I hate the name of my street, Hendrie Avenue, with its gratuitous quirky spelling – just odd enough to force me to have to spell it to every pizza delivery man and anyone else who requires the address. Worse yet, Hendrie Avenue isn’t even a continuous street. Upper Hendrie is the road by Riverside School. Lower Hendrie starts down by Binney Park. It’s bisected by a road called Drinkwater. Can’t tell you how many times visitors got lost driving around upper Hendrie looking for my house. And then there’s Hendrie Lane. But that’s another story.
I miss my last address – Martins Lane – in a quiet burb south of Boston.
The worst was Trysting Lane in Scituate, Mass., where I served a two-year sentence.
When it comes to public arterial nomenclature, I am decidedly a minimalist. I worry someday I will be on the phone with the EMT spelling my address and making sure they don’t end up on Upper Hendrie.
Now, what if the town came to me and said, “Good news, we’ve decided to change your street to Fox Lane?” Would I jump for joy?
How many bank accounts, mutual funds, government agencies, insurance companies, employer data bases, schools, utility companies, phone companies, cable TV companies, etc. have we tethered ourselves to in our complicated lives? Not to mention alumni associations, PTA, NetFlix, Amazon, and the Sierra Club. How many weeks would it take me to communicate my change of address?
Now imagine you’re a small business, say, in Cos Cob, and the town has proposed re-numbering our main commercial artery – Rt. 1 which is named East or West Putnam Avenue depending on whether you’re in the east part of town or west. (Wouldn’t it have been easier to have had one road called Putnam? But I digress.) Jean Louis LeBreton, owner of the Citgo station, represents the overwhelming opinion of more than 40 business affected: DON’T DO IT. LeBreton estimates that it would cost him more than $6,000 in costs to change all his marketing materials and other essentials such as business cards.
After an uprising at a meeting in town hall, the authorities decided to suspend implementation of the plan for now.
But the issue of disambiguating the maze of duplicative town addresses to allow for faster response time in emergencies was not settled, only continued. Town Planner Diane Fox did not mince words:
“We don’t want to incur liability,” she said, suggesting that the town could be held accountable for doing nothing to correct a now very public potential barrier to optimal protection of the citizenry.
Whatever that price may be, we can all agree it would too high, If it ever happens.
