Street Plans

When I came into Knoxville, Tennessee on October 11, I had no idea where anything was, other than the hotel I was staying at and the home of the friends we were visiting. The problem that I have about the Knoxville street plan is that the roads are named and not numbered. This makes finding any address difficult, to say the least (unless you’ve lived there a while).

I have usually lived in places (South Florida and Gainesville) that used a numbered street plan. If I needed to find any place, I could locate it easily from its address and had no problem getting there. Hollywood, Florida, has an interesting twist: although their “east-west” streets are named, most of them are named after former U.S. Presidents (in chronological order). So, Hollywood has an historical theme to its street layout.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t been some glitches to the street-plans in my hometowns. If you go eastward in Hollywood toward the ocean, the avenues go down in number until you hit the Atlantic Ocean itself. At about where 5th Avenue would be is where you start to wade to the seaweed-saturated sea! Apparently, the Hollywood coastline has eroded quite a bit over the past several decades!

Gainesville has its own peculiarities. If you go west on NW 16 Avenue, you’ll find that it changes to NW 23 Avenue. And if you go west on NW 23 Avenue from the center of the city, you’ll find that it changes to NW 31 Boulevard! There is the heavily-traveled NW 53 Avenue that I drive down to go to my Publix grocery store. Along a stretch of this road, I can look off to my left and see another, completely different, residential road running parallel to it. Its name? NW 53 Avenue! And driving north on NW 34 Street, there is a side road turning off to the left. Its name? NW 34 Street!

But in Knoxville, they have their own way of doing things. For example, they have a street officially named after current (neither retired nor deceased nor fired yet) University of Tennessee head football coach Phillip Fulmer. I guess they really do take their football seriously up there!