19.Apr.2010 ABST0002: Trends in Street Naming — Suffixes

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INTRODUCTION: The United States Postal Service divides addresses into seven possible parts: “primary address number, predirectional, street name, suffix, postdirectional, secondary address indentifier, and secondary address.” The USPS recognizes 206 distinct suffixes, ranging from the traditional “street,” “road” and “way” to the less traditional “loaf” and “shoal” to the compound, “stravenue” (street and avenue).

OBJECTIVE: We hope to gain insight into prevailing and past views of domestic ideals by quantifying and understanding trends in street naming, particularly suffix use.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The goal is to obtain cross-sections of suffix use at several different time points and to compare changes of proportions from decade to decade. Once a geographic locale is fixed (preferably one that has a mix of early, mid- and current suburban development), we would need access to atlases (or lists) containing street name data in one easy-to-tabulate location. Depending on the source form, gathering data may be labor intensive – electronic data is preferable.

DISCUSSION: We suspect that early data would show a predominance of certain street suffixes (i.e. street, avenue and road) versus later data, which we would expect to see a lower incidence of these suffixes and a wider variety generally.