Broad Street[s]

[newyorker478]

Is it just me, or does every town in New Jersey and the Philly area have a Broad Street in the center of town? I happen to believe so. How many do you know of?

[Quillz]

It's probably just the equivalent to either "Main Street" or "High Street."

[Don'tKnowYet]

The term Broad came from England in the 17th century when commerce, for lack of a better word, became the central focus of major towns.  prior to this Renaissance, roads in England were just horse paths.  when shops and markets became the central focal point of these towns such as London, Sheffield and Birmingham, they would name their commerce centers Broad Street because the horse cart paths were widened to be more "broad", open, spacious and pleasing. to this day Birmingham and Sheffield's commercial centers are centralized around Broad Street.

In the 17th century, visitors to these towns would generally seek out the "broad" spaces because they were known to be the areas with the market(s).

So as the northeast was settled, they maintained this principle as the main street called Broad to retain the way towns in England were laid out. Newark, NJ, Providence and Philadelphia are the best examples.  Consider how wide the street is realizing the fact that these cities were laid out over 300 years ago.  Other cities efforts for a Broad Street didn't pan out so wide such as Boston and New York City.  that's not to say that Broad Street in Boston and NYC were not essential to their development or commercial center at one time - they just weren't intended to be wide and broad thoroughfares.

[Alps]

It's just you. Bloomfield has a Broad Street, as does the aforementioned Newark, and Summit. Most towns don't. (:

[Michael in Philly]

^^Westfield does.

As far as Philadelphia is concerned, Broad Street actually didn't have the function Don'tKnowYet describes, because it developed fairly late.  If you look at the street plans of William Penn's day, Penn anticipated that ports would develop along both the Schuylkill and the Delaware and they'd grow towards each other up the middle of the grid.  But the Schuylkill port never took off and the city grew up and down the Delaware instead.  Long story short, as late as the Revolution, Broad Street was out in the country (an undeveloped part of the city, legally) and in fact was just a "paper street" - a line on the map that hadn't actually been built yet.  I think it became something of a main street for residences and cultural institutions toward the middle of the 19th century; the Academy of Music (where the Philadelphia Orchestra played for most of its history) was built on Broad Street in 1857 - I can't think of a prominent landmark on it that's older, although I think there was a railroad station where City Hall is now, perhaps as early as 1840.

Market Street was actually the street that had - as its name suggests - the city's main market facilities (in sheds) in the middle of it from the beginning of settlement until well into the 19th century.  In fact, it was officially named High Street; Market Street was an unofficial name that took off and was eventually made official.  Many towns in Pennsylvania and Delaware imitated the Philadelphia street plan (numbered streets one way, named streets, often named for trees, perpendicular to them), and you'll often find that the main street of a city is called Market Street.  Wilmington, Delaware, is the first place that comes to mind.

[Alps]

Newark, NJ has another Market/Broad pair that's actually the center of the city. Paterson, NJ is another city with a major Market St.

[wytout]

Actually the main street going through the center of Windsor CT is named Broad Street.  (CT 159)

[Scott5114]

I assume the name "Broadway" is related to the history of "Broad Street"?

Here in Oklahoma we don't have any "Broad Street"s or "Market Street"s that I know of, but many small towns have a "Main" and a "Broadway" set at right angles to one another, forming the town's quadrants.

[Alps]

I assume the name "Broadway" is related to the history of "Broad Street"?

Here in Oklahoma we don't have any "Broad Street"s or "Market Street"s that I know of, but many small towns have a "Main" and a "Broadway" set at right angles to one another, forming the town's quadrants.

Newark NJ has both a Broad St. and a Broadway. In fact, SB on Broadway brings you right onto Broad St. They run parallel for a few blocks before Broad St. (the most important N-S corridor) ends, and Broadway continues north as Washington St./NJ 7 through Nutley and Belleville. (Washington Streets are generally important as well, especially in the Northeast, for fairly obvious reasons.) In a lot of towns in this area, Broadway tends to be a tiny side street. There are Broadway St./Ave./etc. as well. We even have a couple of roads of mild importance named just Boulevard.

[Michael in Philly]

Lower Manhattan has a Broadway and a Broad Street.  If memory serves, they're parallel and about a block apart.  And they may have had their current names since colonial imes.  Broadway, of course, was a main highway running the length of Manhattan and continuing north toward Albany, although I don't know that the name Broadway was used for it in areas that hadn't become urban yet.

I'm not sure either of them's all that broad, at least downtown....

[xcellntbuy]

Broadway in the City of New York used to be called Bloomingdale Road, long, long ago.

[Michael in Philly]

According to every map I've ever seen, it was always called Broadway in the built-up, southern part of Manhattan.  The name Bloomingdale Road was used farther north; Bloomingdale itself was a village at about Broadway and 125th Street now.  I suppose north of Bloomingdale it might have been the Albany Post Road.  When I said "I don't know that the name Broadway was used for it in areas that hadn't become urban yet," I had the Bloomingdale Road name in mind, but I'm vague on where, geographically, the name changed and at what point in time the just started calling it Broadway all the way to the city line.  At the time of the Civil War, for example, when the built-up area ended at about 59th Street (the south end of Central Park, which had just been created a few years earlier), you can find plenty of contemporary references to Broadway (which was the most important street in the city at the time) up to at least 23d Street, then it's still called Bloomingdale Road farther north, in what is now the Upper West Side but was still country then.

Must try to pin some of this down on line....