Image by the author.

Street names can tell stories.

Sometimes street names give us big headlines, like when Route 1 in Crystal City was recently changed from “Jefferson Davis Highway” to “Richmond Highway.”

Sometimes street names reveal unexpected details. Beach Drive, in Rock Creek Park, has a surprisingly landlocked origin story. Its namesake, Lansing Hoskins Beach, was born in Iowa. He was the Army Corps of Engineers Commissioner who used forced prison labor to pave the road at the turn of the 20th century.

Sometimes, though, it isn’t the name of the street that’s important. Today, we’re looking at titles - terms like “street,” “road,” “lane,” “avenue,” or whatever else. Street titles are easy to ignore, but they reveal a lot about the history of our region. They also make pretty maps.

Image by the author.

Erin Davis is a data scientist based in Portland, Oregon, who has explored the geography of everything from Mexican restaurants to Beyoncé fans to town names. Recently, they released a script that uses the programming language R to generate colorful maps of cities based on the titles of streets. I took that script and used it to create maps of the region.

Image by the author.

Image by the author.

What do these maps reveal?

As soon as the code ran and the first map of the region appeared on my monitor, I noticed a few fun details.

Both Arlington and DC use “street” a lot in their thoughtful and coordinated pattern, but the other parts of the region don’t. That makes the “10 miles square” of the original District stand out in bright yellow against the rest of the map. This pattern isn’t an accident: the difference between “street” and “road” reflects a deep difference about what that paved space is for. Streets are about building wealth and community in a place, roads are about moving people and goods between places.

Yellow clusters of “streets” also show up in many of Virginia’s independent cities and in Maryland’s older communities, reflecting the parts of the region that were settled before widespread suburbanization - including some old streetcar corridors like the path extending to Vienna.

There are a few clusters of light-blue “avenues,” including Del Ray and Takoma Park. Both of these places were developed as planned communities at the end of the 19th century.

Maryland has “state highways,” in orange, while Virginia has “state routes” in dark green. These have similar stature in law and funding, and I don’t know why the names are different.

The way that gray interstate highways and invisible rivers break up the street network is clearly visible.

Even if you put it in black-and-white, the map is still interesting. The shape of the street network changes dramatically across the region. It’s instantly clear that not all suburban areas are the same. Much of Fairfax, for example, has a relatively dense network of streets. It might not be as much of a grid as DC, but it’s much tighter than other areas farther away from the downtown center.

You can get a map of your own!

If you want a map yourself, you can download the full-resolution images from my website (make sure to click the links below the pictures) and print them at your local print shop. If you do this, I encourage you to make a $5 donation to GGWash. Alternatively, if click-button convenience is more your style, you can buy them in this online shop, and GGWash will get 5% of the sale price.

Have you noticed anything interesting? Let me know in the comments!

Thumbnail: Image by the author.