number-names, the phrase "the corner of," and the custom of omitting street fall upon the ear of a Britisher. He quotes with amazement certain directions given to him on his arrival in San Francisco from India: "Go six blocks north to [the] corner of Geary and Markey [Market?]; then walk around till you strike [the] corner of Gutter and Sixteenth." The English al- ways add the word street (or road or place or avenue) when speaking of a thoroughfare; such a phrase as "Oxford and New Bond" would strike them as incongruous. The American cus- tom of numbering and lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. The English ap- parently have an inexhaustible fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Oxford street, London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Holland Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the Oxford road to the westward, and High Holborn, Holborn viaduct, Newgate street, Cheapside, the Poultry, Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the eastward. The Strand, in the same way, becomes Fleet street, Ludgate hill and Cannon street. Nevertheless, there is a First avenue in Queen's Park, and parallel to it are Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth avenues—all small streets leading northward from the Harrow road, just east of Kensal Green cemetery. I have observed that few Londoners have ever heard of them. There is also a First street in Chelsea—a very modest thoroughfare near Lennox gardens and not far from the Bromp- ton Oratory.
Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion ap- parently set up by Major Pierre-Charles L'Enf ant's plans for Washington, the most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as opposed to that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as avenue, boulevard, drive and speed- way. Avenue is used in England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or to one in a warehouse dis- trict. In America the word is scarcely distinguished in mean- ing from street.[1] Boulevard, drive and speedway are almost
- ↑ There are, of course, local exceptions. In Baltimore, for example,
