There is a West 98 1/2 St. in Bloomington, MN.
Digging around I find a bunch of 1/2 streets around Minneapolis. What’s the story behind this?
Do any other cities have them?
NYC has a bunch of building addresses with 1/2 after the building number, although they are quite rare, and I think only in (the old) Wall Street area.
And we have 12th st crossing 4th street in Manhattan, which is as weird as 1/2 street, in its own way, but no 1/2’s.
Well, if you were developing a new corridor between W 98 1/4 Street and W 98 3/4 Street, what would you call it?
In Queens, much of the street grid was planned when a lot of the area was still open farmland. When people actually started building stuff there, they quickly realized they needed a lot more streets. So in between 30th Ave and 31st Ave you have 30th Road and (possibly) 30th Drive. And in between 30th Street and 31st Street you might have 30th Place and 30th Lane.
I am not making this up. Behold.
There’s even a rhyme:
In Queens to find locations best
Avenues, roads, and drives run west
But ways to north or south are plain
Street or place or sometimes lane.
All that to avoid a streetgrid RENUM.
Note: I’m not a Minneapolis historian, or anything, so this is merely an educated guess.
Most of the non-downtown sections of Minneapolis and the older suburbs have a very regular street grid, where the N-S blocks are 1/8 of a mile long, and the E-W blocks are 1/16 of a mile. So, for the occasional place where they decided they needed 1/16th mile spacing going N-S, but didn’t want to mess up their orderly numbering system, they threw in a 1/2 street.
Downtown, however, they threw caution to the wind. At the river, Hennepin is 0th Ave, and Marquette, one block southeast, is 1st, and then the avenues are mostly numbered after that. But, Hennepin is askew compared to the rest of the downtown grid, so by the time you get down to 12th St. (13 blocks later, since Washington Avenue is slotted between 2nd and 3rd Streets, with a full 1/16th mile block distance to each), Hennepin and Marquette are five blocks apart. Fun!
In Cleveland, some neighborhoods have the parking for houses behind them, accessible via alleyways. The alleys are given the same name or number as the adjoining street, but with a different suffix. This sounds like another solution to the same problem.
In South Florida we traditionally have a similar system. With supposedly a similar rhyme that the long-timers say they used to know but now can’t remember.
Numbered Streets are the primary E/W roadways with Numbered Courts as the optional intermediates. So where lots are large you’d see N 10st St, N 11th St, N 12th St, etc. And when you got to an area with smaller lots and closer roadway spacing you’d see N 15th St, N 15th Ct, N 16th St, N 16th Ct, N 17th St, N 17th Ct, etc.
Going N/S, the primary roadways are Avenues with Terraces optionally interspersed. So E 10st Ave, E 11th Ave, E 12th Ave, etc. And when you got to an area with smaller lots and closer roadway spacing you’d see E 15th Ave, E 15th Ter, E 16th Ave, E 16th Ter, E 17th Ave, E 17th Ter, etc.
As more modern tracts are being built with the now-universal curvy streets with cutesy names this “simple” system is falling apart.
I put simple in scare quotes because each town/suburb has its own numbering system centered on its founding downtown and traditional borders. As they’ve all grown to merge into a single continuous metroblob a hundred miles long the numbers seem to shift at random every 3 to 6 miles. Town border signs are also rare and borders are pretty jagged block to block.
Add that most major thoroughfares (and many minor ones) have both a street/avenue number and a given name and in many cases a FL state highway number (or three) and it can get complicated to keep straight.
Madera California does. 18 1/2 avenue is a popular exit from the freeway.
Outside of Grand Junction, Colorado, they do this with numbers and letters. So you can be at the intersection of “F 5/8 Road” and “33 3/4 Road.”
I grew up in Forest Hills, geographic center of those streets, and it might be because of that, but I beg to differ as to the wierdness of that relative to OP implication. It was always a pain in the ass, but each one had a separate name, which"allowable" in my rulebook, whereas you expect integers in streets. (Although its history is interesting, and it never occurred to me.)
On the other hand you don’t expect snuck in streets, so “alphabet” and " integer" row exceptions may be commensurate on the map weirdometer.
And I never knew there was a rhyme. I bet it’s because a) as a kid, who cares about east/west traffic distinctions, and as a legal teenager or adult who doesn’t drive, ditto (although I know such cardinality (alpha-integer pun!) in Manhattan to clue in clue less just off the boat taxi drivers.
How old were you when you learned that ditty?
There’s some of this on the south side of Chicago as well. (The streets on the north side are generally named rather than numbered.) For example, on this map, you can spot 44th Place, 45th Place, 46th Place, 48th Place, 50th Place, 54th Place, and 55th Place interleaved among the numbered streets.
Do the kids do better in fractions because of this?
I delivered mail summers in college so I got to see all the variations and oddities. Houses with 1/2 were, well, not uncommon. Either a house with one number got divided into separate halves, so the second one got the 1/2 designation, or a house was built in the yard or back of the original, also getting a half. A few times they got an A and B instead but that was much rarer.
Rochester is odd in that it has a section of Avenue A, B, C etc and a section of First St, Second St, Third St. etc just like every other northeastern city, but instead of being downtown the two sections don’t meet and are minor streets that don’t go anywhere.
I see the reason for fractional streets in a grid and I admit it makes for quick and easy mental placement. Not growing up in a grid, though, makes it seems at first glance really weird to me.
In Kansas City, MO, numbered streets run EW (KCK has them NS).
If there is an additional path between two numbers, it becomes 42nd Terrace (fairly common). If there are two, the second is 42nd Place. Not sure what would happen if there were three intervening streets.
I read it somewhere once and memorized it after moving to Astoria. So in my mid-20s.
ETA: I think this is where I first read it.
I came here to mention that, I still have relatives in Fruita, CO. It is actually fairly sensible, because the whole letter/numbers are on the one mile section lines, so I-1/2 road is a half mile north of I rd, and I think the origin (zero road) of the N-S ones is the Utah state line. The whole letter/number roads are on section lines, and mostly run through, but the fractional roads represent sub divided sections and often only run a mile…so you know not to expect to find that rd. until you are within less than a mile of the address.
I suppose that exit is outside the town, or puts you onto a road that runs out of town into the countryside.
Throughout the San Joaquin Valley (and, I presume, in a lot of rural areas), the country roads are roughly placed at 1-mile intervals, and are numbered according to the number of miles from some zero-point. The occasional in-between roads are numbered accordingly too, giving the fractional numbers.
If you drive on some country road, where the cross roads are numbered, you can keep track of your mileage and see that it coincides with the road numbers, including the fractional numbers here and there. This is why you need to learn your Cartesian Coordinates in high school algebra.
Hey, that’s my Trade Fair!
I knew someone who lived at an address of the form 123 1/2 A…
Yes, there was a 123 1/2 B also.
LA, where buildings are really packed together.
It’s not unusual for unequally-divided duplexes, garage apartments, etc. to be, for instance, 114 1/2 Main Street, or at least it’s that way around here.
Moline, Illinois has a lot of streets with names like 14th Avenue, which is near 14th Avenue A, B, and C. It is every bit as confusing as it sounds.
I’ve seen 1/2 streets; they are usually between established streets with at least one building that opens onto that street, which was once an unnamed alley, KWIM?
There is a 18 1/2 Mile Rd here. It’s about a half mile north of 18 Mile Rd. They’re not uncommon in Macomb County, where almost none of the Mile roads have proper names, unlike in adjoining Oakland County where roads north of 14 Mile all have proper names and I don’t think there are any roads named with 1/2 Mile. Macomb County road namers are just lazy I assume. If there’s a good systematic name, why bother with a fancy one?