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Numbered street


A numbered street is a street whose name is an ordinal number, as in Second Street or Tenth Avenue. Such forms are among the most common street names in North America, but also exist in other parts of the world, especially in the Middle East. Numbered streets were first used in Philadelphia and now exist in many major cities and small towns. Grid-based naming systems usually start at 1 (but sometimes at a higher number or even at zero), and then proceed in numerical order. In the United States, seven out of the top ten most common street names are numbers, with the top three names being "2nd," "3rd," and "1st" respectively.

Some cities also have lettered street names. For example, Washington, D.C., in addition to having numbered streets, also has streets identified as a letter followed by "Street," going as high as the letter W. New York City (mostly in Brooklyn) has avenues titled "Avenue" followed by the respective letter of the alphabet, such as Avenue D. The idea for such a system was developed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who devised the system for Washington.

The numbered street system is criticized for taking away the individuality from a community that a named street would provide.

The city of Baltimore, Maryland, has numbered streets in the north-central part of the city. The numbered streets in Baltimore do not begin with 1, but rather start with 20th Street just north of and parallel to North Avenue, the former northern boundary of the city, and what is viewed by many today is the northern boundary of Downtown Baltimore. The numbered streets, which go as high as 43rd Street, correspond with the first two digits in the addresses of the north–south streets they cross. Unlike in Washington, where the numbered streets run north–south, Baltimore's numbered streets run west–east. All begin their names with either "West" or "East," depending on which side of Charles Street the block is located.


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