Where do street names come from?

Question

In Florida we have a street named, Aligator Farm blvd.. b/c there's a farm there. But I was just wondering where the names come from... and how often does Main St get used?

Answer 1

Streets and roads were often named for where they went.  Thus in Dallas, Preston Road was once The Preston Road and went all the way to the Red River where Preston had a ferry service.   Garland Road runs diagonally from what used to be the small town of Dallas to the small town of Garland - now they touch each other.   Turtle Creek runs along the creek of that name and Cedar Springs used to run to the springs in a cedar grove about where Love  Field Airport is now.   Webbs Chapel ran from Dallas out into the country to the property owned by Webb on which they had built a chapel.

   There are a group of streets named for colleges in Garland, a group of streets that all start with the letter M along North Central (which used to be a railroad line)  

   The post office places limits on names to avoid addressing problems and sometimes developers reach a bit far.  One area of Dallas has the streets named after Walt Disney cartoon characters including Cinderella and Sleepy

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&ge...

Answer 2

name of a good or famous person who lives or had lived on that street. a name which is chosen by all people who live there...etc

Answer 3

I think there is a Main St. in every town. The rest of the name get chosen by the deveopers. In my town, many of the streets are named after Presidents.

You can give a request to change a street name at a town hall meeting. Then you need a petition from all neighbors, and it coul;d be changed to whateva.

Answer 4

Street names come from a lot of different sources. Sometimes, as you point out, they come from what is there, or what used to be there (there are a lot of Baker Streets, Butcher Lanes, Farm Drives, Canal Streets, Riverside Drives and so on). Sometimes they are named after the landowner or his relatives, or after important historical figures. Names like Main Street or High Street were often given to the principle thoroughfare in a town or city centre, which is why you'll find them in so many towns. Modern housing estates often have streets named with common themes, such as types of tree, birds, flowers, famous people - where I live, there are a clutch of streets named after poets and writers.

You will often find older streets have interesting stories behind their names - I'll leave you to imagine what used to go on in "Grope Lane" in my home town! If you search around you will often find some local historian has compiled a list of the etymologies of street names for a historical town or city. Local bookshops are a great place to look for things like that.

Answer 5

Names are chosen from popular persons like President,/social worker, or simply from a  popular tower , cluster of people living in a locality or their profession etc./

Answer 6

Someone asked that question in our local paper.  

In our city, the developers come up with the names.  So, for the specific part of our city (new development), names are pretty much thought of or picked from suggestions of people the developers know.

Answer 7

Street naming is a local phenomenon, but there are a few names and patterns repeated frequently. Perhaps for obvious reasons Main is a really common name. Almost as common are Commerce, Market, Church, Station, and Front. Most of those streets are old and were really important ones in the early years of a town or city.

Some patterns of street naming include

Philadelphia pattern; with Market street as one of the central streets and then streets named for trees in one set of directions and numbered streets perpendicular to the tree streets. Makes for easy address assignment. Naming streets in this way is common in the US. Even when the name/number pattern is not repeated, naming streets for trees is present thus the large number of streets with names of trees, sometimes ones that don't grow within 500 miles (Shady Palm in Fairfax County, VA, for example).

Washington DC pattern: (Somewhat similar to Philadelphia) Numbered streets in N-S alignment and named streets E-W. In DC the named streets begin with letters (A, B, C), then two syllable names (Adams, Belmont, Channing ) and so forth to the outer limits of the city.  DC also has diagonals, mostly named for states (Pennsylvania, Kentucky, etc.). Once outside the originally developed area, the street naming pattern was not rigorously followed in DC.

Generic Pattern: Numbered streets in both directions, usually called streets in one set of directions and avenues or boulevards and in the other. The north end of  Seattle provides an example with 65th Street (N-S) and 65th Avenue (E-W). This pattern is particularly common in the more recently settled parts of the US where towns were rapidly built and often platted before anyone moved there. It can be really confusing if one forgets to add St. or Ave. when writing the address (know from experience).

With the popularity of cul de sacs and other suburban street patterns, and the explosive development of land for suburban residential areas, the recent tendency has been to give streets names rather than numbers. Mostly the names are provided by the real estate speculators developing new areas, but they are constrained by the existence of names elsewhere in the jurisdiction and sometimes by naming rules imposed by the city, county, or in a few cases the state. The Post Office also plays a minor role in determining names. Some of the new suburban street names are really "creative." I am currently writing in Fairfax County in ole virginny where there is an amazing array of really long, complicated and sometimes stupid names "Wooden Owl Court" or "Harry Davis Family Crescent."  Writing the whole address in the space provided on a form is all but impossible!