or The Mystery of the Missing Street
© KENNETH E. HALL DECEMBER 10, 2018 HOUSTON
Back in the early 1950's, my uncle and aunt moved from the Panamá Canal Zone to our Nation's Capital, Washington, D.C. to work for the USIS. I still have the envelope in which my Aunt Marie told my grandmother about their new home town, etc. One day as I looked at the back of the envelope, I noticed something funny: her address was "EYE" Street, NW.
Now that street name would perhaps not been noticed by anyone else, even though it was a somewhat peculiar name, but I was nonplussed. I had lived for several years in D.C., and also in Arlington, VA, and in all that time, I never ever heard of anything like "Eye Street". So, I did what I thought was the right thing - I looked it up on a city map, but to my further bewilderment, I couldn't find any street in the District that even remotely resembled "EYE St.".So where in the world did my aunt and uncle live in DC, I wondered.
I thought about novels I have read, and about the all-seeing EYE of Providence that was on the $1.00 bill. I could imagine it glowing a piercing shade of emerald green, perched atop a great pyramid at the head of that very street...EYE STREET!
Later on, while driving (I quite often think about oddball things while driving!) again I pondered my relatives' bizarre address. Washington, D.C. is a well-planned city. All talk about Masonic triangulations and vast Illuminati conspiracies aside, the city is well laid-out. l'Enfant did his job well. Anyone who has lived in or visited cities such as San Antonio, TX or New Orleans can greatly appreciate how relatively easy it is to find an address in the District of Columbia. One way, the streets are numbered - consecutively. Another way the streets have letters - A,B,C,D and so forth. The main exception is that quite a number of streets are named after states.
There are no oddball, unpronounceable words to baffle and bamboozle even the seasoned local, things in D.C. are straightforward and easy to understand. I lived at 710 19th Street NW. Were I to give this address to any local cabbie, or any Washingtonian for that matter, they would know EXACTLY where I lived! They knew that I lived on 19th Street near "G" street. Simple. Take it from me - I used to get lost in cities - - - but NEVER EVER in D.C.
So I pondered this "Eye" street address and suddenly it dawned on me: she meant "I" street! That was only two streets down from where we had lived in 1960!! I chuckled to myself, thinking that poor Aunt Marie - she was moving from Panamá and heard "I" and just wrote out the word "Eye"! I bet she had a laugh when she eventually discovered her mistake.
But my Aunt Marie wasn't by ANY means alone in this "Eye" for an "I" substitution. Apparently even locals have been guilty of writing it wrong. It gets better: some businesses and buildings even write "I" as "Eye" to avoid confusion with 1 (one) street.
I wondered what the U.S. Post Office did over the years with envelopes addressed to "Eye St." addresses. A Washington Post article published a comment by the Postmaster who said:
“[There] is hardly a letter in the alphabet which a careless writer is not able to make appear like some other letter, and he generally succeeds,” W.H. Haycock, superintendent of delivery, told The Post.
[ I can attest to that fact! NO college student has ever graduated without first having been able to morph any given letter into another - either willingly or as an embarassing typo boldly appearing and going undetected on the first page of a thesis!]
Moreover, THERE IS NO "J" STREET in D.C !! The reason? "J" looks something like an "I". When in Germany, I had trouble with this, because the way these letters appear, they do look alike. It would also be confused with the letter l (L) which also looks exactly like the number 1. (1 - l) See what I mean? I suppose while they were designing the city they could have had a J street anyway, even if only for purposes of consistancy, and just call the doggone street "Jay" and be done with it. Right, they COULD have done that, but that would have been too simple.
They could have said it was named after John Jay, the first Supreme Court Justice of the United States, or after the Blue Jay, and we'd all have been happy as a Jay bird. As it turns out, where "J" street is is for the locals to know and the out-of-towners to find out. Truth is, there really IS a "JAY" street NE and it runs through the Deanwood neighborhood. It is not associated with the rest of the alphabetized streets in DC.
I can just imagine a situation in which a visiting man is looking to pick up a girl who does not care to be picked up. He asks for her address, and she writes down 1234 J St. NW. The guy walks away fat, dumb, and happy thinking he has a date, and then goes nuts looking for the place later. Imagine him walking up and down the cross street - LITERALLY "J-Walking"! That'll teach him!
Finally, although I do not know why, there are no X,Y, or Z streets in DC. Guess they ran out of space.
I quote here from a Post Article, the link appears below:
"Not everyone has found this amusing. In 1908, The Post published an article quoting residents who thought the practice was kind of cheesy. Not only were people using “Eye” Street, they were also referring to U Street as “You” Street. Wrote The Post: “The name of the optic and of the second person of the pronoun have almost superseded the use of the proper names of these streets. The custom, if it makes progress as to result in the use of words for the letters on street signs, will subject the Capital to the ridicule of visitors, say the opponents of the fad, for its provincialism.”
I am a man of words, and can think of many words to use when it comes to describe Washington's present-day residents, but "provincial" would not be in the top 20,000!
NOTE: The city of Galevston, Texas has letter avenues, too. So how do they address the issue of "I", "J", and "U" avenues? Simple: There are NO such streets - No I, no J, no U - no problem. BUT they do have HALF avenues: O½ Ave. being my personal favorite.
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Here is the link to a Washington Post article I found:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/looking-for-eye-street-answer-man-is-here-to-give-you-directions/2013/10/12/5c1e42b0-31c2-11e3-8627-c5d7de0a046b_story.html?utm_term=.2017824f8817
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