A midcentury street naming convention draws a ‘mental GPS’ across the Twin Cities east metro

The newest housing development in the quickly growing suburb of Lake Elmo needed a name for one of its new streets, but it couldn’t be just anything: there’s a system.

The system calls for streets in Lake Elmo to start with the letter K. So the new street became Knightsbridge. Nearby are streets called Kokanee, Kirkwood, Kindred and Kimbro.

Over in Oakdale, many of the streets begin with the letter G, H or I. In Afton, it’s P.

Since the 1960s, street names in many places throughout Washington County have been designated based on their relative distance from the State Capitol and Interstate 94, by alphabet and number. Once understood, the system can tell you where you’re standing relative to other neighborhoods, or make it easier to find an address you’ve never been to before, said Lake Elmo Assistant Fire Chief Anthony Svoboda.

“The grid system works like a mental GPS,” he said.

It’s proven so vital for public safety purposes that Lake Elmo has gone back to using the decades-old system for its newest neighborhood, the North Star Homes development at Lake Elmo Avenue N. and Stillwater Boulevard N. There, new homes are rising along Knightsbridge Trail and 37th Street N., names chosen to conform to the 57-year-old street naming conventions.

Some developers were allowed to devise their own street names over the past few years, Svoboda said, but lately there’s been a push to go back to the original system.

“We’re kind of back in line with ‘Let’s just stick with the plan,’” he said.

That plan was created at the dawn of the suburban age, when planners were anticipating a wave of development spreading east from St. Paul to the St. Croix River. Back then, the Washington County Planning Advisory Commission spent five years in collaboration with the U.S. Post Office and local officials to create a set of rules for naming new streets.

The rules were not mandatory.

Some cities, like Woodbury, largely opted out, but many others followed it, creating entire neighborhoods where every street begins with the same letter.

The street naming conventions were meant to make things more understandable, the advisory commission wrote.

“In many parts of the metropolitan area, duplicated or confusing street names lessen the efficiency of everyday life,” the planners wrote in their manual. “For example, mail intended for delivery to a person in Cottage Grove may be sent to an identical address in St. Paul by mistake, due to duplication of addresses.”

Using the State Capitol as the starting point, the main county roads that run north-south are designated as avenues with Avenue A at the capitol. Add one mile for each letter and it takes 8 miles to get to Inwood, or 10 miles to Keats, or 12 to Manning, all of them “Avenue North.”

That means if you’re standing on Neal Avenue N., you’re about 13 miles east of the capitol. The measurements work between the avenues as well, meaning it’s 3 miles from Neal Avenue N. to Keats Avenue N.

The main east-west roadways, meanwhile, were designated as “streets” and numbered according to their distance north or south of Interstate 94. Tenth Street S. is 1 mile south of the freeway, 30th Street S. is 3 miles and 90th Street S. is 9 miles.

The numbering system works for streets between the mile markers as well, with 27th Street N. in Lake Elmo about 2.7 miles north of 94.

Even more nuanced was the designation of “boulevards” and “roads”: the former are streets running northeast to southwest and the latter are streets running northwest to southeast. Meandering routes were to be called “Trails.”

Some exceptions were made for streets with historic significance, like Military Road.

The system works so well that Oakdale Police Capt. Ryan Stuart calls it “crucial.”

An Oakdale police officer responding to an incident will know where the address is within a one-block radius without any challenge, Stuart said. For younger recruits, especially, who grew up with GPS and might not have as strong a sense of the compass points, the county’s naming convention makes it possible for police officers to quickly orient themselves, he said.

The naming convention means that Oakdale gets mostly G, H, and I streets. To avoid running out of G street names, some neighborhoods will have multiple streets with the same name but different suffixes.

If someone in Oakdale invites you to their home on Gresham, for example, you’ll need to know if it’s Gresham Avenue, Place, Way, Circle, or Court.

Still, the code isn’t widely known, even to longtime residents.

Afton Mayor Bill Palmquist said he wasn’t aware that Afton’s “P” streets — there’s Pike and Perrot and Pennington, among others — were named according to the county plan.

His gripe: the city has a 34th Street and an Upper 34th Street, both of them interrupted by a steep hill.

Delivery drivers sometimes end up on the wrong side of that break, and Palmquist said he and his neighbors have to deliver the bad news: “You’re nowhere near there.”