The Joy of Numbered Streets

Summary

I enjoy Europe as much as the next urbanist, but years of living and traveling there never uprooted one of my most unpopular opinions: Streets numbered in sequential order are a wonderful thing for the cities that have them. I was recently in Bogotá, Colombia and found that, while the city is as overwhelming as you’d expect a Latin American megacity to be, and the transit system is deeply confusing, there is a deep, comforting legibility beneath it all. Most streets are numbered, either as carreras (north-south) or calles (east-west). So most addresses are a simple pair of coordinates that give you a good idea of where a place is in the city. Wherever you are in Bogotá, you have a good sense of where everything else is, and how far away it is. They do this even though their local street networks aren’t always very gridded. The numbers create a larger web of legibility that always orients you, even if your immediate surroundings are confusing.Salt Lake City and Manhattan are two other famous examples. What New Yorker hasn’t appreciated how you can quickly figure how far it is from 100th St 1st Avenue to 14th St & 9th Ave?Here in the US, the scandal around César Chávez’s grave sexual offenses in the 1960s will require the rapid renaming of many streets names for the United Farm Workers leader. Here in Portland, our 39th Avenue was renamed César E. Chávez Blvd in 2009, so many people remember the old name.Now that the name will almost certainly change again, I ventured a letter to the editor to the Oregonian advocating for returning to “39th Avenue.” They had me cut about half of it, so I thought I’d share the full thing here. I hope it’s relevant to you if numbered streets are part of your city’s heritage.Call it 39th AvenueJarrett WalkerWhat should Portland do about César E. Chávez Blvd, which was 39th Avenue until 2009? The understandable first reaction is to rename the street for Dolores Huerta, Chávez’s partner in the United Farm Workers (UFW) who has now accused ...