Alphabetical Streets

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Fred R

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Everyone knows about the alphabetical streets in the Back Bay, and maybe some people recognize a continuation beyond Charlesgate -- Ipswich, Jersey, Kilmarnock. But there's another set off St. Botolph Street, running eastward: Albemarle, Blackwood, Cumberland, Durham, ..., Follen, Garrison, Harcourt, Irvington (swallowed up by Copley Place). But instead of an E street, there's West Newton Street. Do any of you history buffs know whether there was an E street existing or planned?
 
Great question! And why are they all stubs of streets - do they predate the rail corridor as the original names of those South End streets? Or are they more recent? (the lack of an e seems to indicate it was an original naming convention onto which other names have since impinged...)
 
From older maps I've seen the names are original. I don't get why there is no "e" street but West Newton St existed before this area was even filled in and layed out.
 
The railroad existed on a causeway before the neighborhood around it was landfilled.
 
Van is correct. Newton Street predates the creation of the alphabet streets around St. Boltoph.

According to the great "A record of the streets, alleys, places, etc. in the city of Boston by the Boston (Mass.). Street Laying-Out Dept." (1910, available for free on Google Books!) it appeared on maps as early as 1814 and was formally laid out in 1826. The "East" and "West" labels on either side of Washington St. were given in the 1860s when the South End was being laid out.

Interestingly, the St. Boltoph area alphabetical streets were all created much later than the South End - the book lists them as all being laid out on January 19, 1880.
 
czsz said:
Van is correct. Newton Street predates the creation of the alphabet streets around St. Boltoph.

According to the great "A record of the streets, alleys, places, etc. in the city of Boston by the Boston (Mass.). Street Laying-Out Dept." (1910, available for free on Google Books!) it appeared on maps as early as 1814 and was formally laid out in 1826. The "East" and "West" labels on either side of Washington St. were given in the 1860s when the South End was being laid out.

Interestingly, the St. Boltoph area alphabetical streets were all created much later than the South End - the book lists them as all being laid out on January 19, 1880.
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That answers my question. Apparently the 1880 planners left a space for the E street. Maybe the portion of West Newton Street from the SW Corridor Park to Huntington Avenue should now be renamed. With the one-way system, it's no longer a through street from the Back Bay to the South End.
 
Fred R said:
Everyone knows about the alphabetical streets in the Back Bay, and maybe some people recognize a continuation beyond Charlesgate -- Ipswich, Jersey, Kilmarnock. But there's another set off St. Botolph Street, running eastward: Albemarle, Blackwood, Cumberland, Durham, ..., Follen, Garrison, Harcourt, Irvington (swallowed up by Copley Place). But instead of an E street, there's West Newton Street. Do any of you history buffs know whether there was an E street existing or planned?
Click to expand...

It also seems like there is an O street missing in that first set -- Jersey, Kilmarnock, Lansdowne, Marlborough, Newbury, O?, Peterborough, Queensberry. Was Van Ness Street ever called anything else?
 
FrankG said:
It also seems like there is an O street missing in that first set -- Jersey, Kilmarnock, Lansdowne, Marlborough, Newbury, O?, Peterborough, Queensberry. Was Van Ness Street ever called anything else?
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I would argue that Kenmore St is the right "K" street since it predates Kilmarnock St.

There is an Overland St but I wouldn't add that to the list as it is on the north side of Brookline Ave and doesn't fit in with the alphabetical streets.

As far as I can tell Van Ness was the original name, unless it was planned as something else but changed, as this street was laid out after Peterborough and Queensberry streets.

Also I did not know that Charlesgate East was originally Ipswitch St and Charlesgate West was Jersey St.
 
I think there's some confusion here. The grid extends east to west, and only includes primarily north-south streets on the same angle as the Back Bay grid. It skips from Hereford to Ipswich on the other side of Mass. Ave. Ipswich is sometimes parallel to Newbury, but only because it had to run along the railroad tracks to get to the Charlesgate. The "relevant" parts of Ipswich, on the right angle, only run between Charlesgate East and Boylston and Van Ness and Boylston (so it technically comprises two streets in the system). After that, Jersey and Kilmanrock continue the system west, and I can't find any L street that would work past there (Longwood Ave. would be stretching it for several reasons - it's both an Avenue and the angle is slightly off).

Newbury, Marlborough, and Lansdowne are all east-west streets, in the wrong order, and are on the wrong side of the grid for them to work.

EDIT: considering Charlesgate West was originally Jersey, there's definitely an argument to be made that Kenmore is the real continuation, followed by Lansdowne (if it connected or was intended to connect to Beacon at the right angle) and maybe even tiny Maitland. All three are British aristocratic titles, the one requirement for these streets. The doubling-over of Ipswich may have "reset" the system on the other side of the railroad / Pike so that there are actually two systems. HOWEVER, Jersey/Kilmanrock follows the Back Bay stipulation that the streets alternate two and three-syllable names, whereas Jersey/Kenmore does not.
 
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What Olmsted wanted for a street grid and street nomenclature.

What the city wanted the street grid in the West Fens to be. The names finally used were chosen by the Robert Burns (a literary) Society after the burghs in the author's works. There used to be a statue of Burns, by the same guy who sculpted the Lexington Minuteman sculpture (The Boyle statue nearby on Boylston was sculpted by the same guy who sculpted the Concord Minuteman sculpture - how's that for rivalry?), in the area which was relocated as part of a crooked developer deal to Winthrop Square under the White administration.

Higginson Circle and Agassiz Road were named after the founder of the Boston Symphony and his wife Ida Agassiz. Ida was the daughter of the (in)famous Harvard professor.

Gaston Square was also Castle Square prior to WWI. Park Drive was Audubon Road prior to 1930, the reasoning being that the Shurcliff altered park no longer was a marshland harboring the quantity of birds the Audubon name would be associated with. Boylston Street was also called Boylston Road for some odd reason in this part of the city.

Meanwhile in my neck of the woods, most of the South End is named after railroad stops and famous British locales of developer fancy. So much better than suburbia where all the trees are cut down and memorialized by the streets laid thereafter.
 
I took a Boston history class with Mayor White's son once and he claimed that most of the streets in the Back Bay were given British names just to piss off the Irish immigrants. Kind of a institutional "Irish Need Not Apply" sign.
 
czsz said:
I think there's some confusion here. The grid extends east to west, and only includes primarily north-south streets on the same angle as the Back Bay grid. It skips from Hereford to Ipswich on the other side of Mass. Ave. Ipswich is sometimes parallel to Newbury, but only because it had to run along the railroad tracks to get to the Charlesgate. The "relevant" parts of Ipswich, on the right angle, only run between Charlesgate East and Boylston and Van Ness and Boylston (so it technically comprises two streets in the system). After that, Jersey and Kilmanrock continue the system west, and I can't find any L street that would work past there (Longwood Ave. would be stretching it for several reasons - it's both an Avenue and the angle is slightly off).

Newbury, Marlborough, and Lansdowne are all east-west streets, in the wrong order, and are on the wrong side of the grid for them to work.

EDIT: considering Charlesgate West was originally Jersey, there's definitely an argument to be made that Kenmore is the real continuation, followed by Lansdowne (if it connected or was intended to connect to Beacon at the right angle) and maybe even tiny Maitland. All three are British aristocratic titles, the one requirement for these streets. The doubling-over of Ipswich may have "reset" the system on the other side of the railroad / Pike so that there are actually two systems. HOWEVER, Jersey/Kilmanrock follows the Back Bay stipulation that the streets alternate two and three-syllable names, whereas Jersey/Kenmore does not.
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Fairfield/Gloucester also breaks the 2-syllable-3-syllable progression. (Unless you mispronounce it -- as done by the captain in "The Russians are Coming" -- Glew-kes-ter.
 
The method of naming streets by following the alphabet is often used by developers and planners to assure that none of the street names are too similar to confuse people geographically. Museum Road, the streets on both sides of Evans Way Park, Palace Road, all of which have been renamed at various points, and all the planned but unrealized streets where the MFA/Simmons/Emanuel/Fenway Park are probably have something to do with the breaking of alphabet soup. It probably didn't help the original plan for continuity with the haphazard residential development, unforeseen institutional development, and the rapid change to the use of the roadways in that area.
 
statler said:
I took a Boston history class with Mayor White's son once and he claimed that most of the streets in the Back Bay were given British names just to piss off the Irish immigrants. Kind of a institutional "Irish Need Not Apply" sign.
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Boston is filled with all these stupid legends about how miserable and oppressed the Irish were. Truth is, the people who developed / lived in the Back Bay originally would not have sunk to naming streets to spite the Irish; they were actually attracted to British aristocratic names the same way people are attracted to Sir Walter Scott-style romantic names for their subdivisions today ("Royal Ravenswood Estates" etc.)

Fortunately not many of Boston's urban developers subjected us to the miserable habit contemporary suburban developers have of naming streets after themselves ("Leo DiCorcio Dr.")
 
http://www.mapjunction.com/places/Open_BRA/cgi-view/rest.pl?t=14798&p=19241
Charlesgate East & West predate all the streets in discussion. 1902

http://www.mapjunction.com/places/Open_BRA/cgi-view/rest.pl?t=14798&p=19278
Looking at this later map from 1908, I'm thinking maybe the streets were named in alphabetical order as they were built, rather than being alphabetized by geographic location. The names themselves weren't chosen at random, they were all Scottish locales from Robert Burn's literary works. The skipped MNO might be the three as of yet unbuilt paper streets (including Van Ness) in the second map, two of which were gobbled up the construction of Fenway Park in 1912.
 
It can't have been based on when they were built, because Peterborough and Queensberry existed well before the extension of Jersey or, significantly, Kilmarnock. Moreover, Lansdowne existed almost a decade before Kilmarnock. There are maps showing P and Q existing without the J and K cross streets, so unless there's some secret plan laying around that includes all these streets with their names from before P and Q were built and named, I wouldn't count them as part of the system.

I was under the impression the names were all British peerages, which all the streets in question are. Interesting that they also have the Burns connection.
 
Well this map should explain the original idea.

http://maps.bpl.org/details_12679/?...srch_fields=all&srch_style=exact&srch_fa=save

This map and to some extent the early Olmsted map show an entire series of streets, including some of the Scottish names which were finally used, probably under pressure from the literary fans and the city's desire for a simplified street grid.

The series includes:

Ipswich
Jersey
Kenyon
Lansdowne
Mornington
Nottingham
Onslow
Peterborough
Queensbury
Roseberry
Salisbury
Thurlow
Uxbridge
Vivian
Westmeath
(No X, what Scottish/British place name starts with an X?)
York
Zetland
 
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