There’s a neighborhood in my hometown of Columbia, SC, where the streets are all named after South Carolina colleges and universities.
I imagine they have to replace a lot of road signs around this time of year. I know I was very, very tempted to take a “Furman Ave” sign with me to college.
Come to think of it, Bozeman, MT also has a bunch of streets named after presidents, and also has a Willson [sic] Avenue. It’s named after a local philanthropist.
Don’t know how they do things in Scotland. In the US, it’s common for whole neighborhoods (called a subdivision) to be developed at once. One of the perquisites of the subdivision developer is to name all the streets. It’s quite common for a subdivision to have all the streets with a theme. I’ve seen neighborhoods with such themes as birds of prey, cities in Italy, and characters from Alice in Wonderland. So having the theme of Canadian provinces/cities would not be at all unusual.
New York, NY
A town so nice they named it twice.
I used to work for a digital road map company, so I can tell you: Themed street names within an area are very, very common.
Yup. If you have to name a bunch of streets, as property developers do, your task is greatly simplified if you pick a theme which can inspire a few names.
There is an area in the north centre of Dublin which has adjacent streets successively named:
Henry Street
Moore Street
Earl Street
Of Lane
Drogheda Street
It won’t come as a great surprise that the area was developed in the late seventeenth century by the landowner, one Henry Moore, third Earl of Drogheda. The story is that when he inspected a plan showing the proposed development he approved it by writing his name and title across it, and the streets were then named by reference to the words written next to them. The story is probably apocryphal, but there’s no doubt that the streets were all named after him.
Drogheda Street was later extended and widened and is now known as O’Connell Street. Of Lane is now Henry Place. Earl Street has since become North Earl Street, to distinguish it from South Earl Street in a different quarter of the city. South Earl street is named after it’s owner/developer, the Earl of Meath, whose family name was Brabazon, and who was also Lord Ardee. And, yes, it’s adjacent to Brabazon Street and Ardee Street.
I wish themed street names were more common, as they make it easier to find your way around. If you’re looking for Beethoven St., and you pass Brahms and Mozart, you know you’re in the right vicinity.
In the south part of Manhattan Beach, CA, there is an area called Shakespeare Beach, with street names such as Keats, Shelley, Longfellow, etc.
Well, not themed, but alphabetical street names are common enough. In Back Bay Boston, where the streets run uncharacteristically straight and cross at right angles*, the streets running approximately north-south are alphabetical, starting at the Public Garden:
Arlington
Berkeley
Clarendon
Dartmouth
Exeter
Fairfield
Gloucester
Hereford
In my home town, there’s a section with an alphabetical run, too:
Albourne
Beryl
Colfax
Darrow
Edgewood
George
Garfield
(No “F” for some reason, but two "G’s)
*As opposed to the old North End, where streets are narrow and twisty. By legend, they were laid out along cow paths. This apparently isn’t actually true, but it wouldn’t make any difference if they were. As it is, stretch limos and fire trucks have a hard time negotiating some of the streets.
There is a Swan Island, Maine, which is somewhat of a destination because it is both a ghost town, and has a lot of wildlife. It was named after a bird, but not the swan. It’s name comes from the Abenaki word “Swango”, or “Island of Eagles”.
Arab is pronounced like the Ray Stevens song, “Ahab the Arab.” Any idea how Mr. Thompson said his first name?
There used to be a town in Pampanga, Philippines called Sexmoan. Now it’s Filipinized to Sasmuan.
Interestingly, Mount Everest is rarely ever pronounced in the way that the man for whom it was named (Colonel Sir George Everest) actually pronounced his own name -
‘Eve - rest’. (Not ‘Ever - Rest’)
I went to college in Bowling Green, Ohio. The town is located in a drained swamp and the whole county is one of the flattest places you’ll ever see. It also has very productive farmland. So it being flat and lush with vegetation, I always assumed that the town was named for the appearance of a bowling green, a surface on which you compete in lawn bowling.
Turns out it was first settled by people from Bowling Green, Kentucky.
A neighborhood could have street names that are themed and alphabetical. I recall seeing an area many years ago (IIRC in San Diego) with streets named for kinds to trees, all in alphabetical order. (I’d look it up on-line using the late lamented Google Maps Classic, if it weren’t late and lamented.)
San Francisco has an area of alphabetical streets, named (mostly or entirely?) after people who were significant in the city’s history.
Back to city names: Atascadero, Ca.
The modern Public Relations people at City Hall euphemistically insist that it means “A Place of Much Water”. Actually, it is Spanish for a mire, bog, swamp, or an obstacle or bottleneck. Literally, it means “A Place Where You Get Stuck”.
There is a State Hospital for the Criminally Insane there. It looks like a typical prison, with chain linked fences topped by barbed wire, and guard towers. It’s called Atascadero State Hospital. Yes, a place where you get stuck indeed.
Fort Worth was never a fort nor did the man it was named after ever live there.
A fort has fortifications, while the actual military outpost that is now Fort Worth, was just a camp. The town was named after a dead general.
And Palestine, Texas was named after Palestine, Illinois, of course.
Westward Ho! in Devon, England is named for a novel by Charles Kingsley. The exclamation point is part of its name.
Other places with bangs in their name are Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, Quebec and (kinda sorta) Hamilton! Ohio. For the latter, the city voted to add the exclam, but the powers that be (Board on Geographic Names,. Rand McNally) haven’t recognized it.
Back to fictional origins, I know of only two places named after fictional characters. One is Tarzana, California, which I expect everyone can figure out the source of, and the other is Flin Flon, Manitoba, which was named after Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, a character in a now obscure book published back in 1905.
The city of Batman in Turkey is not actually named after a caped crusader. Or, well, at least I assume that it isn’t.
No it isn’t, although that’s one of my favorite placenames. Occasionally I’ve been able to blow the minds of comic book fans by pointing out its existence.