Did you grow up in a blank space called Colonial Terrace ? Lawndale ? Hawthorne Grove ? Then you might want to thank Stanley L. McMichael . In his 1949 bookReal Estate Subdivisions , the real acres guru occupy all the guesswork out of naming newfangled suburban streets , providing a supersafe and hypersanitized vanilla tilt of choice for next subdivision names .
Several pages in the playscript ’s appendix are devoted to this inspirational card , which includes 750 likely gens “ indicate for subdivisions by operators throughout the country , as reported in the National Real Estate Journal . ”
Yep , it ’s a guidebook to choosing a baby name for a new street or entire neighborhood , one not inspired by local history or clime — or by any naturally occurring landforms — but crowdsourced from the penetration of “ operators . ”
As bizarre as many of the names are — Electric Highway Park?—it ’s obvious that many developer took the advice of the National Real Estate Journal to heart . Just looking at the list , I palpate right back home in my suburban St. Louis subdivision ( name Templeton Place ) . It ’s amazing how many of these name I can figure clearly as neighborhoods and streets near where I live .
This list is over 60 eld old , but appoint branch ( and trapping development , and condo towers ) is still tough work , even though it ’s a picayune dissimilar , consort tothis article in the Chicago Tribune . developer now need names that make their property see high - class yet accessible , though they are more likely to make them as unparalleled as possible :
For example , would you bribe a theatre in a subdivision call Belle Maison ?
Hmmm . Sounds French . Frilly ? Overdone ? ostentatious ?
Tom Bruce , division manager in Charlotte , N.C. , for UDC Homes , proscribe Belle Maison as a name for an upscale subsection UDC open up last year . alternatively , the name became Providence Arbours .
Providence Arbours ? That sounds English . Traditional . tree . ( And it has been a strong seller for UDC . )
Nowadays , you might also want your subdivision not to be deplume out of a book , so it could be somewhat Googleable . Hence the Arbours .
Today we also have knife - in - cheek tools like theReal Estate Subdivision Name Generator , which can create as many as 20 clean names for speculative subdivision at once . It also has an option to generate damaging name — like Repellent Desert .
And there are also some regional seek to poke fun at the fatuousness , likethis generator for suburban Denverthat bring about fancy Western - work name like The Homestead at Buffalo Canyon Landing that do not find so far from reality at all .
To me , this leaning signify where we fit haywire . As if carbon paper - imitate our firm in affected clump was n’t bad enough , we named our neighborhoods — our homes!—from a pathfinder in a book ?
It validates the quest for uniformity that seemed to diffuse our mid - 100 mindset , this melodic theme of pasting an artificial name on an artificial blank space . There ’s a Woodcrest in every city in America , I count . And they all appear just the same . [ h / tMark Vallianatos ]
urbanism
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