Category: Roads
-
Blue Earth Revisited
After awhile experienced 12MC readers can sort-of guess where things are heading. I knew I ran that risk in the recent Blue Earth article. The early draft began to climb towards a thousand words and I still wanted to cover several more topics. Strategically, I split the article into two separate parts and wondered if…
-
Geo-BREWities
My interests collide every once in awhile. I’ve mentioned my unnatural compulsion to visit breweries several times before. So, an overlap shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers. This time, an industry publication mentioned a beer dinner where they paired courses with beverages from Oxbow Beer in Maine. A brewery named for an oxbow…
-
Land of Disco
I came across an unusual neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina where many of the streets were named for different genres of dance. Why yes, it was a mobile home park. How did you guess? It further confirmed my theory that trailer parks have the best street names. They use labels that everyone would love to…
-
Mutual Ownership Defense Housing
My reference to Audubon Park, New Jersey in For More Birds revealed an historic experiment in middle class public housing. In that instance the earlier residents of Audubon voted the newly-arrived shipyard workers out of their borough. So in response, those displaced residents created a separate Audubon Park borough. In the meantime, that anecdote revealed…
-
For the Birds
While researching family history recently I came across several distantly related individuals who were born and married in the town of Audubon, Iowa, a place that is also the seat of government for a county of the same name. I wondered, as I combed through archival records, whether they commemorated famed 19th Century naturalist, ornithologist,…
-
Named for Captain Newport
It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “Iām willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list…
-
Just as Enigmatic
Why? Because. Why Not? I dunno. It’s a puzzle. It’s a riddle. I unearthed an Enigma and I discovered a Paradox. Then I decided to have a little fun with a few more place names along a similar vein. Many of them defied explanation and remained enigmatic. They can still be enjoyed simply for their…
-
When Planners Get Bored
I’ve been collecting a bunch of oddly shaped and unusually themed neighborhoods and didn’t know what to do with them. They didn’t have any similarity amongst them, even appearing in completely different parts of the world, although I wondered if perhaps I could force them into a set anyway. The first notion that came to…
-
Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition)
Several months ago, right after I returned from my Dust Bowl trip and tallied my new County Counts, I noticed that one of them, Lincoln County, Colorado was sort-of shaped like the letter L. So that led to Shaped Like it Sounds, a brief collection of States, Counties and Towns that mirrored the first letter…
-
Warp Drive
Somehow Warp Drive slipped past my attention in the recent Drive Me Crazy article, a collection of several creatively-named streets such as Line Drive for baseball stadiums, Disk Drive for an information technology company, and Doctor Drive which became a study in redundancy. Reader Michael Hollinger rightly noted my omission of Warp Drive in a…