So She Thought: A street by any other name (would be easier to live on)

These days, the city limits of places like Hanford and Lemoore are filling in faster than the Bush administration’s details for Donald Rumsfeld’s retirement party. I do have issues with all this development, and one of the biggest is the names of all these new streets and communities. I only have two questions: Who comes up with these names, and what in the world are they thinking?

Before I got married, I lived in a neighborhood called Quail Run. It was a nice, well-planned community, but there were a couple of odd things I could never get past. First was the name itself. During the six years I lived there, I never saw any quail, running or otherwise. Second was the fact that the streets inside Quail Run all had names like Tarragon and Sage, meaning the subdivision really should probably have had a name relating to spices, like “Maalox Heights” or something.

The process of naming streets and communities is obviously a mystery to me, but somewhere the common sense seems to have gotten lost.

If you’ll look around you’ll find that, historically, most streets in the USA used to have pretty generic names. You know, Main Street, Green Street, etc. It may have been boring, but at least it was consistent. Nowadays, modern-day community planners seem to take great pains to outdo the competition with oddball names for both communities and the streets within them.

Last week, for example, I visited a friend’s neighborhood, where the developer had apparently decided “Americana” was the theme, and as I drove along the lovely homes, I passed streets with patriotic names like Freedom, Constitution, Independence, and, of course, Magna Carta. Wait a minute … Magna Carta? Wasn’t the Magna Carta that British document from the Middle Ages outlining the responsibilities of their king? Hey! What’s American about that?

Apparently you don’t have to have passed American History class to be a subdivision street-namer.

It gets even nuttier when developers name a street in honor of someone. Don’t they know that when something is named after an individual, it’s usually just their last name, for the sake of convenience? Think about it. Is it the Lincoln Tunnel, or the Abraham Lincoln Tunnel? The Smithsonian Institute, or the Steve Smithsonian Institute?

We have at least three “first-and-last-name” street names here in town, and I always feel sorry for the folks who live on them, because if I were them, I’d spend all my time trying to come up with abbreviations for my street that would 1) use the fewest letters, thereby saving time, and 2) not confuse and irritate the post office, already a touchy bunch due to their having to read bizarre street names on mail all day long.

But even with all this nutty street naming business, it’s nothing compared to the wackiness of the names of the actual communities these streets run through.

The most common community-naming technique seems to involve paving over a natural feature, and then naming the community after whatever it was you just paved over.

Any development with a name like “Oak Grove,” “Shady Orchard,” or “Golden Meadows” is probably named for exactly what stood there before it was all ripped out and replaced with streets and houses. So while you may not be living in a Golden Meadow, rest assured they razed it in order to pour the concrete for your driveway.

Sometimes, developers even try and convince homebuyers that although they’re buying an incredibly average 2,300-square-foot house on an equally average 9,000-square-foot lot, that it’s actually quite exotic.

These communities usually have geographically distinctive names like “Silver Willow Valley,” “Sierra Ridge,” or “Diablo Cliffs,” even though no valleys, ridges or cliffs exist within 100 miles.

But I have to admit, some of these names are actually kind of fun. I think my all-time favorite Hanford community name has always been “Pine Castle.” The name has always conjured up an image to me of an actual little castle of pine nestled somewhere within the neighborhood. And perhaps a Pine King that lives in it, maybe even with a pine moat and some pine alligators around it, to protect it from evil, neighboring subdivisions. Who knows.

But if you do live in Pine Castle and if there is, in fact, an actual Pine King, could you do me a favor and send him across town to talk to the guys in charge of naming all those new streets and communities?

Their home designs are lovely, but I think they all need a good lesson in practical street/community naming, and kings do have experience with those sorts of things.

Giving them a brief history lesson on the Magna Carta couldn’t hurt, either.

(Diane Sayre is a freelance writer living in Hanford. Write to her c/o The Sentinel, P.O. Box 9, Hanford, CA 93232.)

(April 24, 2006)