The Minneapolis Street Grid: Explained(streets.mn) |
The Minneapolis Street Grid: Explained(streets.mn) |
So Chowen Avenue might end at the 6200 address in Mpls, but you'll find a Chowen Avenue in Burnsville, about 25 miles south, in roughly the same place laterally as it would be if it were extended south from Mpls and the street numbers will begin with something like 130000.
Don't know if this happens in other places, but it never fails to make me smile when I see it.
Unincorporated addresses in Kane and DuPage Counties do use a reference system based off State & Madison as baseline (although it's been codified based off county and township lines). Eg. 40W100 Keslinger Rd is a bit over 40 miles west of State St.
Downtown Madison is sandwiched between 2 lakes, and most of the city orients North East for the roads that run between them.
LOLNO Madison is complete mess because it's on an isthmus. Also the state capitol is right in the middle of the isthmus, so all of the streets there have to go around the capitol grounds. And then there's Schenk's Corners for example, just a total nightmare. The entire city is going in every direction at once.
The only way you can figure out how to get around Madison is to live here for decades (which I've done), via rote route memorization.
Before Madison I actually lived in downtown Minneapolis, and I always appreciated the orderliness of its streets.
There's a related item that's amused me a lot. 110th at one point shifts like 50 feet to one side and becomes 111th.
https://southtwelfth.tumblr.com/post/56794633391/fictitious-...
Somewhat tongue-in-cheek article that explores the intricacies of our road system to come up with a fake address that sounds believable.
Here are all the numbered streets of New York City, colored by the number of the street.
https://i.redd.it/p48mipyctk5d1.png
The New York street grid can really suck you in because its just organized enough to not be randomness, but not organized enough to instantly fit it to a simple pattern and move on with your life.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/kft9cz/a_view_of_t...
I grew up in Miami that has a sort of less-structured grid system where avenues are the primary north-south roads and streets are the primary east-west roads. There's a through road every half mile, or numbering-wise every 8 streets or 5 avenues. So if you know this fact, you'll know that SW 47th ave is extremely likely to be a through road until it reaches the coast, and SW 42nd Ave is maybe a bit less likely but still probably a through road. Same with SW 88th st (main through road) and SW 96th st (probably a through road). In between these main grid streets you're on your own.
Incredibly, most people I speak to who live there do not realize this! As far as I can tell, it's not explained anywhere on the county or city website, at least that I can easily google. It makes getting around the city's surface streets much, much easier, but it's just not common knowledge.
An example that bit me once, before smartphones and widespread gps, is that numbered streets and avenues in Phoenix both run north-south. The numbering gets higher in both directions as you move away from Central Ave, so the smaller numbered streets/aves are relatively close to one another. Very simple pattern indeed, but it was very surprising the first time I encountered it, didn't match my expectations I guess.
That's nearly 50 miles west of Central Avenue in Phoenix, and it stretches another 33 miles east of Central, out to Apache Junction: https://maps.app.goo.gl/VrjSYy7QEuX9yNee6
The Phoenix-area grid is super-square; I figured it out by way of city bus routes, which are usually numbered according to the block address of the street they travel on. Mileage can be estimated by the number of major intersections you pass.
It is important to distinguish between numbered "Avenues" on the west side and "Streets" on the east side, and in Phoenix as well as other cities, the "east/west/north/south" designator of a road, as well as the city, must be considered when looking at any given address.
Were these maps made manually using ArcGIS? Or is there a way to make them programmatically?
<https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cbvtwt/til_t...>
The cities merged because of competition with St. Paul, which had better rail access and was further down the river (didn't have to deal with the waterfall in Mpls).
So the original grids of both cities were created independently, however, once the cities merged they renamed almost all of the streets in both cities to be what is the modern day naming. This was mainly because there were many duplicate names on either side of the river. If they hadn't done this the street naming would be utterly confusing.
So the answer to your question is really "it's complicated".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richfield,_Minnesota#/media/Fi...
Minneapolis extended down to 62nd street in 3 successive annexations.
Though, this had a pretty minor effect on the streets as they were already continuous.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/news/milwaukees-bridge-war-story-behi...
ah ha. Welcome to PLSS land, neighbor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System#/med...
you will find this pattern EVERYWHERE. They didnt turn the entire country into squares, but by golly they got a lot of it.
They have their own section in the postal addressing standards, under the "Unusual Addressing Situations":
I spent 20+ years in Washington, DC so am used to NW, NE, SW, and SE with avenues, numbered streets, flower streets of two syllables, blah blah blah. But I now live in rural Virginia and state routes are the norm.
Your explanation got me to focus more on what and why. And, I learned something, so thank you.
I mean, yes, Madison is heavily planned. But so is any city you build on an isthmus. You have to heavily plan the layout or it won't work. At the same time they made a north-east flowing layout. Now it may be a "grid" if you rotate a grid 45%, but when someone generally thinks of "grid", they think of a grid oriented in cardinal directions. Obviously, this is not possible in Madison because of two giant lakes.
Minneapolis has more of a "grid" layout that most people would consider a true "grid" layout.
Milwaukee and Chicago obviously have grid layouts on steroids because of their history and the nature of the original people inhabiting those places. They are places built for moving men and material to the front so to speak. And they don't too much care what they have to do to make that possible. Giant hill of rock in the way? They'll happily blow right through it. City keeps flooding because it's basically a swamp/marsh? No problem, they casually lift the entire city into the air and continue right on building. Just a whole lot of things most other places probably wouldn't do.
This is presuming that Madison roads "work", but they don't! They're a mess.
Note also that the state capitol was originally built at the present site in 1837, before the rise of the automobile. And North Hall, the first building on the University of Wisconsin campus, was built in 1851. I'm not aware of any grand road plan.
Another interesting thing not talked a lot about online is that these midwest cities typically have a ton of documented (or not?) underground tunnels. There used to be a cool website for the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) that showed them off. My parents recall walking from the University of MN to further parts downtown where you can transition to skyways and basically never go outside. I guess -40' weather really pushes people to become moles in a sense. I think a lot of big cities also have huge tunnel systems for heating fuel (coal delivery and the like) and other utilities
The numbering system for just about all Chicago roads ends at the Chicago city limits, except for some of the streets on the south side, which continue all the way down into Will County.
Even stranger is that there is a pocket of streets in Dyer Indiana that are numbered according to the Chicago system, as if they had expected the street grid to expand that far south and east. Expand to Hammond, Schererville, St John and you'll see east/west streets that are numbered in the 40s (the Gary Indiana scheme), then in the high 90s (Lake County Indiana scheme?), then the 210s (Chicago scheme), then the 70s (back to the Gary scheme).
EDIT - Chicago did a mass street renumbering (with a few street name changes too) in the early 20th century. It would be interesting to know if some of the suburban street numbering schemes for the roads that cross municipal boundaries are still using the old system and that is why the street numbers seem to reset once you exit the city.
I was wondering about that, particularly for the named roads. I believe Pulaski/Crawford was always Crawford first until Chicago renamed their portion to Pulaski and Skokie kept the Crawford name. I recall my dad telling me that when he was a kid in the 50s Pulaski was Crawford all the way down. I think that might have been the case with Western/Asbury as well, but I’m not too sure on that one. I’m sure there are many other examples.
And here’s an unrelated yet interesting Chicago street fact for anyone still reading: Elston starts and ends at Milwaukee Ave., so there are two Elston/Milwaukee intersections.
I’m not sure how much of this was connected to what seemed to be a multi-generational familial problem recalling proper nouns.
As someone who didn’t grow up there it was a bit different to what I was used to - named roads or road numbers, named settlements or geographic identifiers.
Also, an acre is one furlong long by one chain wide.
Not coincidentally, a cricket pitch is one chain long.
My education was almost all in the metric system but a decent knowledge of the imperial system still makes the world a bit easier to understand.
On graduation and inevitable employment by the forestry commission you got your chain: a vital tool of the job, as well as useful for marking out cricket pitches. (They are one chain long)
