Alpha Avenue and Bravo Boulevard

May 21, 2007 7:42 AM

What are some city neighborhoods that follow an alphabetical-order street-naming convention like the north/south streets in Boston's Back Bay (from east to west: Arlington, Berkeley, Clarendon, etc.) or the east/west streets in San Francisco's Richmond and Sunset Districts (north to south: Anza, Balboa, Cabrillo, etc.)?

I would think there are probably plenty of master-planned suburban housing subdivisions set up this way, but I'm more interested in more "organic" urban examples, if that makes any sense.

posted by letourneau to Grab Bag (37 answers total)

Washington, DC has this especially northwest of Rhode Island Avenue.
posted by parmanparman at 7:47 AM on May 21, 2007

Northwest Portland, Oregon has alphabetical street names going south to north from Burnside Ave., notably missing 'A'. Other areas of the city follow different naming schemas including presidents and numbered streets.
posted by SpecialK at 7:50 AM on May 21, 2007

There was such a scheme for south and west of UC Berkeley:

In conformance with the presumed intellectual tone of the new community, north-south streets were named in alphabetical order for men of science: Audubon (now College Ave.), Bowditch, Choate (now Telegraph), Dana, Ellsworth, Fulton and Guyot (now Shattuck). East-west streets took the names of men of letters: Allston, Bancroft, Channing and Dwight.

Besides the renaming, lots of streets have been interspersed in between, so the pattern becomes a little hard to notice.
posted by Zed_Lopez at 7:50 AM on May 21, 2007

San Diego has a bunch of these neighborhoods. First the "letter" streets (B, C, D, etc), then the trees, then streets named after birds (Heron, Ibis, etc)
posted by Robert Angelo at 7:51 AM on May 21, 2007

Oh, I didn't see the 'more inside'.

I would think there are probably plenty of master-planned suburban housing subdivisions set up this way, but I'm more interested in more "organic" urban examples, if that makes any sense.

I don't think you'll find this kind of organization developing organically... this kind of naming convention is typically set up when the city is platted originally, especially because there's only 26 letters in the alphabet. That means that you'll ALWAYS find master planned developments where there's alphabetical or numbered street names. This master planning was simply done a couple hundred years ago and we don't think of it as being planned anymore.
posted by SpecialK at 7:52 AM on May 21, 2007

Minneapolis has this convention for north-south streets that are west of Lyndale Ave. This is mainly in the Uptown area and around the chain of lakes. As these streets stretch north and south of the City proper, some suburbs like Bloomington also share this naming convention.
posted by kuppajava at 7:54 AM on May 21, 2007

I believe downtown West Palm Beach does this too and the streets are named after trees - Banyan, Clematis, Datura, Evernia, Fern, Gardenia, Hibiscus, Iris. The cross-streets are named Olive, Quadrille, Rosemary, Sapodilla, Tamarind.
posted by superkim at 7:54 AM on May 21, 2007

This is not an example of what you're looking for, but might be interesting nonetheless:

The town where I grew up (Hollywood, Florida) has streets named after the Presidents in order. (Yes, there's only one Cleveland Street and only one Adams Street.) I can't recall how far they got, but I don't think they made it a substantial way into the 20th century (if at all).
posted by JMOZ at 8:02 AM on May 21, 2007

Northeast Minneapolis has the streets named after presidents in order of office, as well. But yeah, like kuppajava said, on the west side of Minneapolis the north-south streets are alphabetically named "avenues" and east-west streets are numbered "streets". Makes it really easy to find an address.
posted by vytae at 8:06 AM on May 21, 2007

Response by poster: JMOZ: Actually, the city of Troy, NY, where I live, has the same Presidential naming scheme you mention, south of downtown. It only goes as far as Polk, though.

Anybody else who wants to chime in with similar naming conventions like this, feel free. I wanted to keep the FPP itself focused, but I'm happy to hear of other interesting areas.
posted by letourneau at 8:09 AM on May 21, 2007

Downtown Tulsa is kind of like this.

East of Main St. the streets are named after cities east of the Mississippi River: Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit, Elgin

West of Main St. the streets are named after cities west of the Mississippi River: Boulder, Cheyenne, Denver
posted by fair_game at 8:17 AM on May 21, 2007

Greenpoint, Brooklyn, birthplace of the USS Monitor and home to untold kielbasy, has streets A-O in alphabetical order: Ash, Box, Calyer, Dupont, Eagle, Freeman, Green, Huron, India, Java, Kent, [Greenpoint Ave], Milton, Noble, Oak. Greenpoint Avenue used to be Lincoln Street up until the middle 1800s, so there you go.
posted by milquetoast at 8:19 AM on May 21, 2007

Nit-picky addition to SpecialK's point about NW Portland: The A street in the series is Ankeny, one block south of Burnside.
posted by ottereroticist at 8:20 AM on May 21, 2007

Here in Tampa, FL, on the entirely preplanned Davis Islands (the whole thing was dredged up out of the bay!), all the streets are named after bodies of water, and appear in alphabetical order. However, because the streets are also organized to maximize waterfront property, there are more than a few loops that throw the whole buisness off. By the end of the Islands, the whole thing has just gone to hell. So, kind of the opposite of what you wanted: they started out with a planned naming system, and as it expanded, the whole thing went to hell. (If you care to see it yourself, just throw Davis Islands into Google Maps.)
posted by The Esteemed Doctor Bunsen Honeydew at 8:25 AM on May 21, 2007

...Clay, not Calyer.
posted by milquetoast at 8:29 AM on May 21, 2007

Northwest Portland, Oregon has alphabetical street names going south to north from Burnside Ave., notably missing 'A'.

It actually starts one block south of Burnside on Ankeny.
posted by chrisroberts at 8:32 AM on May 21, 2007

In Austin, the north-south streets downtown are named after rivers in Texas, with respect to their distance from Austin. So the streets on the east side of the Capitol and Congress Ave (the "main" street) are named for rivers east of Austin, by geographic order, and same for the streets west of the Capitol. So if you know your Texas geography, you should be able to navigate downtown without difficulty.

The east-west streets were originally named for trees, but they were changed to numbers in the 1880s.
posted by donajo at 8:37 AM on May 21, 2007

North of Georgetown in Washington, D.C. having run out of letters to name streets (they end at W Street), the naming convention switches to two syllable names--Benton, Calvert, Davis, Edmunds, Fulton, Garfield, etc. Closer to Columbia Heights, they follow the same conventions, but with different names--Euclid, Fairmont, Girard, Harvard, and so on. Once those letters run out, the streets switch to THREE syllable names--Albermarle, Brandywine, Chesapeake. Of course there are extra roads thrown in between sometimes, but even those often stay alphabetical (easier to find!) All of this developed long after Pierre L'Enfant left town.
posted by sdrawkcab at 8:43 AM on May 21, 2007

In Chicago, once you get a bit west in town, the minor north-south streets are in roughly alphabetical order, starting with (IIRC) the letter K. You'll get 10 or so streets for each letter. When I was growing up, we'd refer to an area as "L-town" or "O-town" or whatever.
posted by adamrice at 8:47 AM on May 21, 2007

The College Terrace neighbourhood in Palo Alto, CA is like this. You'll notice that Princeton St. is out of order; this is because the neighbourhood didn't used to be part of Palo Alto, and there was already another Washington St. in Palo Alto when they joined.

The Windsor Park neighbourhood of Winnipeg, MB, is like this as well, although it's more of a clustering than a strict alphabetization.
posted by Johnny Assay at 9:02 AM on May 21, 2007

In Natick, MA near the Army research labs the streets are named for WWII battles. Anzio, Normandy, St. Lo, Guadelcanal, Corregidor.
posted by Gungho at 9:03 AM on May 21, 2007

Arlington, VA - http://www.arlingtonva.us/DEPARTMENTS/EnvironmentalServices/dot/traffic/EnvironmentalServicesGet.aspx (scroll down)
posted by TheRaven at 9:05 AM on May 21, 2007

Brooklyn's Manhattan Beach neighborhood has alphabetical streets along Oriental Blvd. that go up to at least P (for Pembroke)...
posted by AJaffe at 9:21 AM on May 21, 2007

Anacortes, WA (which hosts the docks for the San Juan ferries) is arranged that way in sort of a mirror. On the downtown (eastern) side of the city, where the streets run on a pretty straightforward grid, the north-south streets are A Ave, B Ave, etc. Then on the western side of the city, which is angled off to follow the coastline, the street names are Alaska Ave, Baltimore Ave, California Ave, etc. Anacortes is most definitely not a planned community, and the street names have been that way for as long as I have been around (going on four decades), so I can only assume that the street names grew out organically as the city expanded westward.
posted by Lokheed at 9:22 AM on May 21, 2007

um, superkim, those are mostly flowers. The first group, anyway.
posted by notsnot at 9:35 AM on May 21, 2007

There's a part of Chicago that's like this. A bunch of streets have K names, then the next few have L names, then the next few M and so on. Look under Street Names here for more details.
posted by Jess the Mess at 9:36 AM on May 21, 2007

Yes, as suggested DC has an alphabetical naming convention, though not quite as stated. It actually begins north and south of Constitution and Independance just off the Mall. "Streets" run east and west as you head north or south begining with the alphabet (excluding letters J, X, Y and Z which were not part of the alphabet at the time of the creation of the DC plan). The alphabet repeats with two syllable names and again with three syllables. North-south thouroughfares are numbered starting east and west of Capitol Street. Anything that does not fit the grid is not called "Street." Large usually diagonal non-streets are called "Avenue" or "Road" and most avenues are named for the states. A "Lane," "Alley" or "Place" is a thouroughfare that fits between the gridlines (for example Riggs Place runs between R Street and S Street.)

Of course there are lots of exceptions to the above conventions (especially in the parts that weren't origionally part of the city of Washington like Georgetown), but generally, that's how it works.
posted by Pollomacho at 9:42 AM on May 21, 2007

In San Francisco, it's not just the Sunset that does that, out in the Bayview there's another alphabetic set: Amador, Burke, Custer, Davidson, Evans, Fairfax, Galvez, Hudson, Innes, Jerrold, Kirkwood, LaSalle.....it skips over X but goes to Y and then starts AGAIN at Armstrong, Bancroft..and then down to Meade.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 10:02 AM on May 21, 2007

Not exactly what you're asking about, but Fredricksburg, TX (small German town in the hill country west of Austin) has streets with first letters that spell "ALL WELCOME" and "COME BACK". (Yes, there are German towns in Texas -- where do you think the accordions in Tejano music came from?)
posted by svenx at 10:09 AM on May 21, 2007

Margate, N.J. The north/south streets are in alphabetical order, apparently renamed in 1938. They all have a vague English sound (Essex, Clarendon, Exeter, Jasper).
posted by sixpack at 11:18 AM on May 21, 2007

Denver Co. uses first nation tribe names , alphabetical east to west Arapaho to Zuni.
posted by hortense at 11:44 AM on May 21, 2007

South-east Brooklyn. There are avenues H through Z (increasing southward) and to the north are named avenues:
Albemarle
Beverly
Cortelyou
Clarendon
Dorchester
Ditmas
Avenue D
18th Avenue (continued from a numbered-avenue section to the east)
Foster
Farragut
Greenwood

18th avenue. Think about it.
posted by hexatron at 4:07 PM on May 21, 2007

Not alphabetical, but interesting - the north/south streets in Lawrence, KS are named for the states, in order of admission, from east to west. Helpful for navigation in a vague way - "she said Kentucky, this is Arkansas, we're too far west".
posted by donnagirl at 7:50 PM on May 21, 2007

Denver uses alphabeticals in other areas too, not just the ones named for tribes. I remember poring over the maps long ago and there were several A-Z sequences.

Where I'm at in Austin (Hyde Park) there's a small section where it's just letters (Avenues A through H). Avenue E is named Speedway instead though, I imagine since it's the one that's more of a mini-thoroughfare.
posted by marble at 6:03 AM on May 22, 2007

Marble: Speedway is called Speedway because there used to be a racetrack there.
posted by adamrice at 6:59 AM on May 22, 2007

San Diego has a bunch of these neighborhoods. First the "letter" streets (B, C, D, etc), then the trees, then streets named after birds (Heron, Ibis, etc)

Yeah--just about everywhere in SD is like this. In downtown, you have the alphabet streets. Once those end, you get the tree streets, starting at Ash, then Beech, Cedar, Date, etc. all the way up to Vine. Then you get to my neighborhood with the birds: Dove, Eagle Falcon, Goldfinch. Then there's La Jolla with Draper, Eads, *something*, Girard, Herschel, Ivanhoe. And Ocean Beach with Abbot, Bacon, Cable, *Sunset Cliffs*, Ebers, Froude, Guizot. And then Point Loma, with alphabetical authors, and I think it actually goes through two whole alphabetical lists there. Byron to Zola, and then starts over with Alcott and goes up to Lytton. And these are all old neighborhoods (for southern California), dating from the early 1900's or so.
posted by LionIndex at 8:19 AM on May 22, 2007

I just stumbled across this question.. there's a part of Redondo Beach, CA (near the pier) that has a somewhat crazy naming scheme like this... The streets are named after gemstones starting with Agate, Beryl, Carnelian, Diamond, Emerald, etc. Somtimes, major streets from other cities come in and disrupt the order (Torrance Blvd, for instance is between Garnet and Pearl).

They skip the letters that have no associated gemstone, but the jump from 'Garnet' all the way to 'Pearl' always confused me...

At Topaz, it stops and streets south of that are called 'Avenue A', 'Avenue B', etc. etc.
posted by everybody polka at 9:01 PM on June 1, 2007