The Stravenue

The Stravenue

Jodie had it right:  Tucson's weird.  In so many ways...but Stravenue?

Our own created nomenclature, used only here.

Stravenue.

Can you imagine sitting around and thinking, "we need a new name for that paved thing you drive cars on.  I know, let's call it a Stravenue.  Hell, I'll bet no one else will call it that."

Yup.

According to Arizona Highways:

The Old Pueblo, like Phoenix, is mostly laid out in a grid, with the vast majority of streets running either north-south or east-west. But in both cities, there are outliers. In Phoenix, Grand Avenue, a stretch of U.S. Route 60, is the most well-known diagonal street.

But Tucson gave birth to a whole new type of road. As Atlas Obscura noted recently, it started in the 1940s, with Cherrybell Stravenue — a portmanteau of "street" and "avenue." Cherrybell is only a half-mile long, but it runs diagonally, whereas most of Tucson's north-south roads are avenues and most of its east-west roads are streets.

The local Uniform Naming and Numbering Committee agreed that "Stravenue" was the best halfway point between the two designations. Soon, there were about 30 stravenues in Tucson.