Oct 5 2023 - On the Street Where You Live

 

Street Names.  There's no Donut Drive, Roast Beef Boulevard, or Celery Street in Grimsby.  Why is that?  Look further afield and you can find Frying Pan Road in Virginia, Roast Meat Hill Road in Connecticut. And there is a Chicken Dinner Road in Idaho, Puddin' Ridge Road in North Carolina, and Chicken Gristle Road in Texas. What are the conventions for street names?  There are lots of conventions for streets - both the names and the extensions/suffixes such as road, avenue, drive, and so on.   This comes from a U.K. site: "Street names should not be difficult to pronounce or awkward to spell. In general, words of more than three syllables should be avoided as should multiple words." That's good sense, but the choosing of a name?  This goes down a long road of conventions of all sorts.  There are types of commerce:  Cannery Row if you've been to Monterey.  Elm Street - a name for the trees on the street.  There are landmarks on the street - in New York Canal Street was named after the canal that was filled in to build it.  We like famous and important people here in Ontario - Queen Street, King Street, Victoria Street.  We like the province in the street - Ontario Streets are everywhere in Ontario towns.  And then we like first names that are simple:  Albert, Mary, John - simple street names.  Or maybe the names of British historical figures and monarchs.  I remember in Toronto there was an area named after the Greek alphabet - alpha, beta, delta, and so on streets. One can often find streets with number names - Fourth Avenue, Third Street. Streets do get renamed.  Usually there is a political motivation.  We have our own story in Montreal - this comes from Wikipedia: It is seen as a way to rewrite history, even if the original name is not well-liked but nevertheless traditional or convenient. It can be used to erase the presence of a cultural group or previous political regime, whether positive or negative, and to show the supremacy of a new cultural group or political regime. A prime example of this type of name change was the renaming of Montreal's Dorchester Boulevard, the nexus of the financial and business district, named for governor Lord Dorchester, to René Lévesque Boulevard, after a French-language reformist premier of Quebec. City officials rushed the name change, without waiting the required one-year mourning period after Lévesque's death. Many Anglophones were outspoken in their opposition to the name change, and the majority English-speaking city of Westmount retained Dorchester as the name of their portion of the street in protest. Streets seem to have their own life and history.  Some of the weirdest names? This, That and The Other Street in Nova Scotia, Ha-Ha Road in London, Mad Dog Lane, Yorkshire, Boring, Oregon and a lot of scatological names - Yellowsnow Road in Fairbanks, Alaska.  For those who believe, there is Elvis Alive Drive in Las Vegas.  That's fun. Isn't this a wonderful picture of the Prince of Wales Hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  What's the main street named?  Queen Street.

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On the Street Where You Live

There seem to be two kinds of ant jokes - those that start with ant, and those that conclude with ant.  How many jokes could there be with words that start with ant? There are almost 5,000 words. In comparison there are only 533 words that end with ant.  These seem to be the funniest jokes. The pavement ants seem to have concluded their nest-cleaning activity as there are little bits of ant rubbish on the driveway.  My street is a very quiet one so I can sweep the grass edging without any worries of any cars - careening or even creeping on my street.   Did you know that the busiest road in the world is Highway 401?  It carries 420,000 vehicles per day.  Remember our Niagara Falls statistics of 13,000,000 million visitors - they might make a contribution to the load. We can find out the busiest intersections in the world.  Here's the list - look how many US intersections there,  and even 2 in Canada.  I can't imagine this is on someone's bucket list - but it has to be with 7.5 billion people and various bucket lists. Place Charles de Gaulle- Paris, France The “Magic Roundabout” - Swindon, UK Nanpu Bridge Interchange - Shanghai, China Porta Maggiore - Rome, Italy Knight St and SE Marine Dr, Vancouver, Canada “The Plough” - Hemel Hempstead, UK The “Beijing Intersection” - Beijing, China Spaghetti Junction - Atlanta, USA Spaghetti Junction - Birmingham, UK Armdale Rotary - Halifax Flamingo Road and Pines Boulevard - Pembroke Pines, US Gibraltar Airport, Gibraltar I-95, I-287, NJ 440, and CR 514 Intersection - Edison, US Judge Harry Pregerson Interchange - Los Angeles, USA Kathipara Junction - Chennai, India Times Square - New York, USA Meskel Square - Addis Ababa, Ethiopia Ha Noi Intersection- Hanoi, Vietnam Shibuya Crossing - Tokyo, Japan You can see a picture of each intersection HERE. We're in downtown Toronto today for the flags that oversee the clock tower on Queen Street at City Hall.

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On the Street Where You Live

We will all be travelling/driving a little more around Christmas time.  Shopping increases; there are more visits with friends; the family Christmas dinner brings people together from different areas. I was driving in my little town of 30,000 people and came across the corner of Ontario and Adelaide Streets - made me think of Toronto as it has that intersection.  Street names can follow us in our travels.  We moved from Toronto's Sunnylea area to Grimsby's Sunnylea Crescent. In Toronto we lived in The Kingsway - we can drive on Kingsway Crescent in Grimsby. There is the intersection of Victoria and Front Street in Niagara-on-the-Lake, like in Toronto.  There is a Yonge Street on the escarpment, but sadly no Yonge and Bloor intersection.   So I went in search of the authoritative guide to the most common street names in Canada.  The article is at the10and3.com website.   This website's mission is to tell compelling and unusual stories about Canada through maps, interactive charts and other interesting visualizations, so I encourage you to read the story on street names. I am familiar with street names in Ontario.  However, the article notes: "there are 7,204 kilometers between Victoria and St. John's Newfoundland, and 4,529 Kilometres between Alert, Nunavut in the north and Windsor, Ontario in the south".  So my Ontario experience is limited - every Ontario town has an Ontario Street. The most popular/common street name:  Second. That turns out to be the most popular street name in America as well.  Numerical street names are six of the top ten street names.  The Canadian distinction?  Maple! Statistics Canada's Road Network Files for 2015 were the data source for the analysis - and the popular categories of street names were: numbers, nature, people, royalty, and other. Why isn't First the most common street name?  They tell us it is because Second Street will often come after whatever serves as a city's primary thoroughfare.  Front Street  and Main Street are common for the primary street. What's the distinction of 50th Avenue and 50th Street - it originated in Alberta and serves as the midpoint of many urban municipalities in the province.  It was a popular and easy navigation system in earlier times.  "It comes as little surprise that names of royal descent appear on the list before those of famous Canadians. Victoria (501), King (479) and Queen (371) are more common than any historic Canadian, a testament to our enduring if not complicated ties to the British monarchy. After all, Queen Victoria has 501 streets named after her and a federal holiday to boot, while Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. MacDonald, didn’t even make it onto the list". Sometimes we worry over our complicated world - perhaps we can insert some simple pleasures - street names would qualify in my books. Our pictures today feature nature and man - the back of a tropical leaf and the back of a transport truck.