The Pecan Park Eagle

The 6600 Block of Japonica Street in Pecan Park, Heading West toward the Sandlot on Right and Myrtle Street Intersection, You Also Have to Pass Where I Grew Up at 6646 on the Left. Japonica was bunched in our East End Houston Neighborhood with Other Floral Street Names Like Kernel, Flowers, Linden, Narcissus, Ilex, Hemlock, and Moss Rose., At least, the names sounded distinctly unique from each other.

As a Houstonian, you probably have experienced the downside of one of our cute subdivision developer time bomb tricks that have been known to hatch upon the residents of certain neighborhoods on a regular basis forever. As a lifetime Houstonian, minus the first five years and three more from young adult years living elsewhere, it is my pet peeve that some of the cute similar-sounding names of more than a few areas almost always guarantee an ongoing issue with accurate mail delivery for area residents.

Eagle Field: The Sandlot, Japonica @ Myrtle, Houston.

There is a street named Wickchester in the Westwick Subdivision, very near Westchester and the major through street of Wilcrest. – You see where I’m going with this point? As residents of this general area, I couldn’t maintain a count on the number of times we have received mail intended for someone else on one of the several other like-sounding nearby streets when the only thing that fit us were the five accurate digits of the street address. The street name would be clearly indicated as one of those others I’ve mentioned here. Or worse, sometimes it would just be mail with the same address numbers intended for one one of the two dissimilar-sounding streets that parallel ours to the north.

After a while, close seems to get the cigar for US Mail delivery people in out neck of the woods.  And, after all these years, it would simply create new problems to re-name all the streets. The lesson seems to be: Get ’em right in the first place or prepare to live with the consequences forever.

My other favorite eccentricity of Houston street names, if you could even call these issues such, is the tendency of some long reaching Houston Houston cross-town streets to simply change names as they travel far enough north and south – or east and west. My favorite is Wirt Road in the Spring Branch area. Take it south and it becomes Voss Road on the south side of the Katy Freeway and then morphs into Hillcroft once you cross Wertheimer Road. As long as you know where you are going and have GPS, you won’t get lost.

Japonica @ Flowers. Some of these old markers go back to the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Where you may have trouble, if you don’t know the local territory, occurs when you stray to far off our prominent freeway travel system. You see, or as you may already have discovered, hundreds of Houston streets exist as disconnected pieces that cannot be traveled from their true starts to their true finishes without detouring to another area where the dead ending byway(?) in one neighborhood again continues in another form by the same name.

We used to have two major thoroughfares named “Buffalo Drive” and “Buffalo Speedway” and “Richmond Road” and “Richmond Avenue” and these situations both created the kind of problems that screamed for change. Things got better when Buffalo Drive was later renamed Allen Parkway in favor of our city’s founding fathers – and Richmond Road was re-named Bissonnet. (Hope I got the latter spelling right. I always have trouble with this name and which letters – s,n, or t – get the multiple appearance treatment.)

West University has always stood out as a nice example of theme-names-for-streets-gone-well. This classic Houston municipality neighborhood just west of Rice University has most or all of its streets named for various universities. It makes for good fitting residential ambience in the neighborhood near Houston’s educational and cultural museum center.

Other places in Houston  have intersections that come together with all the pizazz of a local “Hollywood and Vine.”  – without all the fame and notoriety. I’m thinking of the intersection that reads “Courageous” at “Fearless.” – Do those streets deserve a cross street connection with each other – or not.

Then again, Houston also has “Telephone Road,” a street that once served as the artery of growth for the city into the area that became its large East End suburbia of the post World War II years – and more recently held up as the title of a book and a few songs about the history and urban legends inspired by that famous title.

As some of you who follow Houston sports may have noted as recently as Sunday’s last season date, 23-22, NFL football loss by the Houston Texans to the locally despised Tennessee Titans, we don’t always get it right in Houston, but we keep trying.

To the bitter end, we try. And we never give up.

Go, Houston, Go! And make 2012 our best year ever! – And one with no more cute-sounding neighborhoods with cute same-sounding names, if you please.