Do the Math: The Pleasures of Fractional Street Names
Fun with fractions! Plus a new installment of the Inconspicuous News Roundup.
Last week I wrote about 6½ Avenue, a pedestrian walkway that’s New York City’s only thoroughfare with a fraction-based name. As I worked on that piece, I knew that there were a few other fractional street names lurking in various American cities. At first I thought I’d mention them at the end of last week’s piece, sort of as a quick epilogue. But as I did more research, I started realizing that that there were enough of these place to justify a separate follow-up article.
At that point, however, I still didn’t fully comprehend the scope of the fractional street name phenomenon. As I began working on the follow-up post (i.e., this article that you’re reading right now), it soon became apparent that there are a lot more fractionated street names than I had assumed. I initially thought I’d list eight such places in this article, then 10, then a dozen, then 15. I eventually established a hard cap of 20, but I can tell from the pace of my research discoveries that I could easily have come up four or five times that many. (Let’s say at least four-and-a-half times, in keeping with the fractional theme.) And these are real streets, not just pedestrian passageways like the one in New York. Together, they comprise a fun little alternate universe of confoundingly esoteric roadway nomenclature (and, no doubt, are every local letter carrier’s worst nightmare).
The 20 such places I’ve identified for this article range from big cities to rural backwaters and are located in many different regions of the country, as you can see on this map:
Ready to learn about these 20 fraction fanatics? Here they are, listed alphabetically.
Anniston, Alabama
Last week I mentioned that it’s hard to know how to express fractional street names in ordinal form. Anniston has addressed this issue by formatting its signs as “11th½ Street” and “12th½ Street” (instead of 11½ and 12½). If you look at all the fractionated street signs in this article — and there are a lot of them — you’ll see that Anniston is the only municipality that’s taken this approach.
Austin, Texas
Austin has a few fractionally named roads sprinkled throughout its street grid. According to this article, these streets were added as parts of subdivisions that were created after the street grid’s whole-numbered streets already existed.
Baltimore, Maryland
Baltimore’s Barclay neighborhood includes a bunch of narrow streets — they’re really alleys — numbered 20½, 21½, 22½, 23½, 24½, and 25½. You can see most of them running east-west on this map:
Barron County, Wisconsin
