Seeing double in quest to map Boston's roads

Repeated names defy 21st-century navigators

Bowdoin Street sits just a few blocks from Beacon Hill, not far from the city's gold domed State House and some of Boston's toniest zip codes. A different Bowdoin Street crosses the heart of Dorchester, six miles away in a neighborhood plagued by gun violence.

Same name. Different locations. Nothing new in Boston.

Nearly 200 Boston street names are repeated elsewhere in the city. An address of 10 Cedar St. can bring you to locations in Charlestown, or several miles south in Mattapan and Roxbury. One Marion Ave.? Look for it in East Boston, Roslindale, and Hyde Park.

If you find this confusing or irritating, you're forgiven. Navigating Boston's streets even confounds David Cobb, curator of maps at Harvard University, one of the editors of the book "Mapping Boston."

Cobb said he travels mostly, if not entirely, by T to avoid navigating Boston's baffling streets.

"I've always thought of it as a pure nightmare," Cobb said. "And I'm a native New Englander."

Such issues may be a fact of life in a city that is a collection of provincial neighborhoods connected by winding roads that were once cow paths and horse and buggy routes. The city also is a product of villages it absorbed over centuries.

Yet a quirk in the nomenclature can also be a public-safety hindrance, as it was last week, when Boston police officers ended up at the wrong address of a fatal stabbing. A dispatcher sent officers to 689 Washington St. downtown, instead of to the same address in Dorchester, causing police to arrive 14 minutes after the initial call for help. While the victim had already been dead for several hours, the incident highlighted the confusion caused by multiple locations of identically named streets.

City police have now said they will respond to all matching addresses. But no one in city government, including Boston Transportation Commissioner Thomas J. Tinlin, has called for rewriting the map.

"One tragic event doesn't mean there's a duplicate name problem," Tinlin said last week. "If we thought for a second it was a problem, it's something we would engage in [changing]."

City Councilor John Tobin said Boston residents "just learn how to adapt." His mother grew up on La Grange Street in leafy West Roxbury, not the La Grange Street in the city's old "Combat Zone."

"I tell people my mother grew up on La Grange Street, and people step back from you," he said.

Tinlin said he has received no complaints about street names in his 13 years on the job. People who want a street name changed can apply for an official name change through the city's Public Improvement Commission. That involves getting an application and scheduling a hearing to determine whether neighbors and others who work on the street support the change. Tinlin was unsure how many people apply for street name changes annually, but suspected it was a small number.

"You have certain streets with the same names, streets cross through multiple areas. You have your Shawmuts, your Tremonts, your Bowdoins," he said. "It's a fact of life in older cities."

Dozens of streets in Atlanta - founded 207 years after Boston in 1837 - refer to "peachtree," and that can cause confusion, said Mark McKinnon, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Transportation. But there is only one "Peachtree Road," one "Peachtree Avenue," one "Peachtree Circle," and so on, he said. Peachtree Street, one of the city's main drags, begins as Peachtree Road NE before becoming Peachtree Street NW and splitting into Peachtree Street NE and West Peachtree Street NW.

Boston's Washington Street, by comparison, exists separately in downtown Boston, Dorchester, Charlestown, Hyde Park, and Brighton. In Colonial times, most if not all of those neighborhoods were villages that surrounded Boston proper.

Back then, the Washington Street that stretches from downtown Boston into the South End existed as Cornhill Street, Marlborough Street, Newbury Street, and Orange Street until a visit by George Washington prompted city officials to rename it. The only problem, Harvard's Cobb said, is that other villages did not change roads that were already dubbed Washington Street.

"Everybody had a Washington Street of their own, and they weren't going to give it up. And they haven't," Cobb said.

Dennis Frenchman, chairman of the planning department at MIT, said he thinks technology, in the form of Global Positioning Systems, "will save us" from the frustration city streets evoke. "When everyone has GPS, what difference does it make?" he asked.

But whoever programs the GPS software will need a nuanced understanding of the street landscape. Plug 689 Washington St., Boston, into MapQuest, and the downtown address will pop up, not the ones in Dorchester or Brighton. To get directions to either of those destinations, a person must enter Dorchester or Brighton in the box reserved for a city's name.

Chris Zegras, an MIT professor of transportation and urban planning, said city residents take satisfaction, even pride, in conquering the logistical dilemmas.

"Doesn't that go with the Boston persona and the New England persona?" Zegras asked. "We're hard to crack open. We're cold and stand-offish and complex. But once you get to know us, we're kind of interesting."

Nancy Miller, who lives in a white ranch house at 158 Bowdoin St. - in Dorchester - said she occasionally gets mail late as a result of the confusion, but that it was no big deal.

"You think people on Beacon Hill are going to change the name?" she scoffed on a recent morning while cleaning her car outside the house. "Dorchester sure isn't."