Home Sweet Home
Recently on some news magazine show, I guy did a bit on all the weirdly named streets in America. It was not a very funny bit, because you could tell that some of the streets had been named by the wackos who lived on them, probably for the sole purpose of getting onto a news magazine report about weird street names. I know there are funny addresses out there, which made this guy’s report more annoying, because he obviously hadn’t looked hard enough to find them. His report got me thinking about the names of the streets that I have lived on, because for many years now, each time I’ve had to give my address, the recipient usually can’t understand what I’m saying. While my addresses are not especially uproarious, I did find it somewhat interesting that the names seem to reflect my life at the time of my occupancy
From the time I was two until I moved away to college, I lived on Utah Avenue in Washington, DC. I always felt it was a noteworthy address, the sort that would bring appreciation from others who heard it. After all, I mistakenly believed everyone knew that in the grand plan of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, each state in the union had a street named after it in the capitol city. I believed I was quite privileged to live on one of the 50 state streets, but looking back, I can’t remember a single time that a person was impressed to hear that I lived on Utah Avenue. My friends in college ignored the street name completely and thought I had a weird address because the house number was four digits long instead of one or two like theirs. However, I blame Baltimore for the lack of appreciation my address received, because Baltimore has a “Eutaw Street.” I haven’t been able to determine who or what Eutaw is, but the word itself certainly looks like the Yosemite Sam spelling of Utah. So apparently as I was attempting to portray myself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate living on a famous street in our nation’s capital, what people were hearing when I gave my address was “Dagnabbit Rabbit, I say, I say, it’s EUTAW Avenue.”
When I went away to college, my address became a rather boring “1 College Street,” although none of the streets running through campus actually had a name. The only building on College Street was the guard shack that was always occupied by a guard who had nothing to do, since cars were generally not allowed onto the main part of campus. The street that ran past my first year dorm was known as Easy Street, but I guess using that as an address might have given my penpals the wrong idea about the Jesuit views on premarital sex and the Catholic views on frugality. A few years later, my off campus apartment was on Caro Street, but the house itself was referred to by the past and present students (as well as by my parents and my roommates’ parents)as “Red Hell” which didn’t really seem to be the sort of address I should be including on my letters to prospective employers.
Since employment was in short supply in the early 1990s, I instead became a professional student at the University of Virginia and found an apartment on Oakhurst Circle, an address that was much more refined and impressive-sounding than the College Street address of my immediate past. College Street denoted a kid in school, but Oakhurst Circle in Charlottesville was the home of a scholar. Unfortunately, the geographic change did not actually translate into my transition to a more refined and impressive-sounding intellectual. While my fellow classmates would happily leave a bar at 11:00 pm on a Friday to go check on their experiments back at the lab, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would set down a glass of water, let alone a frosty cold beer, and venture out into the dark to an empty academic building to make sure the magnetic stirrer was still spinning. Clearly I was not ready for such a sophisticated address, so I left school with a consolation master’s degree and moseyed back on home to Eutaw to do me some job lookin’.
After a few months, I found a crappy job in Philadelphia and moved with my sister into an apartment on Manayunk Avenue. When we moved to Philadelphia, Manayunk was an up and coming part of town, full of bars, restaurants and small stores. Everyone came to Manayunk to party and when they got there they would typically find my sister and I parked at the local bar, chatting with the bartenders and monopolizing the juke box. For people who were not quite in the know, Manayunk Avenue probably seemed like a pretty happening address. Actually, Manayunk Avenue was not in Manayunk but about a quarter of a mile straight up, on top of a cliff in Roxborough, more of a working class “low and sinking” part of town. So really Manayunk Avenue was the perfect address for us – although we had the party instincts of Manayunk residents, we had the budget and prospects of Roxborough. Eventually I was laid off from my crappy job, and then I really began to feel that the Manayunk address was a sham. While collecting unemployment, I became a true Roxborough chick, and when people asked me where I lived, that’s what I told them.
In time I found another job, my sister tired of Philadelphia, and I moved to a new address on Rittenhouse Place. Most cities have a Rittenhouse street of some sort, and sometimes it is the center of a quite impressive neighborhood, like the Rittenhouse Square section of Philadelphia. I was about 3 miles away from Rittenhouse Square, living in the Rittenhouse section of Ardmore, PA. While it was not exactly a tony address, it was an impressive address, because you could get absolutely everything you needed on its two long blocks. Among other things, it had a 5 and10, a beer distributor, a courthouse, a Christian Science reading room, an adoption agency, a coin laundry, pizza place, a German restaurant, a deli, an art gallery, and my apartment building. While I was living on Rittenhouse Street, I met and married my husband. He never lived there because he was stationed in Virginia and then deployed to Korea; when he got back we moved together to Maryland.
I suppose it is fitting that our first apartment together had a romantic name like Liriope Court (for you inexperienced hayseeds out there like me, it’s a plant that rhymes with calliope - strangely, there was no liriope on Liriope Court). My husband and I hated the street name because no one ever understood it the first or second time we said it, and eventually we wouldn’t even say it to people, we’d just spell it. However, when we said it to each other we always pronounced it with a sigh “liriiiiope” and threw our heads back and fluttered our eyelashes, swooning with the romance of it. Aside from the name, it was a great apartment, but a forth floor walkup, so when I got pregnant with our first daughter, we decided to move to someplace a little closer to the ground and, although it was not a top priority, someplace with an address that was a little easier to communicate to people. We ended up on Gairloch Place, which is probably a great address in Scotland, but in Maryland, it still needs to be spelled out every time you use it.
Since we left Maryland, we have lived on two different military installations, and these are places that know how to name a street. Our first address was Warhawk Street, and although it was easy to spell, we always had to spell it out for people, since “warhawk” isn’t actually a word. We wondered if having such an aggressive address would have an effect on the personalities of our children, but other than occasionally curling up their fingers like claws and giving a falcon shriek, they did not become particularly violent. While Warhawk Street was a rather weird name, at least we had it better than our neighbors who lived on 8th Armored Division Street.
Where will we go next? That is a question that dogs military families from the moment they finish unpacking. Not just where, but when will we go next? Only Uncle Sam knows for sure. Something tells me it will not be to Main Street or Walnut Avenue, but hopefully it will be a place the kids can pronounce and a place they can call home for a good long while.
From the time I was two until I moved away to college, I lived on Utah Avenue in Washington, DC. I always felt it was a noteworthy address, the sort that would bring appreciation from others who heard it. After all, I mistakenly believed everyone knew that in the grand plan of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, each state in the union had a street named after it in the capitol city. I believed I was quite privileged to live on one of the 50 state streets, but looking back, I can’t remember a single time that a person was impressed to hear that I lived on Utah Avenue. My friends in college ignored the street name completely and thought I had a weird address because the house number was four digits long instead of one or two like theirs. However, I blame Baltimore for the lack of appreciation my address received, because Baltimore has a “Eutaw Street.” I haven’t been able to determine who or what Eutaw is, but the word itself certainly looks like the Yosemite Sam spelling of Utah. So apparently as I was attempting to portray myself as a cosmopolitan sophisticate living on a famous street in our nation’s capital, what people were hearing when I gave my address was “Dagnabbit Rabbit, I say, I say, it’s EUTAW Avenue.”
When I went away to college, my address became a rather boring “1 College Street,” although none of the streets running through campus actually had a name. The only building on College Street was the guard shack that was always occupied by a guard who had nothing to do, since cars were generally not allowed onto the main part of campus. The street that ran past my first year dorm was known as Easy Street, but I guess using that as an address might have given my penpals the wrong idea about the Jesuit views on premarital sex and the Catholic views on frugality. A few years later, my off campus apartment was on Caro Street, but the house itself was referred to by the past and present students (as well as by my parents and my roommates’ parents)as “Red Hell” which didn’t really seem to be the sort of address I should be including on my letters to prospective employers.
Since employment was in short supply in the early 1990s, I instead became a professional student at the University of Virginia and found an apartment on Oakhurst Circle, an address that was much more refined and impressive-sounding than the College Street address of my immediate past. College Street denoted a kid in school, but Oakhurst Circle in Charlottesville was the home of a scholar. Unfortunately, the geographic change did not actually translate into my transition to a more refined and impressive-sounding intellectual. While my fellow classmates would happily leave a bar at 11:00 pm on a Friday to go check on their experiments back at the lab, I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would set down a glass of water, let alone a frosty cold beer, and venture out into the dark to an empty academic building to make sure the magnetic stirrer was still spinning. Clearly I was not ready for such a sophisticated address, so I left school with a consolation master’s degree and moseyed back on home to Eutaw to do me some job lookin’.
After a few months, I found a crappy job in Philadelphia and moved with my sister into an apartment on Manayunk Avenue. When we moved to Philadelphia, Manayunk was an up and coming part of town, full of bars, restaurants and small stores. Everyone came to Manayunk to party and when they got there they would typically find my sister and I parked at the local bar, chatting with the bartenders and monopolizing the juke box. For people who were not quite in the know, Manayunk Avenue probably seemed like a pretty happening address. Actually, Manayunk Avenue was not in Manayunk but about a quarter of a mile straight up, on top of a cliff in Roxborough, more of a working class “low and sinking” part of town. So really Manayunk Avenue was the perfect address for us – although we had the party instincts of Manayunk residents, we had the budget and prospects of Roxborough. Eventually I was laid off from my crappy job, and then I really began to feel that the Manayunk address was a sham. While collecting unemployment, I became a true Roxborough chick, and when people asked me where I lived, that’s what I told them.
In time I found another job, my sister tired of Philadelphia, and I moved to a new address on Rittenhouse Place. Most cities have a Rittenhouse street of some sort, and sometimes it is the center of a quite impressive neighborhood, like the Rittenhouse Square section of Philadelphia. I was about 3 miles away from Rittenhouse Square, living in the Rittenhouse section of Ardmore, PA. While it was not exactly a tony address, it was an impressive address, because you could get absolutely everything you needed on its two long blocks. Among other things, it had a 5 and10, a beer distributor, a courthouse, a Christian Science reading room, an adoption agency, a coin laundry, pizza place, a German restaurant, a deli, an art gallery, and my apartment building. While I was living on Rittenhouse Street, I met and married my husband. He never lived there because he was stationed in Virginia and then deployed to Korea; when he got back we moved together to Maryland.
I suppose it is fitting that our first apartment together had a romantic name like Liriope Court (for you inexperienced hayseeds out there like me, it’s a plant that rhymes with calliope - strangely, there was no liriope on Liriope Court). My husband and I hated the street name because no one ever understood it the first or second time we said it, and eventually we wouldn’t even say it to people, we’d just spell it. However, when we said it to each other we always pronounced it with a sigh “liriiiiope” and threw our heads back and fluttered our eyelashes, swooning with the romance of it. Aside from the name, it was a great apartment, but a forth floor walkup, so when I got pregnant with our first daughter, we decided to move to someplace a little closer to the ground and, although it was not a top priority, someplace with an address that was a little easier to communicate to people. We ended up on Gairloch Place, which is probably a great address in Scotland, but in Maryland, it still needs to be spelled out every time you use it.
Since we left Maryland, we have lived on two different military installations, and these are places that know how to name a street. Our first address was Warhawk Street, and although it was easy to spell, we always had to spell it out for people, since “warhawk” isn’t actually a word. We wondered if having such an aggressive address would have an effect on the personalities of our children, but other than occasionally curling up their fingers like claws and giving a falcon shriek, they did not become particularly violent. While Warhawk Street was a rather weird name, at least we had it better than our neighbors who lived on 8th Armored Division Street.
Where will we go next? That is a question that dogs military families from the moment they finish unpacking. Not just where, but when will we go next? Only Uncle Sam knows for sure. Something tells me it will not be to Main Street or Walnut Avenue, but hopefully it will be a place the kids can pronounce and a place they can call home for a good long while.
posted by Shannon at 11:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home