Unusual Goes Very Local, Part I

Twelve Mile Circle is an appreciation of unusual places. However, they don’t have to be famous to be noteworthy. Every town has at least one unusual place, maybe more. Perhaps even your own hometown has a few.

There is a spot in Arlington County, Virginia where a contiguous road called “North 26th Street” changes names. It jumps all the way up to “North 31st Street” after crossing through an intersection! How can that possibly be?

This happened when the county applied its established grid-based naming convention upon an area of hilly terrain. Grids are suitable for flatlands. On the other hand they don’t work so well in places where roads can’t travel in straight lines. Here, the Broyhill Forest subdivision, built in the 1950’s, needed to conform to the undulating contours of the land.

The street numbering made sense within the context of roads framing the borders of the new subdivision. Then the roads that extended into the neighborhood and around the hills and valleys did not meet cleanly in the middle. As a result — and in the most extreme instance — a single road carried the name 26th Street and 31st Street on the two sides of its intersection with N. Thomas Street.

This is only the beginning of the strange street naming system in Arlington. A 1999 Washington Post article, “Arlington Streets Defy Logic” identified several other examples.