Feb. 8, 1997
Contemporary street names are primarily used to sell real estate: to unload a rabbit warren of condominiums as "luxury townhomes," the street address has to convey a certain splendor that the property cannot: Avalon Way, Tresor Drive, Edgewater Place, and so on. The burnishing effect is not always permanent; in California there are plenty of run-down 25-year-old housing developments with ugly tract houses, Camaros on blocks, orphaned shopping carts, broken sidewalk tiles pushed up by tree roots -- and pretentious street names.
What makes a good street name? Something easy to write and dictate over the phone, so the pizza guy, mail-order company, or fire station doesn't need me to spell it out letter by agonizing letter. Here's my luck so far: Nampeyo Street (too foreign; probably some developer contrite over EuroBorg assimilation/land grab from native Americans); Hummingbird Lane (apparently too long); Murre Lane (some kind of bird; pronunciation too ambiguous), and now Baronscourt Way (too long; and engenders the irksome "is that one word or two?"). Not once have I been able to just say the street name and move on.
I must concede that part of this problem is in the brains of the people on the other end of the phone: they seem to be limited to queueing up and understanding no more than three characters at a time.
Another pernicious trend is the naming of streets after car dealers and malls. In the past few years, the South Bay has seen perfectly good street names (Durham, Tasman) facelifted into Auto Mall Parkway (serves a bunch of car dealers) and Great Mall Parkway (serves a noisy discount mall with high turnover). Welcome to Milpitas, New Jersey. The Bay Area economy is in excellent shape; can't we stay above this sort of small-town economic boosterism? Next thing you know, Candlestick Park will be renamed after a hub company or something.
The two parkways above also illustrate the street type inflation we've been seeing. Why use the prosaic "road" or "street" when you can use "boulevard," "crossing," or "parkway"? A parkway, properly, has few or no stoplights and runs through open country or along a body of water. It is not a six-lane surface street you use to shop someplace.
Milpitas (again) has the silly "Escuela Parkway", which most people are familiar with because it's a side street (with a red light for you) for two major streets. This thing is not a parkway either; it's simply a street that goes by a school. This is the new trend: street names suffering from the twin evils of type inflation and gratuitous español.
