This past Saturday afternoon, as I write this, I was traveling with some friends of mine to watch the webcast for church at the home of a friend where we later played pinochle after sunset. On our way to the home of the friend, we passed by 17th Street South, and the sight of the rows of suburban tract houses on small yards prompted the other people in the vehicle I was with to wax nostalgic about the times when the subdivision we saw was a farm. This is a common sort of lament, I must admit. I myself remember times visiting the area outside of Irwin where my father and his closest relatives had lived and saw a farm I remember from my childhood turned into a subdivision. I remember having asked my father what happened and he commented that as so often happens, the heirs of the family farm could not agree on what to do with it, and so the land was sold to be developed. It is a common fate for family farms, it must be admitted.

It was notable to me in looking at the area that 17th Street is only a bit more than a mile south of the center of town. Generally speaking, in the United States, there are sixteen blocks to a mile, and where streets are numbered, as they often are, they roughly pattern this distribution. To have the edge of housing in a city where there used to be farms only 17 streets south of the main drag through town means that the city only extends barely over a mile south of its center. This is not a very large city, it must be admitted, at least in terms of area, and given the low-density housing that one sees in the town, it means that the population of the town is pretty small, which is borne out by the statistics one could see in looking at the town, for those who are curious. It is, nonetheless, a town I know well, and one I have often visited over the course of my time in Oregon, for a variety of reasons.

It has long been interesting to me to see the influence that cities have over the areas surrounding them. I live, for example, near a 3 digit number avenue that is numbered from the city of Portland to its west, even though I live in the next county to the west of Portland. A few years ago, shortly after annexing large amounts of territory near me, the county seat of Hillsboro started in at least some of the cases to rename roads to reflect its own numbering pattern rather than that of Portland, which has been admittedly interesting to see. I am unfamiliar if this is a common technique used to make an area show its importance as a suburb, as there are plenty of places in Gresham, another suburb of Portland, on its east side, where the numbers of the streets increase as they go east on that side of the city, while other streets closer to the core of Gresham reflect its own numbering and lettering patterns and naming conventions. 

The usual pattern, near as I can determine it, is that in many cases, the naming pattern of a large city goes out in all directions until it meets up with a rival numbering system, including all of the unincorporated farmland and pastureland in between. This is all well and good for increasing the status of a larger community in an area, but it can make for problems when other towns grow around it, swallowing up land that has already been claimed by a larger city that was not able to annex all of the land that was numbered according to its own dimensions. It is certainly awkward to know that one is ten miles or so from the center of another city when you live within the boundaries of another city, one of no mean size (both Hillsboro and Gresham are more than 100,000 people, not insignificant for suburbs of Portland, and Beaverton, which appears to have no numbering convention of its own, being completely included within Portland’s westbound numbering, is itself near 100,000 people in population).

The numbering of streets is a reflection of some sort of reality on the ground, and it is interesting to note that this numbering can either lead to a sense of nostalgia or one of confusion. In cases where a larger city of the Portland or Portcouver (a loving nickname I have for Vancouver, Washington, the largest of Portland’s suburbs, at over 150,000 people, directly across the Columbia River from Portland and the county seat of Clark County, Washington) has numbered hundreds of streets or avenues that have in some cases been swallowed up by other neighboring cities, the numbering pattern can seem a bit puzzling unless one realizes that the annexations are relatively new and the city has not gotten around to renaming roads according to its own conventions. Some cities never get around to that task, considering that people and business names may be attached to old names and may find it confusing to adopt new ones, even if it leads to a crashing grid within the city’s geography. On the other hand, at other times the sight of seeing areas turn from unclaimed farmland to city streets filled with houses and numbered like other parts of the town can be a reminder of urban sprawl and fill people who knew the previous uses of the land with a sense of nostalgia about a simpler time when there were fewer people living in the area, and life was less crowded and filled with more open spaces to drive and run freely.