UPDATE: Cesar Chavez Park in Seattle is now Parque Libertad.
After a city council vote today, César E. Chávez Boulevard in Portland (OR) will be renamed Campesinos Boulevard, which means farmworkers in Spanish. I like that it still honors the Latino laborers without the risk of naming it after a person.
Nice.
I agree with this move.
I can’t read more than the first couple of paragraphs without a subscription, so I don’t know if the article addressed this, but renaming a street introduces some additional complications that you don’t get when you rename something like a park. The biggest one, IMO, is that all the homes and businesses on that street all have a new address all of a sudden. I hope the Post Office will continue delivering mail addressed to “123 César E. Chávez Boulevard” or whatever in case some senders don’t get the memo that the name changed, at least for a while.
Meanwhile San Francisco still has not made any visible moves to change the name of our Cesar Chavez Street. The Mayor started a group to decide on a new name, and of course the budget will have additional expense of new street signs all along the 3-mile length. They only started in May, and knowing the sludge that passes for activity in our city government, I’m not expecting anything soon.
I believe I’ll be writing to the Mayor to suggest Portland’s choice as equally apt for our fair city.
@WildaBeast, I’m not worried about USPS being able to deliver mail, they have a protocol for street name changes, and they had no problem when our Army Street was changed to Cesar Chavez Street in 1995.
Unfortunately, we went through it in 2009 when it changed from 39th Ave, so residents, businesses, and the Post Office already have experience dealing with it. It’s a brief pain for those involved, but the post office will manage no problem.
Pretty much any street named after Chavez was done relatively recently and changed from something else. Similarly for streets named after MLK which of course won’t be changed. They have done it before and it’s not that big a deal.
Mail addressed with Zip+4 will autosort to the right delivery route no matter what, but yes otherwise USPS and the other carriers deal with that multiple times a year in multiple locations.
The mapping/driving directions apps can have it done in a couple days if they so choose.
Literally “country people” (“country” as in “rural”).