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Who the Streets Are Named For

A. T. Andreas printed Chicago's street nomenclature in 1884, with the eponyms and the renamings. This is that list, cited — and it is not all of Chicago's streets.

Andreas thought the subject mattered, and said why.

“The study of street nomenclature is always an interesting one, not alone for the mementoes it presents of citizens, many of whom have ceased to be remembered, but who were intimately identified with its progress; but also for the indexes it affords to the idiosyncrasies of the civic potentates, to wit: the omission of Adams from the roll of Presidents in naming Chicago streets, and the expurgation of Tyler Street.”

He then argued for naming streets after something, rather than nothing: for a name “that has some relevance to the city’s history, and not designating thoroughfares by names that convey no meaning, annotate no history, neither recall any individual.” He was writing in 1884. Forty-four years later a chamber of commerce sold a widened Elston Avenue by opening with the same move, setting it beside the Appian Way, the Strand and Unter den Linden. Two of those three are Andreas’s own examples, used in 1884 to argue that a street name should mean something, and in 1928 to sell six per cent mortgage bonds.

The part that is not a curiosity

Five entries in this list carry a Native name or a Native referent, and Andreas records what happened to most of them in the same breath as the name itself. Mau-te-ne, after an Indian chief, became Langley Avenue, after Esther Langley. So-mo-nauk, after an Indian chief, became Ellis Avenue, after Samuel Ellis. Vincennes Road, also called Min-ne-mang Avenue after an Indian chief, became Vincennes Avenue. Waubansia Avenue and Black Hawk kept theirs.

That is the argument of this whole project appearing in a reference list: the naming-over is not asserted here, it is printed by the city’s own standard historian, in 1884, as ordinary municipal housekeeping. One other entry belongs beside them. Johnson Street, later Hoosier, was named, in Andreas’s words, after “Colonel Johnson who slew Tecumseh.”

The list 163 streets, 49 of them renamed

Every row is Andreas’s, transcribed from the held scan of the 1884 volume. Where he gives a later name, it is shown. Spelling is his.

Small things worth noticing

Two streets in the list are a married couple, and only the wife’s survived. Paulina is named for Paulina Edy Taylor, entered as the deceased wife of Reuben Taylor; Reuben was his, and it became Ashland Avenue. Cottage Grove Avenue is named, flatly, after a cottage that once stood there. Sloan honours a manufacturer of horse liniment. Selah was taken from the Hebrew word. And four entries are marked simply extinct: streets Andreas could name and no longer point to.

What this list is not

It is not all of Chicago’s streets, and saying so is the point of keeping it. Andreas was writing in 1884, when the city was a fraction of its present size, and he stopped where his own knowledge stopped: his section ends by admitting there are several streets “whose eponyms” he could not establish. Everything the city built, annexed or renamed afterwards is missing, and the largest single absence has a number on it. On 14 April and 30 July 1913 the City Council passed two ordinances that between them changed 567 street names, more than three times the whole of this list. The figure is the Chicago Examiner’s, of 16 August 1913.

Two absences worth naming. Astor Street appears once in this store’s entire corpus, as a mailing address in an 1891 handbook, and no source held here says whom it honours; the obvious answer is probably right and is still not a citation. And Wells Street is in the history rather than in this list: Chicago named it for William Wells, replaced the name with a number, and restored it only later.

The ordinance this store could not get

The 1913 ordinances are a municipal record and therefore public, and they are still not here. The Internet Archive holds 175 volumes of the Council’s proceedings and its run is missing part of 1913. The volume it does hold, number 71, was fetched for this section and read: it opens on Thursday 2 January 1913 and closes on 31 March with the Council adjourning to meet on Monday 14 April at half past seven in the evening. The ordinance was passed at that next meeting, in the volume that is not there. Searched for change the name, hereby changed and street name: none of them occurs.

The route in, recorded so nobody repeats the search, is the Chicago History Museum’s run of the Journal of the Proceedings of the City Council of Chicago, 1908–1963, or a library set of the printed volume. Until then this page carries the count and not the contents. There is a transcription of the changes on chicagology.com, and it is another author’s arrangement of the record, so it is cited here rather than copied.

Source: A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago, Volume I (1884), the section headed Street Nomenclature, held in full in the research store and searchable there. Read the naming argument it belongs to in The plant, and the name and The name, still spoken.