Most countries I’ve been to honor their national authors with street names. For example, every town in Poland has an Adam Mickiewicz street or a Henryk Sienkiewicz street. The US has so many legendary writers, but I am yet to come across a Mark Twain street or Emily Dickinson boulevard, never mind Nobel Prize winners for lit, like Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck or Toni Morrison. Why is it more appropriate to name American streets after trees than your non-military national heroes?
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The exist, you just haven’t seen them. Twain, for example, has streets, schools, parks, and more named after him across the country.
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There is this thing.
It’s called Google.
Also. Trees > People
A cursory search shows that there are multiple Mark Twain Streets located throughout the country, including Detroit, Memphis, Gainesboro, Tennessee and St. Charles, Illinois.
What, you haven’t sunbathed at Sereno Park in Phoenix, on East Emile Zola Avenue?!?!
Road names are set locally, not at the federal level. And many cities and towns have streets named after famous Authors.
I just visited Chicago and saw a few streets named for writers.
We do. My city has Rosa Parks Way, and Omaha has Ayn Rand St.
It also depends on location, the closer you get to where a famous person was born or had an impact the more things are named after them. A town called Hastings, in Nebraska, has the Tom Osborne Expressway (a College football coach of some note) for instance since he grew up there.
Las Vegas has a street named after Hugh Hefner. Thanks for all the softcore nudie pics of seriously beautiful women, Hef. You helped make junior high more bearable.
**Edit:** this actually *is* more of a thing in Europe than in the USA. Sorry guys, the OP’s hunch is not off.
I’d assume there are some, but there are a lot of streets. I used to rent a place named after legendary actor Ricardo Montalban. So I’d assume there is Mark Twain or Ernest Hemmingway out there somewhere, and almost certainly a University building.
A cursory Google search shows Hemingway, Twain, Stowe, Faulkner, Thoreau, and Melville streets all adjoining each other in a town in North Jersey.
Trees generally have no skeletons in the closet.
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We have an entire platte named for 18th century romantic poets.
And a Sandburg elementary, an Emerson elementary-
I’ve heard it’s actually pretty difficult to name streets. It’s a big part of city planning. They have to be distinct enough from other streets.
Where I live we have a lot of streets named after themes. Like you might have a neighborhood where all of the streets are named after types of birds, for example. I assume that whoever named it liked birds, or thought that would be appealing for a neighborhood.
I used to live near a mark twain drive
I think part of it is that most of the US seems to do more one word names than two words. I can think of only a few streets with someone’s full name, and they are mainly non-military heroes (Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, John F Kennedy), but not artists. I’m not totally sure why, but my guess would be that authors are unlikely to be killed for their work and most streets that have a first and last name attached to them seem to be people who were assassinated. Some of it is also age of streets. Many well known American authors are 20th century authors, by which point most major cities already had established street names.
I’m very confused by this post…There is both a Twain Street and a Dickinson Street just in my city. My city is named after a former president.
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My guess is that these streets just aren’t in the areas you’re visiting.
Theres a whole town named Twain in the Sierra Nevada foothills. The population is like 80 people, but that was named for the author.
Streets are named at the local level. The U.S. does not have street naming policies. Which is good because the U.S. has a lot of roads (it’s a big country).
But there is a Mark Twain St in Saint Charles, Illinois and another in Detroit Michigan.
There is Emily Dickinson Place in White Plains, Maryland and a Emily Dickinson Lane, St Charles, Illinois.
Google will answer your question.
3 major reasons:
1. The US is more “suburban” and our suburbs tend to be fairly new and have generic names, and the easiest thing to use is trees. “Pinehill road” “oakcrest street” etc
2. The US has a colonial history and some of our major roads are just descriptors of old colonial foundations or roads. Wall Street in NYC is on the site of an old wall fortification built by the Dutch, Mission street in San Francisco is near the site of the spanish mission, el Camino real (loosely translated “the royal road”) runs from San Francisco down and was a Spanish road built in the colonial era to support San Francisco and other missions in California. A lot of these tend to be the larger streets in big cities and urban areas along with “Main Street” which is the vague descriptor for “here you can buy and sell goods.” In San Francisco the equivalent of Main Street is “market street”
3. We generally name streets (and other things) after local politicians and activists, sometimes cultural figures but only if they have ties to the region. Here in SF a new metro terminal was built in Chinatown and named after Rose Pak, an activist and reporter who worked to improve public transit in downtown to help Chinatown businesses. We have an airport terminal named after Harvey Milk, the bay bridge between San Francisco and Oakland is partially named after former mayor Willie Brown. There’s a district in Oakland named after American writer Jack London but he had strong ties to the city and region.
We definitely have streets named after authors, but I’d say it’s not super common. What we do have a lot of is schools named after authors. The small city I live in has a middle school named after Mark Twain. The town where I grew up had a rival high school named after the famous poet Carl Sandburg.
I will admit that it seems like a missed opportunity not to name a street “Heming Way.”
If you are implying that literary culture is not foremost in the mind of America’s image of itself, that’s not exactly wrong. But I’m sure there are author streets out there. We do tend to pick presidents, local political figures, and trees. In the current climate deciding which author to use would probably incite a culture war.
There are streets named for poets. Since the country is so large, you’re more likely see Steinbeck streets in Salinas/Monterey, CA and Hemingway’s namesake in Key West. There are tons of places all over the country named for Mark Twain. Toni Morrison has a hall named after her at Cornell. Edgar Allen Poe has an NFL team (and mascot) named one of his famous works “The Raven” among other things.
As others have pointed out, there are streets. I think overall the US is more likely to name a building, school, park, city, county, or even a state after a famous American.
Street naming is a pretty localized affair. I’m sure the hometowns of many famous authors name streets after them. But other cities wouldn’t feel *entitled* to name a street after an author with no connection to the local area, even if they’re a nationally beloved author.
For example, there’s a Herman Melville Square in NYC. I could imagine some New England former whaling town doing the same. But nobody in Idaho is looking to commemorate a NY author who wrote about New England whalers. People in Idaho would agree Melville is a great American author. But if they planned a new street in Boise, they’d name it after someone or something relevant to Boise.
So this was fun, looking through Google Maps to see if we had any in my city. I didn’t find a Twain Street or a Hemingway Drive, but there was a Dickinson Street, a Melville Street, and a Hawthorne Street. A Fitzgerald Avenue was a ways outside town. The was no Buck Street, but there is a Buck Creek and a Buck Creek Avenue. There’s a London Street, but that might be named after the city; likewise James Avenue might be named after any number of people.
As to why not as many as Europe, developers seem to have decided that naming streets after natural features was a winning strategy and just stuck with it.
The fix here is to start a new development, and name streets as we choose. I’d like a Hemingway Street, a Michener Street, and of course a Twain Street. Not stopping with American authors though- definitely getting a Tolkien Street. I’d like a road named after Dante, too, preferably leading towards the town of Hell, MI.
In Massachusetts, most new streets in towns get proposed names from the developer, with the planning board having some veto power, but rarely dictating street names. This encourages very neutral names in most cases.
But Concord, MA has a Thoreau Street and an Alcott Street (though I can’t be sure the Alcott Street is actually named after Louisa May Alcott).
When a town wishes to honor an author, they may go further. Lowell, MA has a Kerouac Park, honoring Jack Kerouac who was born there.
I will answer in good faith, but OP, you should know my response is dripping with hostility for your dumb question.
We do name streets after authors. In my city alone, here are some examples:
Aldrich Avenue – Named for poet and editor of Atlantic Monthly, Thomas Aldrich.
Bryant Avenue – Named for poet and author William Cullen Bryant.
Emerson Avenue – Named for poet, writer, and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Irving Avenue – Named for author Washington Irving.
James Avenue – Named for English author and writer George P. R. James.
Other notable non-military people whose names are on our streets:
Girard Avenue – Named for the founder of Girard College.
Humboldt Avenue – Named for German scientist Friedrich Alexander Humboldt.
Newton Avenue – Named for Sir Isaac Newton, a philosopher and mathematician.
Penn Avenue – Named for William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania.
Can you name as many streets in your town named after authors, poets, writers, or other non-military heroes?
I anxiously await your response.
If you got to any Texas town that developed before the turn of the 20th century you’ll find that they will generally all have a Travis, an Austin, a Houston, a Lamar, etc. named after heroes in the Texas Revolution. We just don’t have a lot of authors and composers to choose from given our recent history
New England reporting in….
Fair number of Whittier, Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, et al streets. (All New England writers.)
Does Alexander Von Humboldt count? Because I think every big city in the country has something named after that guy.
We tend to honor activists and people who founded the town more so than authors. There are Martin Luther King streets, boulevards, and highways all over the US. You have John Lewis Freedom Parkway in Atlanta, Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in NOLA, and other people like that. Also tons of road names after politicians and many of them didn’t serve in the military. Just not a lot of authors or composers.
I am not really sure why just that it’s the way it is.
A lot of our cities are very much deliberately planned cities. Planned either by state governments, universities, or company towns (sometimes actually owned by the company). And once you plan a city and name a street and people start living there and moving there and getting mail and acquiring business cards and all that, its a huge uphill battle in changing a street name.
Probably one of the more widespread name changes in the last 60 years is naming a street after Martin Luther King Jr. And even with a widely popular figure, there was a lot of controversy in changing street names. Some in good-faith, some thinly veiled racism, some actual racism. Some places named an entire street from one end to another. Some re-named part of a street. And some just said “fuck it” and stuck a sign by an Interstate Highway and said “this is named after him”
Why do you think we don’t have those?
My town, a Los Angeles suburb, is named after a poet John Greenleaf Whittier. His name is also used for a major boulevard cutting through a large section of Los Angeles.
Jack London Square in Oakland.
There’s a Steinbeck Highway through Salinas Valley that he wrote about, they also named a street “Cannery Row” in honor of his novel.
It’s a big country that expanded and developed a lot more recently and quickly than what you’re familiar with. So there’s lots of streets named after prominent contemporaries of that time.
Do songwriters count? There’s a bridge named after James Taylor in Chapel Hill, NC.
Would everyone in Poland have read Adam Mickiewicz?
I don’t think most people in the US read old authors unless they are forced to in high school. And most of the old books we read in high school are British authors. Most Americans have probably read some of Mark Twain in school. But I doubt more than a few percent have read any of the others you listed. Our authors don’t seem to have cultural “stick” through the generations.
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We have a development in my town named The Authors. All the streets are named after famous NC authors.
We do have streets named as such. Adam Adam Mickiewicz died about the same time we became a country. Most of our writers came long after the street names you are aware of were made.