{"id":13134,"date":"2013-04-23T18:47:53","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T23:47:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=13134"},"modified":"2022-05-28T08:01:24","modified_gmt":"2022-05-28T13:01:24","slug":"stravenue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/stravenue\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Stravenue?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Followers of Twelve Mile Circle are aware of my fascination with portmanteaus, the mashing together of two distinct words to form a single new word (see the portmanteau tag<\/a> for several examples). So I stumbled across a new one, or at least a new one to me, as I attempted to find variations on Public Streets<\/a>. I consulted Wikipedia’s Street Type Designations<\/a> and there I noticed “Stravenue,” a portmanteau composed of Street and Avenue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

An Odd Designation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Little information on the Stravenue phenomenon exists. The few websites that explore this topic tend to quote heavily from each other. I’m not going to be able to add much value to the existing body of knowledge although I will provide a summary. I can also add something which nobody else seems to have considered, an interactive map of primary stravenue locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invariably most of the other writers who stumbled across stravenues also did so by accident. The topic does sometimes make it<\/a> into the mainstream media including the Arizona Star from time-to-time. The general blogger reaction to the discovery is: What the {fill in the exclamation or expletive of your choice}?!?<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I got that out of the way in the title so let’s move along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Prevalence in Tucson<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Dover<\/a>
Dover Stravenue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Most sources claim that Stravenues are unique to Tucson, Arizona, a city configured generally on a grid of cardinal directions. In many parts of Tucson the streets run east to west and avenues run north to south. Railroad tracks in one part of the city run diagonally, northwest to southeast, and several small communities adhered to that orientation while eschewing cardinal directions. Many of the roads within those developments became stravenues to signify that they ran diagonally between streets and avenues of the more prevalent Tucson grid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are a lot of stories about the initial application of stravenue as a street suffix in Tucson. The Pima County Public Library<\/a> took a bit of a contrarian view:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“[the] … Library staff cannot find an exact origin of this term. We telephoned the Tucson Planning Department on March 7, 2008. The Tucson Planning Department said the term starvenue did not originate in Tucson and that stravenues are not unique to Tucson.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I found a couple of references to two stravenues outside of Tucson, albeit both still in Arizona and likely influenced by the Tucson occurrences: Lead Stravenue in Brisbee (map<\/a>) and a reference to a Babin Stravenue on OpenStreetMap not corroborated in Google Maps (listed as part of Zent Road<\/a>) in San Simon. I sure would like to know where other examples of stravenue exist if they are not unique to Tucson. But I couldn’t find any other uses other than those minor instances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Clusters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Two primary stravenue clusters exist in Tucson plus a handful of disconnected outliers strewn about the city. So I’ll embed both of the clusters below. You can open either of these in another tab and then zoom outward to see the complete file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n