You’ve been wonderful about sending me examples of unusually or strikingly named streets, neighborhoods and cities, a topic that I first wrote about in January and revisited on this publication, this one and this one. As we speak’s Odd Neighborhood Names installment would be the final — we’ll discover different enjoyable subjects to commune over — and I apologize to the various of you who’ve submitted unused materials. Due to your generosity. I’ve had extra choices than area for them.
Virtually all have fallen into considered one of three classes. I consider the primary as “let’s faux we’re someplace we’re not.” Jane Houssiere of Boulder, Colo., wrote: “I reside on the interface the place the Rocky Mountains meet the semiarid excessive plains. We’re nowhere close to any ocean.” However, she added, “builders will need to have been homesick for the coast.” Behold, on this mountainous inside, Barnacle Avenue, Starboard Drive, Driftwood Place, Sandpiper Circle, Beachcomber Court docket, Outrigger Court docket, Jib Court docket and extra. It’s a excessive tide of nautical nomenclature.
The second class is the motif-a-palooza, whereby the namers of streets work a theme as aggressively as my Regan does her favourite bones. Rob Boas of Atlanta alerted me to that metropolis’s “Sherwood Forest” neighborhood, the place the streets embrace Robin Hood Highway, Friar Tuck Highway, Woman Marian Lane, Nottingham Manner and Little John Path.
John FX Keane of New Windfall, N.J., famous that his childhood house of Binghamton, N.Y., has byways that pay homage to classical composers: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner and extra.
The motifs could be … sudden. Mary Beth Norton famous that Ithaca, N.Y., has a grouping of streets seemingly named for cigarette and cigar manufacturers: Winston Court docket, Salem Drive, Tareyton Drive and Muriel Avenue. Lest that appear eccentric, Barbara Lerner wrote that within the Gibson part of Valley Stream, N.Y., the place she used to reside, there’s a profusion of roads with cigarette- or liquor-related appellations: Marlboro, Munro (an English gin), Carstairs (a blended whiskey), Gordon (gin), Dubonnet (vermouth). The Gibson, in fact, is the martini’s cousin, garnished with a pickled onion slightly than an olive.
The third class: utter failures of creativeness. Into this group falls what was in all probability your most nominated avenue identify, Toronto’s soul-crushingly prosaic, spectacularly redundant Avenue Highway. However Sheila Gerstenzang of Las Vegas wrote in with one other positive instance: Overthere Lane in North Las Vegas.
Past these classes are avenue, neighborhood and city names that simply don’t seem to be such names in any respect. In Ipswich, Mass., there’s Labor in Useless Highway, as a former Ipswich resident, Douglas Atkins, and a present one, Tamsin Venn, identified.
