‘A Street’ by Any Other Name Would Sound Better

Oxnard is about to hire a sign consultant. As near as I can make out, this is a person who gives (actually sells) expert advice on the design and deployment of street signs.

It occurs to me that if the city is about to invest in new street signage, this would be a propitious time to change the names of some of the streets in Oxnard’s urban core.

The identity of Oxnard’s Original Sign Consultant (OSC) is, mercifully, obscured in history. I speak of the person who, upon first learning the alphabet, graced the city with his newfound erudition and named a street A Street. When it became apparent that no one was about to argue that A Street was not a street, the sign consultant was emboldened to name the next street B Street. Then came C Street. And so it went as the city proceeded inexorably westward in more or less alphabetical progression.

Although some find it curious that no alphabetical street name in Oxnard goes beyond N, there are two possible explanations. One that has been discounted by recent scholars is that the OSC had learned the alphabet only though the letter N. The more widely held theory is that the OSC had failed to reckon that as the city spread westward it would encounter the Pacific Ocean well before there would be a street named Z.

With arrival of the New Sign Consultant, Oxnard has its nose pressed against a narrow window of opportunity. The tedious letters of the alphabet can give way to more inspirational street names. Moreover, alphabetical sequencing need not be sacrificed. Those who know their ABCs in order need never be disoriented.

Maintaining alphabetical integrity is easy, at least through the letter C. In cities all over America there are streets named for presidents: Adams, Buchanan, Coolidge; for trees: Alder, Birch, Cedar; and fruit: Apple, Berry, Citrus. Poor indeed is the city, town, village or hamlet without a Main Street.

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For Oxnard, here is a one-time-only opportunity to flaunt its cultural sophistication. How many cities in America name their streets in celebration of poets? Not many, I dare say. Indeed, Oxnard does have an Arnold Road, an Emerson Avenue and a Longfellow Way. But are these, respectively, Matthew, Ralph Waldo and Henry Wadsworth? I think not.

Be that as it may, with the arrival of the New Sign Consultant, Oxnard might want to consider this happy amalgam of gender, era, nationality and sexual orientation:

Zoe Akins, Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Dryden, Euripides, Henry Fielding, Thomas Gray, Robert Herrick, Christopher Isherwood, Ben Jonson, John Keats, Emma Lazarus, John Milton, Alfred Noyes.

Or maybe you have a better idea.