The Street That Changed Its Name Three Times

The street has had three official names in eighty years. It has had one working name for all of them.

Ask anyone who lives on it for directions and you will not get a name at all. You will get the pharmacy — which closed in 2013 and reopened under a different family in 2019, and is still the pharmacy. You will get the corner, which is a specific corner, and not the one you would pick. And you will get the tree, which everyone agrees on, and which is not the largest tree on the street.

What a street is actually for

Official names are for post and for maps. Working names are for the people who have to describe where they are to somebody who is coming to find them, and they are ruthlessly practical. They select for what does not move.

This is why the pharmacy survives its own closure. As a landmark it is not the business — it is the frontage, the two steps, the green sign bracket that stayed on the wall for six years with nothing hanging from it. The bracket is the landmark. The pharmacy is only what the bracket used to hold.

A woman on the second floor told us she had never once used the current official name in conversation, and could not, when asked, recall the previous one. She could recall the one before that, because it was on her mother's identity papers.

The map is renamed from above. The street is named from inside, and only once, and it never changes.