What’s in a street name

There was a period of time a few years ago when I lived on a street named 16 de Septiembre.

When I first moved to that wonderfully shabby apartment I had no understanding of the name’s meaning, nor did I think to ask one of my neighbors, as the apartment was located in Mexico and my functional Spanish consisted of ordering food and accidentally insulting people. Fortunately, the 16th of September rolled around soon enough and I was treated to a variety of parties that marked the beginning of Mexico’s struggle for independence from Spain. It turns out that this day is Mexico’s equivalent to our Fourth of July, and the name of my street was a simple tip of the hat to Mexico’s long expired freedom fighters.

I was driving through Palmer the other day when I became entrapped in a newer neighborhood whose existence was previously unknown to me and I began noticing the street signs. Mike Street. Tammy Circle. Felicia Street. What sort of narcissistic quasi-suburbia was I rolling through? Who, other than Mikes, Tammys and Felicias, would be happy to live on streets with such mundane names?

I think street names are important. Not to betray the inanity of my day-to-day thoughts, but I sometimes wonder what name I would choose if I were afforded the privilege of naming a portion of the planet. Would I delve into the past and dredge up an important, and yet overlooked, historical reference? Would I name it after one of my favorite scientists or artists? How about a mountain or a species of plant or animal?

In Luxembourg, where I lived before I fought my way home to Alaska, the streets of the city are often named after prominent historical figures and have a smidgen of information about the individual on the sign below the name. This, I think, is a quite clever way to deepen the significance of naming a street after someone and educating the public.

When visiting Puebla, Mexico, I became engrossed in the uber-rational naming convention that the city had adopted. Starting at the zocalo, or central plaza, streets running east to west are evenly numbered if they are north of the zocalo and oddly numbered if they are to the south. These streets also are labeled with an east or a west to denote whether they are east or west of the zocalo. Similarly, the north to south running streets are evenly numbered if they are east of the zocalo, oddly numbered if they are to the west and carry a north or south designation depending on their location from the plaza.

Confused? Yes, I was as well. But I had to respect the forethought and reason that developed a naming convention in which you could deduce your exact location in a city based simply on the street names.

Of course, the interstate highway system in the continental U.S. was developed with similar thinking, which makes me smile with patriotic pride when I admire the mess that is European freeway numbering.

A few years ago, a friend of mine who had traveled to Alaska was describing with excitement the route he drove, which is how I first learned that Alaska actually numbers its roads as well.

“We traveled out of Anchorage on Route One” He began.

“Um … excuse me,” I interrupted, “but such a road actually does not exist. You were on the Glenn Highway or the Seward Highway.”

“No, it was Route One.” He responded with the authority of someone who actually knows what he is talking about.

The fact that he was a brilliant, Stanford-educated chemist did not stop me from correcting him a few more times, until we determined with the help of the Internet that Route One was in fact the official name of the Glenn Highway. Stupid Internet.

I am not sure when these numbers arrived on the scene, but looking at a highway map of Alaska indicates that the roads were numbered by a troupe of intoxicated harlequins. As noted previously, the Glenn is Route One, a designation that it shares with parts of the Seward Highway, the Tok Cut-Off, the Sterling Highway, and the Richardson Highway. The Parks Highway is number three, the Denali is number eight and the mighty Dalton Highway is relegated to the double-digits with the ungainly designation of eleven. I don’t know what purpose these numbers serve as they do not seem to correlate to any particular direction or orientation, but I have been gone a while, so maybe Alaska route planning has evolved unexpectedly in my absence.

Even though I never knew that the Glenn Highway was named for Captain Edwin Glenn, a North Carolina native that lead a U.S. Army expedition to find a route to the Klondike gold fields, I enjoyed the folksiness of the name and the fact that it commemorated someone, even if I had no idea who it was. I certainly will not be calling the Parks Highway “Route Three,” not out of respect for the late governor George Parks, but out of a stubborn understanding that numbers are fine for street names as long as they help me understand where I am or which direction I am pointing, but fall drastically short otherwise as they will never lure anyone into an exploration of the past or conjure brilliant sounding addresses.

So maybe that’s what Mike and Tammy were going for when they immortalized themselves on those green signs. Who knows. The lack of last names on the signs makes it a bit difficult to track down which Mike is being honored, and I suppose the signs themselves are destined to adorn the bedrooms of teenagers who are lucky enough to share those names. I guess at the very least, the person who titled these streets can enjoy the fact that they achieved more than those creative wizards who named the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

Pete LaFrance grew up in Palmer and has moved back to the area after a number of years living abroad.