Many Chicago street names are not letter orderly named, if that’s the correct term to use, until one gets west of Pulaski a bit. The “K” streets start ( not in order - Kolin, Koster, Keating, Kilpatrick…) followed by the L, M and N named streets.
How and why did the “K” streets start this letter orderly naming convention?
West of Harlem Ave (7200W), the alphastreets extend into the O’s. This is perhaps most easily seen in Edison Park between Touhy (7200N) and Howard (7600N).
North O Aves
Speaking of Avenues O, I only learned of the South Side Letter streets relatively recently in my adult life. This appears to be the East Chicago neighborhood going out to 4100E or so, right up to the state line.
South Avenues A-O
I’ve always wondered why they never got around to naming the east-west streets on the south side. Seems like a pretty haphazard way to lay out a city.
Once again, Google is your friend, although I need to digest the “found approximately in the 11th mile west of the Indiana state line” part. And how did Tripp sneak in there?
While all north-south streets within city limits are named, rather than numbered, smaller streets in some areas are named in groups all starting with the same letter; thus, when traveling westward on a Chicago street, starting just past Pulaski Road (4000 W), one will cross a mile-long stretch of streets which have names starting with the letter K (From east to west: Komensky, Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler, Tripp, Kildare, Kolin, Kostner, Kenneth, Kilbourn, Kolmar, Kenton, Knox, Kilpatrick, Keating), giving rise to the expression “K-town.” These streets are found approximately in the 11th mile west of the Indiana state line, and so begin with the 11th letter of the alphabet. A mile later, just past Cicero (4800 W), the starting letter changes to L, and mile by mile the letters progress up to P. Additionally, for most of the first mile west of the Illinois/Indiana state line, streets are lettered from Avenue A at the state line (4100 E) to Avenue O (3430 E), forming the A group. The areas that might otherwise be the B through J groups are the older parts of the city where street names were already well established before this system was developed (although some small groups of streets seem to have been given names intended to conform to the system), and the Q group (8800 to 9600 W) would fall west of the city, as the only land in Chicago west of 8800 West is O’Hare Airport, undeveloped forest preserve, and a small strip of land connecting O’Hare to the rest of the city and containing only Foster Avenue.
For the complete article:
Cecil has responded to this in a Straight Dope Chicago column: http://chicago.straightdope.com/sdc20100121.php
Congrats, daveg, on being one of the lucky few to have Cecil notice your question!
This all reminds me of a sly joke I learned at my mammy’s knee many long years ago:
Q: What are the names of the three streets in Chicago that rhyme with “vagina”?
A: I’ll leave this up to the denizens of the message board; to provide the answer myself would be an insult to the community for being unable to supply the answer!..TRM
Of course in Minneapolis, they go thru the entire alphabet at a shot: Aldrich Bryant Colfax Dupont Emerson Fremont Girard Humboldt Irving James Knox Logan Morgan Newton Oliver Penn Queen Russell Sheridan Thomas Upton Vincent Washburn Xerxes York Zenith, then begin again. (I think there are three alphabets in all. I don’t live in Da Cities, I just have spent a lot of time there.)
Love telling that joke. I tell it “rhymes with a ladies privates” with a wink. One street is home to a popular butcher, one I see all the time heading north on Milwaukee just south of Superdawg (but difficult to notice heading southbound), the third is just funny.
I was going to call Cecil a damned liar about the streets going into the P’s. However, in checking my facts prior to submitting my scathing counterpost, I consulted a map and found the P streets right there in the ‘Northwestern Chicago Cemetary District’:
Googlemaps link
The map details the area immediately east of Cumberland between Irving and Belmont.
Just curious – when people refer to “K-Town,” what are the north and south boundaries? Didn’t see it in Cecil’s column, and a Yahoo! or Google search didn’t give me ANYTHING that had anything to do with Chicago, even if I added “Chicago” to the search…
Having lived on one of the K streets for over 20 years back in the 60s thru 80s…
It’s slang in places like Lawndale - see discussion halfway down in this article:
That was an interesting column and reminded me of my K-town envy when I was attending Lane Tech High School (now Lane Tech College Prep) in the '70’s. I lived in “O-town” at Belmont and Orange and I hated it. I took an interminable bus ride from Western all the way past Harlem and envied anybody who lived east of Cicero.
The irony is now I own a house in the midst of K-town, right where I fantasized about living 30+ years ago.
ardeleanu–I live at Ozanam and Belmont for 25 years. In the 3300 block. I loved the place.
I also had a lot of friends that lived on Orange between Belmont and Addison.
Of course that was from 1939 till 1964, it was a great back then…
Did you go to Grace St. or Canty? If you went Canty, please tell who the hell Canty was.
The school was named in 1948 for a school engineer/custodian who had died two years before. He was quite well known in Labor circles and was the State Commander of the American Legion. Arthur E. Canty.
This is the first time I’ve heard the term “K-town”, even though my family moved there in 1959.
This depends on what part of the city you’re in. Komensky is Keystone Ave throughout the North Side. And north of North Avenue, Kolin is Lowell. (Plus you get a smattering of other K streets throughout K-town in parts of the city where the streets go off the regular North-South-street-every-half-block grid.)
As for “K-Town,” I’ve been aware of the term, but I can’t recall anyone ever using it in conversation in my neck of the woods (SW side, just on the other side of K-Town.) We just called it the K streets, the L streets, the M streets, etc.
Ah, that’s interesting. According to that Wikipedia link:
“Although these long streets extend beyond the bounds of North Lawndale, published sources identify the name K-Town as referring specifically to an area of North Lawndale, i.e. the area through which these streets pass.”
That’s a rather weak citation, but it seems K-Town is not just any section of K streets, but specifically the one in North Lawndale. That would make some sense.
Melvina, Paulina, and…Lunt.
There are four parallel streets in Montreal named Duke, Prince, Queen and King, I mention for the heck of it.
In the 1970’s, K-Town was home to the lovely widow of blues pianist LIttle Johnnie Jones, Letha Jones. She would have discreet little “rent parties” on Sunday afternoons, which I and my then-spouse Jim O’Neal would often attend. Often Mac and/or Syl Thompson/Johnson would be there, as well as Louis & Dave Myers, (of the Aces fame), and Johnnie B. Moore, one of Koko Taylor’s guitarists, would also hang out. Great way to kill an afternoon, if you loved the blues !!!