Across the nation in a few miles
The Tulsa World’s Mark Brown explains one aspect of his hometown’s street grid:
The [streets] downtown, the first, west of Main were named for western hubs — Boulder, Cheyenne, Houston — while streets east went that direction: Boston, Detroit, Frankfort, with the Mississippi the dividing line. A town commission hired two brothers, Gus and Dan Patton, to perform the survey and create the plat. The Pattons were “experienced in other territorial towns,” wrote Danney Goble in his history of Tulsa. Presumably, then, there are other mid-continent ‘burgs roped off with big-city names.
It’s not the full lasso, but once you get west of University Avenue, Lubbock grinds out a whole batch of alphabetized American towns: Akron, Boston, Canton, all the way out to York. There is no X, so points to Tulsa for coming with Xanthus and Xenophon and even Xyler, which aren’t exactly hublike but which appeal to my sense of order.
East of University Avenue, Lubbock has letters: Avenue A, which seems to be the dividing line between east and west (though numbered streets on the west side get no designator), out to, well, Avenue X. Streets that fall between the letters get more town names: Uvalde Avenue is between Avenue U and Avenue V, north of 4th, which is not West 4th.
People wonder how I kill time on the road. Wonder no more.
Mark »
26 June 2009 · 6:49 pm
Yale, Oklahoma (named for the lock on the post office door, not the seat of higher learning) has Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Erie Avenues on one side of Broadway and Beaumont, Charleston, Dallas, and Ft. Worth on the other. (The other “E” street evidently didn’t get built.) They stopped growing before they had to worry about Xanthus or Zunis.
CGHill »
26 June 2009 · 7:31 pm
I’m thinking eventually it will all be on the Tulsa grid anyway; several years ago on Route 66, just outside of Bristow, I caught a sign for South 545th West Avenue.
miriam »
26 June 2009 · 9:29 pm
Paterson, NJ, has these geographic names. I can’t remember their exact order, but they went something like this: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Buffalo. For some reason this drove me crazy. ( am easily crazed.) They should run out of states before they resort to cities, dammit. You do not mix cities and states!