(no subject)

[camwyn]

Dear Boston:

I'm not going to bitch at you today about your little habit of 'forgetting' to put up street signs. I know you think that's cute and you have some kind of excuse about confusing the British if they ever come back. You know what I think of that; it involves some complicated Italian gestures and both hands. That's not what I'm gonna complain about today.

No, today I wanna know why the hell you have two of the same street, and not only two of the same street but two of the same street with the same range of addresses, within the limits of 'Boston'. In New York, if they have two of a street- say, Forty-Eighth Street- they distinguish them. Addresses on one of them are addresses in 'Astoria, NY' or 'Long Island City, NY'; addresses on another are addresses in 'Manhattan, NY' or 'New York, NY'. This is because Manhattan is New York County and Queens is Queens County and they had enough sense not to name them both the same freakin' thing. Please, explain to me why there is a 99 High Street, Boston and another 99 High Street, Boston, and the only effort you people made to distinguish them in the slightest was to say 'this one is zip code 02110 and this one is 02116'?

If I wanted this kind of 'I hate the people who laid out this city and I hope they get rashes every time they sit down for the rest of their lives' I would get a job delivering mail in Tokyo.

That's all. Than you for your time.

Comments

[genarti]

...Golly. I've missed that one.

My usual explanation for the proliferation of streets with the same name is that Boston is really a bunch of small towns that grew together into a metropolis. So each town usually had a Main Street and a High Street and such, and then the road that went to Medford was called Medford Street (so each surrounding town had one), and then the street that went to Boston was Boston Ave similarly, etc. But I didn't realize there were two High Streets within Boston proper. I wonder if one used to be another town that's been entirely subsumed, or if there were arguments about what counted as High Street, or what?

(I have no idea what the explanation is either for the point where there are two Mystic Valley Parkways running on different sides of the Mystic River, except unhelpfulness.)

At any rate: my headdesking sympathies, and apologies on behalf of a city that will not offer them because it's a jerk like that.

[camwyn]

The 99 High Street I deal with most often is the one in 02110. Financial district. The other one is down in the Dorchester area, near the Savin Hill T stop. I'd assumed Dorchester was one of those cities that got swallowed up by Boston in much the same way that Brooklyn got added on to New York- but then again, when people talk about locations in the different boroughs of New York they generally make a point of indicating which borough they're referring to. You can't just write '543 31st Street, New York, NY' on an envelope and have it go to anywhere other than Manhattan Island.

[genarti]

Ah, yeah. I don't know why they didn't say Dorchester, then! It is, to my knowledge, one of those towns that got swallowed up early or thoroughly enough that it turned into a neighborhood rather than a separate city, but generally people still specify.

Unless it was a GPS or GoogleMaps similar. Those are marvelous inventions and they've helped me any number of times, but all the same sometimes they're engaged in a quiet feud with Boston street patterns.

[telophase]

I used to live in an apartment that had an address exactly duplicated elsewhere in the city. I discovered this when I was waiting for my dinner to be delivered, and the delivery person phoned me wanting to know why I wasn't answering my door, when I was standing on my front porch with the door wide open. We eventually figured it out, but I had to quit ordering from that place because the people taking orders believed the computer when it claimed that my address didn't actually exist and wanted to send my food to the other address.