The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #113306   Message #2407626
Posted By: PoppaGator
07-Aug-08 - 11:33 AM
Thread Name: Folklore: Street names
Subject: RE: Folklore: Street names
There are any number of different neighborhoods in New Orleans where the street-names constitute a "set" of some kind. John Chase's book Frenchmen Desire Good Children is a sort of history of the city, tracing the development of one area and then the next in terms of the street names. (I provided a link to Amazon's description of the book back in that other thread yesterday.)

My own neighborhood, where most of the homes were built in 1927, is too "new" to be featured in Chase's book, but has its own quirky little set of related street names: the various screets running east-to-west across Franklin Avenue are named for plants, mostly flowering shrubs: Sage, Elder, Myrtle, Acacia, Clover, Lavender, Jonquil, Gladiolus, Verbena, Jasmine, Wisteria. Another neasrby neighborhood features Arts, Music, and Painters, all parallel to each other.

One of favorite sequences of New Orleans street names occurs up in the Carrollton neighborhood, where every other street is named for a tree, and the alternate streetnames in-between are mostly surnames: Hampson, Maple, Burthe, Freret (a major crosstown thoroughfare that interrupts the pattern), then Zimple, Oak, Plum, Willow, Jeannete, Birch, Green, Hickory, Cohn, Spruce, Panola, Sycamore, Neron, Claiborne Avenue (another inerruption for a major boulevard), Nelson, Apple, Belfast, Apricot, Pritchard, Fig, Earhart, Oleander, Forshey, Olive...

If I remember correctly, I think that Chase tells us that the family names memorialize the owners of large plots of land, or plantations, that were each two blocks wide and indeterminably long. Back in the old days, these properties were laid out with relatively narrow frontages on the Mississippi River (that's the two-block width) and would extend indefinitely back into the swamps. In later times, as the city spread into formerly rural areas, the street grid was laid out to cover two blocks per plantation. The street dividing each former property in half took on the former owners' name, and the streets marking the former property lines were given the tree names.