Themed street names

[1995hoo]

.... And the area of Great Neck, Kings Point, and University Heights seem to have a recurring theme of British place names on their streets.

British names seem to be a fairly common theme in my observation. I can think of a neighborhood near us (Kings Park) that has names like Cromwell, Piccadilly, Trafalgar, Parliament, Victoria, etc..... The builders probably weren't satisfied because nearby there's a Kings Park West with names like Commonwealth, Constable, Claridge, Llewellyn, Dundalk, etc.

(As an aside, how would you like to live on a street with a Welsh name like "Llewellyn" and have to deal with giving your address to delivery drivers who seem to have trouble with even simple names?)

I've always thought that there seems to be a notion that British names and the like are perceived as "elegant" and I've long assumed that's a major reason for that sort of theme. My community (Kingstowne) is nominally British-themed, though it shows through in some areas more than others (one portion of the community is called "Yorkshire," another is "Edinburgh," and there are streets with names like Joust , Liverpool, and Norham).

[Scott5114]

(As an aside, how would you like to live on a street with a Welsh name like "Llewellyn" and have to deal with giving your address to delivery drivers who seem to have trouble with even simple names?)

Oh god. My girlfriend lives on a street with a simple name that happens to include the word "Glen" (as in the geographical feature). Her W2 came with it spelled "Glan", and she's gotten the spelling "Glenn" (like John Glenn) as well.

I live in a part of town with Southern city themed streets, specifically on Nashville Dr., and had a pizza driver attempt to deliver to a house on Memphis Dr. instead. Wrong part of Tennessee! Fortunately there is no house with my number on Memphis Drive and he called me for clarification.

[kphoger]

Wichita has done what a town should NOT do:  put Minneapolis one block apart.  I work for a cable company, and I remember one time when one of our techs went to the right house number on the wrong street (Minneapolis/Minnesota).  The person living there let him come on inside and hook everything up.  I later got an email that the customer wondered where their installer was.  No big deal, an honest mistake, we'll be right over there, right?  Except that he also had to go back to the wrong house and disconnect that lady's services.  Man, she was seriously pissed off....funny, since she hadn't ordered cable service.

[hobsini2]

I once came across a map of Chicago from around 1900 with some interesting names that i am sure confused people back then. There were 3 Lincoln Aves, Michigan Ave crossed Michigan St, 2 Columbus Aves, and 4 Grands with different suffixes. The city changed a number of the street names to end to confusion and said there can't be any duplications in the name with one exception, there still is Columbus Dr in Downtown and Columbus Ave that heads southwest and becomes Southwest Hwy. at Pulaski Rd.

[Roadgeek Adam]

Highland Park, the town I live in, has an interesting setup that's had to be adjusted a lot since 1888.

The "North side" of town, uses North 2nd, North 3rd, North 4th all the way up to North 11th. (North 8th being an anomaly because when North Eighth crosses the border into Edison Township, it retains its name until the Northeast Corridor tracks.) However, when Watson Whittlesey built the Livingston Manor portion of the North Side, none of these streets boasted these names until they came under borough control. (Such as North 2nd being known as Highland Avenue at the time. There is currently a Highland Avenue further up the North Side.)

The "South side" of town is similar, having boasted the original First Avenue, Second Avenue, Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue. If you figure the North side is North 2nd to North 11th, the South side has South First — Fifth (the original First Avenue — Fifth Avenue). South 6th, South 7th and South 8th soon joined it the normal way. However, South 9th, South 10th and South 11th were interesting situations. Around 1923, one portion of South 11th was Tierce Avenue, one portion of South 10th was Brieger Street, and one portion of South 9th was South 9th. (The current day Volkert Street was a 2nd Cherry Street.) However, South 9th, South 10th and South 11th have another problem, considering they also run through the part of town I live in, The Triangle (which runs between NJ 27 and CR 514). For whatever reason the developer around the Triangle (then the RaceTrack district), started a 2nd set of numbered streets through the area. So South 9th in the Triangle was 1st Street, South 10th was 2nd, South 11th was 3rd (4th, 5th and 6th were a little more divided up on the named streets area).

If that wasn't confusing enough, Highland Park has three distinctive areas with name choices for streets. A lot of the Livingston Manor portion of the North side does the presidential thing, but with no clear pattern. Lincoln, Grant, Harrison, Madison, Cleveland (and Jackson, which was added later on) were the 5 original streets. But the north side has no clear pattern currently, didn't really then either:

The North Side from River Road (CR 622) to North 5th currently looks like this in order: RARITAN AVENUE (NJ 27, the main drag), DENISON STREET, MONTGOMERY STREET, WAYNE STREET,  then a bend into Livingston Manor, where its LAWRENCE AVENUE (a violation of the presidential system), LINCOLN AVENUE, GRANT AVENUE, HARRISON AVENUE, CLEVELAND AVENUE, JACKSON AVENUE (a small connector between North 2nd and Janeway) then all of a sudden, the last street before the RR tracks, HUBELI STREET (currently closed) violates the president system once again. (There are proposals to build new developments along Hubeli, so this name might see the light of day again.)

On the Triangle district, noticeably obvious is the numerous amount of Universities given prominence. Harvard Street, Barnard Street, Columbia Avenue, Amherst Street, Dartmouth Avenue and Exeter Street all boast names of Universities. My guess to why Rutgers is not represented is that Lincoln Avenue on the North side had a portion called Rutgers Place that was just absorbed into Lincoln, and the road existed under that name when these existed. The 1st-6th Streets are long gone, thankfully from the Triangle though. None of the other streets in the Triangle fit within any system pardoning the South 9th, South 10th and South 11th extensions.

Although technically not really an "area", several of our former mayors have their name plastered on a street somewhere. Eden Avenue, Volkert Street (on the South Side), the four disconnected Johnson Streets (on the south side), Archer Place (a shrimpy little street on the North side) all represent names of former mayors of Highland Park.

This has probably gone past TLDR at this point, but considering how confusing this history is, I'm not surprised its this long.

[Fixed dashes. -S.]

[yakra]

Spotted in Galveston, TX:
Fish-themed streets

[empirestate]

Hollywood, Florida uses a presidential theme on its east-west Streets beginning with Washington and ending with Coolidge.  The city's gridiron was laid out in the 1920's.

I was just noticing that Brownsville, TX does this as well, along with a few other cities mentioned downthread. What are some other cities that have the presidents-in-order naming theme? And who is the most recent president to be represented in this fashion (that is, as part of a sequential system, not just an isolated instance)? And no, you can't count LBJ if the street is named for Andrew Johnson. :-)

No takers? I guess Coolidge wins the prize??

[mgk920]

Hollywood, Florida uses a presidential theme on its east-west Streets beginning with Washington and ending with Coolidge.  The city's gridiron was laid out in the 1920's.

I was just noticing that Brownsville, TX does this as well, along with a few other cities mentioned downthread. What are some other cities that have the presidents-in-order naming theme? And who is the most recent president to be represented in this fashion (that is, as part of a sequential system, not just an isolated instance)? And no, you can't count LBJ if the street is named for Andrew Johnson. :-)

No takers? I guess Coolidge wins the prize??

I, too, have mused about some city with a lengthy consecutive run of numbered streets renaming them in order for presidents, skipping duplicate names.  Duplicate names that would have to be skipped in such a 'run' include Adams, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush.

Mike

[bugo]

There's a subdivision on the south side of Sapulpa, OK that has streets named after Ford cars (Thunderbird, Fairlane, etc.)  Here's a link:

http://g.co/maps/37fmf

[empirestate]

Hollywood, Florida uses a presidential theme on its east-west Streets beginning with Washington and ending with Coolidge.  The city's gridiron was laid out in the 1920's.

I was just noticing that Brownsville, TX does this as well, along with a few other cities mentioned downthread. What are some other cities that have the presidents-in-order naming theme? And who is the most recent president to be represented in this fashion (that is, as part of a sequential system, not just an isolated instance)? And no, you can't count LBJ if the street is named for Andrew Johnson. :-)

No takers? I guess Coolidge wins the prize??

I, too, have mused about some city with a lengthy consecutive run of numbered streets renaming them in order for presidents, skipping duplicate names.  Duplicate names that would have to be skipped in such a 'run' include Adams, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush.

Mike

Yeah, although the Hollywood, FL example stops at Coolidge, there are certainly areas of the country still being built out, many of them already with orderly gridded road systems that could easily be renamed. I'm surprised, then, that some more recently built area hasn't gotten farther down the list than Coolidge.

But perhaps it's more due to a shift in values, such that naming streets after presidents stopped being in vogue during the 20th century. Or perhaps, it's still in vogue but is more represented now by honoring individual presidents (or other local heroes) rather than the egalitarian approach of honoring them all in a named sequence?

[Mark68]

There is a section of Riverside, CA, that is called "Wood Streets". It's an older neighborhood (nice, tree-lined streets), probably dating from the 1910s-1920s, where the east-west (technically WNW-ESE) streets have names like Larchwood, Beechwood, Elmwood, Linwood, Oakwood, Rosewood, Edgewood, Brentwood, & Maplewood.

There's also a Presidential theme in Corona, unincorporated Home Gardens, and west Riverside, where every half mile for streets going ENE-WSW are, from the east, Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, then La Sierra Ave, then continuing with Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, then out of order (McKinley instead of Johnson...maybe because he was impeached?), then Grant. Every 2-3 of these streets (starting with Madison) have interchanges with the Riverside Freeway (SR 91).

The Denver/Aurora area is full of themed alphabetical street names. Pretty much every N-S street west of Broadway and east of Colorado Blvd is alphabetical in nature, and with Yosemite St (which is the traditional eastern border of Denver and western border of Aurora), the streets are double (for instance, the first two streets east of Yosemite are Akron & Alton). The two Xs in this sequence are Xanadu & Xapary.
This pattern is sometimes broken by a major arterial, but oftentimes not.

[mgk920]

Hollywood, Florida uses a presidential theme on its east-west Streets beginning with Washington and ending with Coolidge.  The city's gridiron was laid out in the 1920's.

I was just noticing that Brownsville, TX does this as well, along with a few other cities mentioned downthread. What are some other cities that have the presidents-in-order naming theme? And who is the most recent president to be represented in this fashion (that is, as part of a sequential system, not just an isolated instance)? And no, you can't count LBJ if the street is named for Andrew Johnson. :-)

No takers? I guess Coolidge wins the prize??

I, too, have mused about some city with a lengthy consecutive run of numbered streets renaming them in order for presidents, skipping duplicate names.  Duplicate names that would have to be skipped in such a 'run' include Adams, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush.

Mike

Yeah, although the Hollywood, FL example stops at Coolidge, there are certainly areas of the country still being built out, many of them already with orderly gridded road systems that could easily be renamed. I'm surprised, then, that some more recently built area hasn't gotten farther down the list than Coolidge.

But perhaps it's more due to a shift in values, such that naming streets after presidents stopped being in vogue during the 20th century. Or perhaps, it's still in vogue but is more represented now by honoring individual presidents (or other local heroes) rather than the egalitarian approach of honoring them all in a named sequence?

Well, naming streets in new developments for Presidents more recent that Franklin Roosevelt is not entirely unheard of.  For example, here in the Appleton area, some of the streets in a commercial/industrial park area that was developed in the mid to late 1970s in the suburban Village of Kimberly are named 'Truman', 'Eisenhower', 'Kennedy', 'Ford' and 'Carter' (for some reason they skipped 'Nixon').  Of those, 'Kennedy' is now an important collector street that extends into a residential area well to the east and 'Eisenhower' is now a major arterial street that extends well to the south, including though a newly developing part of the City of Appleton.

See:
http://maps.google.com/?ll=44.260292,-88.346944&spn=0.017519,0.027595&t=m&z=15

Mike

[hm insulators]

British names seem to be a fairly common theme in my observation. I can think of a neighborhood near us (Kings Park) that has names like Cromwell, Piccadilly, Trafalgar, Parliament, Victoria, etc..... The builders probably weren't satisfied because nearby there's a Kings Park West with names like Commonwealth, Constable, Claridge, Llewellyn, Dundalk, etc.


I've always thought that there seems to be a notion that British names and the like are perceived as "elegant" and I've long assumed that's a major reason for that sort of theme. My community (Kingstowne) is nominally British-themed, though it shows through in some areas more than others (one portion of the community is called "Yorkshire," another is "Edinburgh," and there are streets with names like Joust , Liverpool, and Norham).

As mentioned before, I grew up in a tony Los Angeles suburb called La Canada (Lah Can-YAH-dah) Flintridge. Although politically it's one entity, in reality, it's still split into two parts: The part called La Canada is on a valley floor, tucked in between the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Rafael Hills. La Canada is definitely upper-middle class, but the part called Flintridge, in the San Rafael Hills, is really ritzy. The streets in Flintridge are winding streets frequently lined with huge live oaks, and many of them have British names: Oxford, Hampstead, Chevy Chase, Inverness, Berkshire, Dover and a bunch of others.     

[mightyace]

Discovered a few weeks ago that a subdivision in Sebring, Florida uses an automotive and racing marque theme as well. There's Porsche, Ferrari, Mercedes, Corvette, Jaguar, Lotus, but also some other automotive brands like Volvo, Lexus, Bentley, Fiat, Aston-Martin, Renault, Lancia and others. What I really smiled at was the obscure stuff like Riley, OSCA, Vanwall, Alpine, Lola, et al making an appearance. 

At the south side of that there's a Thunderbird Dr. but it also runs parallel to bird named streets (Eagle, Lark, Wren, etc.) but the Thunderbird is mythological, not real.

Maybe it was someone's idea to have a street that kinds of fits both themes.

[bugo]

Hollywood, Florida uses a presidential theme on its east-west Streets beginning with Washington and ending with Coolidge.  The city's gridiron was laid out in the 1920's.

I was just noticing that Brownsville, TX does this as well, along with a few other cities mentioned downthread. What are some other cities that have the presidents-in-order naming theme? And who is the most recent president to be represented in this fashion (that is, as part of a sequential system, not just an isolated instance)? And no, you can't count LBJ if the street is named for Andrew Johnson. :-)

No takers? I guess Coolidge wins the prize??

I, too, have mused about some city with a lengthy consecutive run of numbered streets renaming them in order for presidents, skipping duplicate names.  Duplicate names that would have to be skipped in such a 'run' include Adams, Johnson, Cleveland, Roosevelt and Bush.

Mike

Yeah, although the Hollywood, FL example stops at Coolidge, there are certainly areas of the country still being built out, many of them already with orderly gridded road systems that could easily be renamed. I'm surprised, then, that some more recently built area hasn't gotten farther down the list than Coolidge.

But perhaps it's more due to a shift in values, such that naming streets after presidents stopped being in vogue during the 20th century. Or perhaps, it's still in vogue but is more represented now by honoring individual presidents (or other local heroes) rather than the egalitarian approach of honoring them all in a named sequence?

Well, naming streets in new developments for Presidents more recent that Franklin Roosevelt is not entirely unheard of.  For example, here in the Appleton area, some of the streets in a commercial/industrial park area that was developed in the mid to late 1970s in the suburban Village of Kimberly are named 'Truman', 'Eisenhower', 'Kennedy', 'Ford' and 'Carter' (for some reason they skipped 'Nixon').  Of those, 'Kennedy' is now an important collector street that extends into a residential area well to the east and 'Eisenhower' is now a major arterial street that extends well to the south, including though a newly developing part of the City of Appleton.

Does "Bush Street" lead to a sewage treatment plant?

[mightyace]

^^^

or does Clinton Street lead to a brothel? 

[english si]

many of them have British names: Oxford, Hampstead, Chevy Chase, Inverness, Berkshire, Dover and a bunch of others.

Chevy Chase isn't a British name, but boy there are a lot of others there: Somerset, Dorset, Cambridge, Antrim, Braemar, Putney (they realise that is an area that has never been fashionable, right?), Finchley, Euston, Wendover, Berwick, Sherwood, Kirkham, Ashington, Erin, Dublin, Windermere, Keswick, Stratford, Windsor, Durham, Penbury, Beresford, Cathcart, Chatham, Dartmouth, Wimbledon, Charing Cross, Buckingham, Cornwall, Coventry, Kennington, Whitehall, Greenwich, Leith, Solway.

A real mix of different types of places and everything there.

OK, there's also Normandy and Roanoke that aren't in the British isles, plus some more Spanish road names and some generic ones.

[1995hoo]

Chevy Chase isn't a British name ....

According to West Virginia University's football radio announcers, it's a General Motors—related name. (A few years ago the University of Maryland sold the naming rights to the playing surface at their football stadium to Chevy Chase Bank: Chevy Chase Bank Field at Byrd Stadium. It's now Capital One Bank. Anyway, when WVU played at Maryland that year, their radio guys kept pronouncing "Chevy Chase" as the make of car, as in "Ford or Chevy?")

[kphoger]

I've noticed that Bella Vista, AR, has a lot of streets named after Scottish place names.  However, they have about a bazillion streets and none of them seem to have 'normal' names.  I haven't made any attempt to track down the etymology of most of them.

[cooperrhall]

I used to live in a neighborhood with astronomy-themed street names.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=41.405165,-73.055627&spn=0.005359,0.011362&t=m&z=17

Seymour, CT

[Super Mateo]

It would have been cool had Hershey, PA continued the chocolate theme on more than just the main streets.  Then again, I'm not sure how many different ways one could say chocolate.....

[empirestate]

It would have been cool had Hershey, PA continued the chocolate theme on more than just the main streets.  Then again, I'm not sure how many different ways one could say chocolate.....

They did. Chocolate Ave. intersects Cocoa Ave. in the middle of town.

But I'm more interested in the theme, if any, behind the streets parallel to Chocolate...you have Caracas, Granada, Areba and Bahia (and then you get into regular tree names). I first wondered if these were places from which chocolate was imported...Caracas being in Venezuela, Granada in Spain, Bahia in Brazil, and I don't know what Areba is.

It also seems the Areba is used as the base of a rather abortive alphabetical sequence...Areba, Beech, Cedar, Maple (?), Elm...and that's as far as it ever gets.

Also interestingly, Hershey has numbered and lettered streets, but these apply to the alleys between the main streets, and the pattern is quite sporadic.

[1995hoo]

I always thought Areba would be the ideal street on which to speed: Areba, Areba! Andele! Andele!

[Takumi]

Areba might be a misspelling of Aruba. Just a guess, mind you.

[CentralCAroadgeek]

Salinas has several parts with themed street names.
-Wines
-Places in the UK
-Colonial America
-Desert Plants
-Wildlife
-Places in Italy
-Trees
-San Francisco