(A blast from the past. I don’t think this was printed anywhere. Well, now that I am adding more to it at will, I know it wasn’t)
Greater Houston is so huge and sprawling, and it has so very many streets, developers have had to get really, really creative in naming them all. Unlike big cities elsewhere, such as Chicago and New York, the same streets do not go on forever and ever under the same names, perhaps differentiated by north and south, east and west. No, in Houston, our longest streets stop and start randomly — perhaps at some point all the sections of Ella or Chimney Rock will be contiguous, but that day is not imminent.
Thanks to the helter-skelter car-driven development pattern that big Texas cities evolved under, most developments are cut off from one another, forcing their developers to concoct new street names for each curvilinear warren of cul-de-sacs since few of them connect to anywhere else via more than one or two connectors.
And so we have these neighborhoods with cute themes, like the grand opera hood out Memorial Way — Tosca, Traviata, Figaro, and a Butterfly; an Isolde sans her Tristan, and a meandering street that starts as Hansel and turns into Gretel. Was that made into an opera?
Way down south there’s a famous racehorse-themed zone: Affirmed and Alysheba leading the pack and with Sugar Bars and Man O’War coming up the back stretch, but what’s this? The developer seems to have lost the plot! He’s stopped naming the streets after race horses and taken to naming them after antiquated classes of ships! And all things nautical and sea salty! And so along with Man O’War, we have Tall Ships Lane, Carrack Turn Drive, Schooners Way and Frigate Point, which then gives way to…scouting? Yes, scouting, with Webelos Court, Camp Fire Road, and a lane for the Girl Scouts and a Drive for the boys. (A more creative developer would have named these streets Samoa, Lemonade, Tagalong, and Do-Si-Do. And why have developers given up on pop culture references? There should totally be streets named after Van Halen, Han Solo, Beyonce, and the Marvel and DC universes, and for snobbier people, like me, neighborhoods with a Pancho Street intersecting with Lefty Drive and hipper references like that. We do have a corner of Clinton and Fidelity, but it is uninhabitable.)
This all came home to me through a search of public records one morning. (Alright, it was the Harris County Jail intake sheet, which I still regularly peruse out of morbid curiosity a few days a week, years after I stopped reporting crime.) I discovered one of the horse racing neighborhoods — actually there are three, with two in Houston and another in Stafford — because I was amused by the fact that an accused criminal lived on Ruffian Street, which, I learned, takes its name from a tragic Kentucky filly of the early ‘70s.
In just one day of arrests, the Baker Street jail became the home away from home for residents of :
Red Ripple Road (Naming a street after a red wine that bears the advice/warning “serve cold” seems to set a few limitations on expectations.)
South Magnolia Elms Drive (Pearland) (An elm is not a Magnolia. The same neighborhood also includes Magnolia Pines and Magnolia Oaks.)
Smoke Rock Drive (Spring) (Given that Houston, unlike the Hill Country, is not studded with any notable rocks, this just sounds like really bad advice. And no, sadly for the sake of a darkly humorous story, the arrestee was not busted for crack. )
Pine Echo Drive (Humble) (I've yet to hear a pine tree echo, and I've been around pines for much of my life. Lots of these names seem to be randomly generated from a list of tree types and poetic geographical words like "dale," "meadow," "glade," and "brook," some of which describe features Houston does not actually possess, a list that also includes hills, valleys, mountains, (notable) rocks, and ridges.
Bigwood Street (Houston) (Beavis and Butthead would try to steal that sign, as sure as stoners have been swiping the Cypress Hill signs in Spring ever since those guys hit it big.)
Gallant Forest Drive (Houston) (I guess they were going for a Robin Hood theme but forests themselves cannot possess gallantry.)
Sign Street (Missouri City) (Whoa, meta street signs.)
Rue Street(Houston) (Who, meta street signs en Francais.)
All of this bizarre fancy and seemingly algorithmic nomenclature had me longing for a more honest street naming system.
We live here, we know what it’s really like. Houston, it’s maybe almost kind of worth it on certain October mornings and all that, so we can handle the truth.
To wit:
Fire Ant Lane
Tree Roach Circle
Grackle Place
Raging Bayou Boulevard
Pit Bull Mix Alley
Boulevard of Trash Trees
Pothole Speedway
Vape Shop Place
"Hundred-Year" Floodplain "Heights" Drive
8-Liner Highway
La Avenida de las Cantinas
La Avenida de las Llanterias
Strip Club Row
Trans Fat Alley
Mount Goodyear Lane (While we have no natural hills, Houston is home to a tire mountain visible from space.)
And there really should be a whole subdivision called Hunker Downs.
I broached this topic on Facebook on a few years back and got a few more suggestions.
West Mount Mattress Road (courtesy of Ken Watkins)
Developer’s Daughter Lane (courtesy of Camille Kenney)
Judgement Oaks Boulevard (courtesy of Albert Nurick)
Orange Cone Row (courtesy of Betty Halpern)
Stray Dog Chase (courtesy of Marcus Twain)
You're Totally Not Going To Save Any Time Cutting Through This Neighborhood Instead Of Staying On That Main Road No Matter How Backed Up It Is Drive. (Charles Kuffner)
My dad was the developer for an affordable housing development in La Luz, NM back in the 1970's. Just a neighborhood of very modest homes. Which are still standing, no gentrification there. As a result, my sister and I each got a street named after us. So yeah, probably a lot of developers resort to naming streets after their kids or family. You could do worse than to live on Andy Ln or Robin St, as far as street names go. But the big developers have more streets than kids, so what can you do but get fanciful (or ridiculous) with street names?