NW Pettygrove/NE Halsey
NW Quimby/NE Weidler
NW Raleigh/NE Broadway
NW Savier/NE Schulyer
NW Thurman/NE Hancock
NW Upshur/NE San Rafael
NW Vaughn/NE Tillamook
NW Wilson/NE Thompson
[NW Roosevelt] no X/NE Sacramento
NW York/NE Brazee
[NW Reed] no Z/NE Russell

Flanders, Lovejoy, Quimby!! Gotta love the way Matt Groening used Portland streets as Simpsons characters. 

[sp_redelectric]

Portland has the Alphabet District as follows:

McMinnville, Oregon does the same as well, in the N.E. and to a lesser extent S.E. quadrant:

Adams Street
Baker Street
Cowls Street
Davis Street
Evans Street
Ford Street
Galloway Street
Hembree Street
Irvine Street
Johnson Street
Kirby Street
Logan Street
Macy Street
Newby Street
Oak Street
(And the pattern is broken there, as the next and final street is Oregon Street.)

The pattern starts on the NW quadrant by using the names of trees:
N.W. Alder Street
Birch Street
Cedar Street
(pattern is broken by Yamhill Street)
Elm Street (the last street in the series)
The next and final two streets in the grid are Thomsen Lane and Michelbrook Lane.

[Takumi]

There's a neighborhood with lettered avenues in my town. The sequence is A, B, C, D, E, F, and finally, Brame.

[akotchi]

Boston has an alphabetized grid starting at the west edge of Boston Common

Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford, east to west.

[huskeroadgeek]

My hometown of Lincoln, NE has lettered streets except for I Street and Z Street, which are left out because of the similarity to the numbers 1 and 2. Also, for reasons I'm not sure of-V Street is replaced by Vine Street except for a small 1 block portion running underneath I-180 that is marked as V Street(it is disjointed from the rest of Vine Street).

[agentsteel53]

My hometown of Lincoln, NE has lettered streets except for I Street and Z Street, which are left out because of the similarity to the numbers 1 and 2. Also, for reasons I'm not sure of-V Street is replaced by Vine Street except for a small 1 block portion running underneath I-180 that is marked as V Street(it is disjointed from the rest of Vine Street).

is there an O street?  I seem to recall there being one.  zeroth street hardly ever exists, so there's likely no confusion there.

[1995hoo]

Boston has an alphabetized grid starting at the west edge of Boston Common

Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, Dartmouth, Exeter, Fairfield, Gloucester and Hereford, east to west.

That sort of thing is fairly common, either on an official basis or otherwise. For example, DC's single-letter street names have been mentioned in this thread. Once they got to the end of the single-letter names (W Street, as there are no X, Y, or Z Streets) they started over again with alphabetical names having two syllables (e.g., Biltmore Street, Calvert Street, Porter Street, Yuma Street), and after that alphabet ran out they then used three-syllable names (e.g., Albemarle Street, Chesapeake Street). Northwest DC has a fourth alphabet that mostly uses botanical names (e.g., Myrtle Street, Orchid Street, Tulip Street) without regard to the number of syllables. Of course there are a few exceptions to all these rules. As a practical matter, though, the number of syllables in a DC street name will give you a rough sense for how far out from the Capitol you have to go. (Avenues are not part of the system, BTW.)

Across the river in Virginia, Arlington County carries it a step further. North-south streets (i.e., routes with "Street" in the name; "roads," "lanes," drives," etc. are exceptions to the rule) start with a one-syllable alphabet closest to the Potomac River and work west, then there's a two-syllable alphabet, then a three, and finally a single four-syllable street name (Arizona Street) that, as far as I could tell when I drove on it one day, doesn't appear on any street sign but does appear on a park sign for a park where one of the old DC boundary stones is located. What makes it confusing to a lot of people who haven't studied the system is that most of the local named and numbered streets are not thru streets but the street names are repeated. For example, looking at a map I count four disconnected South Buchanan Streets and four disconnected North Buchanan Streets. Figuring out the block numbers on the named streets is easy enough if you know that the intersecting numbered street tells you the block number, just like in many other places (example, the 1600 block is between 16th and 17th Streets). The hard part is knowing which part of a numbered street you have to go to if you need to find a particular block number and you don't have a navigation device or weren't told where to go. The county publishes a chart to give people that information. While the overall naming system has a sound pattern to it, the need for a block number chart for numbered streets isn't necessarily the most accessible system for someone new to the area!

Aside from those sorts of formal systems, I can think of a number of neighborhoods where the developers assigned alphabetical names. In those sorts of situations there's no inherent advantage like there is in the DC, Boston, or Arlington systems, so it's more just the developer trying to be cute or something.

[huskeroadgeek]

My hometown of Lincoln, NE has lettered streets except for I Street and Z Street, which are left out because of the similarity to the numbers 1 and 2. Also, for reasons I'm not sure of-V Street is replaced by Vine Street except for a small 1 block portion running underneath I-180 that is marked as V Street(it is disjointed from the rest of Vine Street).

is there an O street?  I seem to recall there being one.  zeroth street hardly ever exists, so there's likely no confusion there.

Yes, in fact O Street is the main street in Lincoln-carrying US 34 from the east and US 6 from the west. It fairly well divides the city into North and South(it is also the dividing point for North and South addresses).

[Duke87]

Brooklyn has an alphabetical sequence of streets in Greenpoint: Ash, Box, Clay, Dupont, Eagle, Freeman, Green, Huron, India, Java, Kent, (Greenpoint Ave), Milton, Noble, Oak.

[twinsfan87]

Northern Hennepin County, MN has a very extensive alphabetical street naming system for north-south streets that runs at least 6 times through the alphabet (including Q, X, and Z). It's really helpful to give directions to out-of-towners, especially when the streets are grid (such as in Minneapolis) and not so much when they are curvy (see Maple Grove and Plymouth for example). Hennepin County also numbers the east-west streets. MUCH less confusing than St. Paul/Ramsey County's street system!