The nearest moderate size city to me is Portland, Oregon, which goes up to approximately 257th Street, which led me to wonder. Then I did a Google search and found midwestern towns with 1300th Street, etc.
I suspect that any town with 1300 numbered streets I might have heard of. So what gives? are they numbering county roads, or is it just a different system.
Midwesterners, how about it? Or anybody else for that matter
Hometownboy (whose home town goes all the way up to 23rd St)
Perhaps the street wasn’t 1300th. Perhaps it was something like 1300 South. Many areas, for example Salt Lake City, use a grid pattern where each point is given a North/South and an East/West coordinate. In SLC every full 100 equals 1 block 8 blocks to a mile. So if you were at 4500 South and 1300 East (a relatively busy intersection) you would be 5.625 miles South and 1.625 miles East of downtown. It is quite possible when using this system to have streets such as “12700 South street.” Now when you get into the Uinta Basin near the Utah/Colorado border the county roads are generally numbered accouding to the nearest town. So about an hour out of Vernal you start seeing roads named “45000 West” etc.
While sitting at the intersection of 226[sup]th[/sup] and 335[sup]th[/sup] Streets (two dirt roads crossing amongst the crops) in Tulsa a few years back, I wondered this very thing. According to my local guide, country roads were numbered in this fashion to provide reference points for 911 services. It seems reasonable to me–not that Tulsa has impressed as terribly reasonable in the street-naming department.
Similar to Balance’s experience-- a while back I took a picture of an intersection (1 narrow dirt road, 1 narrow paved road) out among the cornfields in South Dakota. I think it was 260th Ave and 451st Street. This was near Canistota, SD, which is a little west of Sioux Falls. Perhaps the local numbering system originates there.
This comes up in misc.transport.road a lot.
The Utah coordinate grid streetnaming system doesn’t count. We’re talking consecutive street numbers (1st, 2nd, etc.), not high coordinate numbers.
Phoenix seems to top the list for “broadest expanse of a coordinated street naming system involving ordinal numbers.”
Denver tops the list of “broadest expanse of a coordinated street naming system not involving ordinal numbers.” There’s numbered street names in Denver, but the Maloney Grid, which defines the names of all streets in the Denver Metro area, extends to the eastern edge of Arapahoe and Adams County, about 65 miles east of downtown Denver. There’s more than 20 “alphabets” of streets east of downtown Denver (groups of 26 street names in alphabetical order) the names get very strange the farther east you go. To get an idea on how far out the grid goes, consider that Aurora encompasses only the third through fifth “alphabet,” and that there’s some “double alphabets” further east – streets in a sequence of A, A, B, B, C, C, and so on. Is anyone getting this? Except for the nut living on 3460 South Easy Money Street, some 45 miles east of downtown Denver, probably not.
Aha. The light slowly dawns. But I’m still hunting for the highest ordinal numbered street. So far the tops is malden’s 451st street in Greater Souix Falls. Who can top this?
Hometownboy
Rats, Los Angeles only goes up to 266th St, which is a very small street near the Wilmington area. After that, the city starts it’s numbering system over again.
Eastlake OH has a 364th Street…
Mind you, the numbering system starts in downtown Cleveland OH, and then expands through Euclid OH (Cuyahoga County), Wickliffe OH, Willowick OH, and ending up in Eastlake OH (the last three in Lake County).
Hm. If I recall correctly, the Miami area has streets whose numbers go higher and higher…But I don’t have time to look it up.
I’ve found streets as 1150th in cities in the Midwest like Marshall, IL and Flat Rock, IL.
I would imagine that any municipality in the plains or on the prairie with a lot of room to spread out could keep going up and up in numbers.
The Cleveland grid is rather compact – about 20 ordinals to a mile. 364th Street is only about 18 miles from Public Square – no biggie.
The Phoenix grid, on the other hand – it’s 10 ordinals to the mile, originating from a point downtown. 579th Avenue is thus 57.9 miles from downtown Phoenix.
Okay, I messed up… the intersection I saw in Canistota, SD was actually 445th street, not 451st street. My photo of the sign han be seen here. I have no idea how much higher they went in this area.
To purists, that doesn’t count. Sorry. It’s a county coordinate grid, not an ordinal system using a baseline that runs through the center of a town or a city.
Is there a way to differentiate between the two? If I followed the grid from the cornfields to its origin in the city, at what point would the numbers change their meaning? (This presumes that the origin in my example is in Sioux Falls and not at some county line… maybe that’s not correct.)
I think this is funny, because I’m amending a discussion that started and ended 19 years ago. But after reading a Wikipedia article about ordinally-numbered streets, I decided to do a bit of Googling (and all this may be gibberish to a time-traveler who woke and found themselves at the end of this comment stream, but what do do about that but move on).
Up at the top of this a poster who said they lived in Portland and that Portland numbereds go up to about “257th Street”. Nitpick follows: It’d be Avenue, not Street, and the Portland grid goes well-beyond both Portland and 257th (which is found in the edge-town of Troutdale.
The greater Portland address grid covers the three Oregon-side metro Portland counties: Washington, Clackamas, and Multnomah. Addresses range out into the upper 70000’s/lower 80000’s in the vicinity of, respectively, Bonneville Dam and the community of Government Camp on the shoulder of Mount Hood itself. The actual highest numbered streets, however, well surpass 257th: on the west side between Hillsboro and Cornelius there’s SW 331st Ave, NW 334th, 336th, 338th and 341st Avenues, also a SW 345th Avenue. And, just southeast of the town of Gaston, just on the edge of Washington County, there’s a SW 407th Terrace.
This, however, doesn’t compare with the east side, where, about 5 road miles east of Sandy, in the shadow of Mount Hood and north of Hwy 26, there’s a little country lane exulting in the name SE 502nd Avenue. An that’s the biggest ordinally-named avenue one can find the greater Portland area (Clark Coutty makes a game play for it but peters out in the lower 400s in the northeastern corner of the county).
And that’s not all for the Pacific Northwest. Greater Puget Sound communities are just crazy over numbered streets and avenues. King County takes it to the utmost. In the northeastern corner of the county, were US 2 dips in from Snohomish County to serve the towns of Skykomish and the communities of the Tye River drainage, there are absurdly named streets such as 802nd and 766th Avenues NE. These two roads don’t actually have signs and are probably actually merely driveways to private properties, but there is vacation home subdivision just to the west that contains 762nd Ave NE.
The Wikipedia article on numbered streets claims that a road in Orangeburg NY called East 704th Street (a road that has no other numbered streets anywhere near it and does not seem to have any obvious connection to any other numbered grids nearby (what or whereever they may be) that was the highest known numbered street. It was easily found out to be wrong, but that’s Wikipedia scholarship for you.
If anyone wants to see the street blade for SE 502nd, it’s on a blog post I made here:
Cheers,
SJKPDX
You need angle brackets, not square brackets.
< sup>th< /sup> = th
< sub>th< /sub> = th
The post you’re replying to is 19 years old, and when it was posted, on a different board software, square brackets was correct.
Calgary (Alberta, Canada) uses “Centre St.” N/S as one axis (acting as “0 St.”); the E/W axis is the Bow River. The NW/NE/SW/SE quadrants radiate from these axes. But the river isn’t straight, so there are named streets in areas where numbered streets wouldn’t be within the axes. The “Avenues” approach the 200’s to the north and south, while the “streets” go up to around 100 east and west. So you would have roughly 400 (200 N + 200 S) numbered streets going from north to south.
Edmonton (same province) uses a similar system. It was originally based on the intersection of 100 St. and 100 Ave. downtown, with numbering continuing upwards and downwards as the city expanded. You eventually reach 1 (and the numbering increases again) if you go far enough east or south. This forced a change to quadrants, so the vast majority of the city’s streets are now suffixed with “NW”. There are few (if any) streets labelled with “NE” or “SE” - but I guess they’ve allowed for urban sprawl. Numbers approach 200 west and north.
Where’s that “smack” icon when you need it?
There doesn’t seem to be one for “embarrased”, either…
Calgary’s grid extends out a huge distance - 658 Ave near Cayley is the highest one I’ve seen based on that.
