Jim Burrill just alerted me to the fact that the City keeps a list of approved names for future streets (pdf) in Fort Collins. The list is a selection of 41 names of people who made some kind of impression in Fort Collins’ past.
Getting on or off the list takes a vote of City Council. That’s especially interesting for Jim since he has a relative on the list whose name is misspelled.
It’s a long list, and some characters are kind of hard to get excited about, at least as described in the document. Like J.A.C Kissock who “checked and audited city books” and was known as the “father of Fort Collins sewer system.”
Other names seem more colorful, like Pappy Spencer: ”Prospector and burro wrangler who kept his burros at Elizabeth and Overland Trail.”
But honestly, I prefer street names that mean something.
Lemay was once “Hospital Road.” That just makes sense.
The forgettable SummitView Road used to be “3 Silos” because there were, you guessed it, 3 silos there.
And you know what became of the man who built the three silos? Franklin Pierce Rudolph? He’s now slated to have a street named after him.
Postscript
For more street fun, go see Kip W’s Flickr page. He’s got some great 1970s photos and some 1960s planning maps. Maybe you can find your street.
Fort Collins 1979, from Kip W
Lemay is actually a combination of two (partial) names that if I remember correctly were developers. I’ll have to look into this as I forget the story.
Apparently the street was known as Hospital Road but was never officially named. You can pull up the City resolution declaring the change, which was done in December of 1961.
It was the Tiley family, May and her husband’s name escapes me right now. They developed “South College Heights”, streets like Rutgers, Columbia and Yale.
Pappy Spence, wasn’t it? That’s how I always heard it. My school bus went by the acres of donkeys every day for some of my years, and I once made a friend turn his head and then give me a dirty look by exclaiming “Look at that ass!” as we went by.
Kip, I asked Norm and he remembers it as Spence too. So that’s two misspelled names on the list!
Developer street names never cease to amaze and amuse me. When I lived in Georgia, the subdivision streets had hoity-toity names like Avensong Drive, Roswell Pointe, and one of my favorites, Dressage Road. Get out of the subdivisions and you’ll find names like Hardscrabble Road and, or course, the ever famous Peachtree.
My favorite set of names was the subdivision on South College with streets named for the planets and all — Saturn Drive, Venus Drive, whatever. Now I’m even blanking on the name of the development. Milky Way Estates? They moved the Red Cross office out there, after years of having it in the Avery Block (along with Frank Avery’s office, which never had anybody go in or out of it in all the times I was there). I think I heard someone say they finally changed the names, which is a pity, if true.
When we lived in Newport News, Virginia, we found a major road called Mercury, which was named for the Mercury astronauts, who trained at the NASA base in Hampton. To me, it was a pleasant echo from a different past.
Montezuma Fuller is off the list? But some water commissioner is on it? Something’s wrong. It’s sort of neat to see Phyllis Mattingly on there, though. I wonder if David knows about that. When I talk about my youth in the children’s theater, it’s because of Phyllis and her Helen Mary Greene Theatre, named for her mom. I was at their house once and saw a wind-up prototype for the Water-Pik. It’s possible I met John, but I have no recollection of it — he was a shadowy figure, possibly working in his basement office, possibly somewhere else entirely.
Kip–Montezuma was used this year: http://lostfortcollins.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/fuller-alley.jpg?w=193&h=151
Phyllis Mattingly? Wasn’t she the woman who did handwriting analysis? Cool!
Thanks, Cat. I didn’t think of that until I’d posted.
Barb, Phyllis was strongly interested in handwriting analysis. Oddly enough, I picked up one of those tiny checkout-counter books on the subject and gave it to David as part of his birthday present one year, and a while later, his mom was interested in the subject. I sometimes wondered if there was any connection there.
She was the “Welcome Lady” when we moved to town in 1959, which made her the first person we met there that we hadn’t already known from California (probably), and made David the first kid I met. He would have been about three, and I was not quite that old.
Following up after getting information, Lee Everitt (of the Everitt fame) + May Tiley = Lemay Avenue.
Apparently the reason Hospital Road was pushed to be changed involves a story of a doctor buying a house in a subdivision and when he sent out Xmas cards with Hospital Road as his address, people assumed he was sick.
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