I have always been attuned to place names. As a kid, growing up in a region filled with towns bearing Native American names like Wauwatosa, Oconomowoc, and Sheboygan, the idea that names precede us, that names come from people and cultures who came before, was second-nature. I didn’t give too much thought to their specific origins until much later, though.
In graduate school, I spent a lot of time researching places and place names. I traced the origin of Milwaukee’s name from current citizens who often don’t pronounce the L (they say Muh-waukee) to the Potowatomi tribe who inhabited the region centuries ago, whose language, it turned out, didn’t have a letter L in it. When I’d found out as a teenager that I should be calling my home Mil-waukee, with a clear L in it, I made a point of saying it the right way. My graduate research suggested that maybe I wasn’t right, or maybe none of us were. Originally, the Potowatomi may not have pronounced the L, but does that make me wrong for pronouncing it now? Somewhere in the evolution of language “rightness” gets murky.
In high school, riding the city bus from the south side of town to the center, I learned the names of streets as the bus idled at stoplights. National Avenue, Greenfield Avenue, Beecher Street. I never bothered to learn who they were named after. Like landmarks you see everyday, the street names blended into the background of my daily life. Other streets had meaning built into the name: Watertown Plank Road used to be a road built out of wooden planks that connected Milwaukee to Watertown. I attended college in Milwaukee, and exploring the old parts of the city near my university made me realize how many streets are named after famous people: Van Buren, Washington, Jefferson. Once I started moving around to different cities after college, I encountered plenty more presidential streets.
I wonder how many people live in places where they don’t know the meaning of street names, or building names, or town names. Who don’t ask for reasons, who just accept. I once overheard a girl working at a grocery store in a small town in Iowa say she didn’t know why so many of the buildings in her town had castle architecture—turrets and gray brick walls and brightly colored flags. Maybe she’d never thought to ask. Maybe after seeing these things every day for her whole life, they seemed completely normal and not worth inquiring about. I know, at times, I have been one of these people.
I can’t help but think of U2’s song “Where the Streets Have No Name.” What the song makes me think about is history, the fact that we’re tied to places, and that names give things like streets a story and a past. People say Bono is singing about heaven in that song. I wonder if maybe he’s just singing about a place that isn’t so tied to the past because sometimes the past can be a weight we have to bear.
But maybe it is that past the gives meaning to certain places.
I’ve been thinking a lot about language because I now live in Phoenix, Arizona, where language plays such a large role in daily life. So many people speak Spanish or are bilingual that names matter in a different way. Pronunciation matters. The New York Times published an article in 2007 by Manuel Muñoz about the difficulties of having a foreign-sounding name and being raised bilingual in an English-dominated society. I used to have my English Composition students in Iowa read it.
I think about it now as I drive through the town of Guadalupe, a small area—a neighborhood really—surrounded on all sides by larger cities like Phoenix and Tempe. In Guadalupe, all the street names change from English to Spanish. Instead of “Street,” the signs say “Calle.” Calle Maravilla, Calle Magdalena. The names of grocery stores and tire shops are all in Spanish. It’s an abrupt switch, but it’s interesting, the way the street names tell those passing through something about the place. Not just that the people living in it speak a certain language, but that that area has a certain history that led to its streets wearing those names. In other parts of town, all the streets are named after universities or animals, perhaps alluding to the aspirations we once had or the creatures we might have observed before subdivisions and strip malls and highways showed up.
I know not every street name sounds important. In high school, I lived on Maple Terrace, which was, as you might suspect, lined with maples. I’ve also lived on 4th Street and Washington Avenue in recent years. I currently live in a neighborhood where the streets are named generic things like “Lake” or after plant species like “Cottonwood.”
But even when the names sound boring, they say something about us. Names always do. Years from now, someone might be able to discern something about our mentality, our concerns, or our aspirations from our street names. Greenfield, however mundane it may have sounded when I rode the bus in high school, will be a part of our shared history. Maybe, at the time it was named, we were hoping for something greener, something better. Or maybe—much like the maples—a green field used to sit adjacent to the street.
Not all names scream to be noticed, but they are worth paying attention to. It’s worth thinking about origins and history because as a society we must understand where we came from. It’s also worth thinking about where we hope to go. Names can have power. They can inspire us if we let them. They can direct our thinking. Think about it.