The Corner Of Harvard And Yale

The most common street name in the United States is ...?

Second Street.

At least according to Sheldon on "The Big Bang Theory," though TigerBlog can't remember which episode that was.

Last night, one of the great episodes of TBBT was on, the one where Penny gets mad at Leonard because she can no longer go out with dumb guys, like the one who thought that the laser they were using might blow up the moon, and where Raj and Howard create an on-line dating profile for Sheldon, which spits back Amy Farrah Fowler, who says, among other things, that she is fine with the idea of a deity but "objects to one who takes attendance."

Ah, but TB digresses.

Meanwhile, back at common street names, a quick search indicates that Sheldon was in fact correct. The most common street name is Second Street.

TB would have guessed Main Street, but that doesn't pop up until seventh on the list.

The only street number that matches up with its number on the list is Fourth Street, as it goes Second in first, Third in second and First in third. That has a very Abbott-and-Costelloish ring to it.

Fourth is fourth, followed by Park, Fifth, Main, Sixth, Oak and Seventh in the Top 10.

The next 10 goes Pine, Maple, Cedar, Eighth, Elm, View, Washington, Ninth and Lake.

TB's Aunt Edie once gave him directions to her office in Manhattan where he was going to meet her for lunch and said it was at the intersection of "Walk and Don't Walk." It took him a few minutes to figure out what she meant by that.

Then again, Aunt Edie is now 84 years old and the last time TB spoke to her, she told him a joke that started out with: "a guy opened a bar underneath a whorehouse ..."

Ah, more digression.

TigerBlog is surprised that so many street names near the top of the list are named for trees.

He's even more surprised that none are named for colleges. Well, Washington is a college, but that's not why Washington Street is so popular. The same is true for Elm College.

A cursory attempt to do a search for streets named for colleges came up fairly empty. If he had to guess which college has more streets named after it than any other, though, he'd go with, well, he's not sure.

TB grew up in a neighborhood where the main road was Old Queens Boulevard, named for Rutgers. There were also streets named Georgetown and Cornell and Villanova, as well as Oxford and Cambridge.

TB was in a neighborhood the other day where the streets were all named for colleges, and he felt obliged to stop at the intersection of Harvard Circle and Yale Terrace and take a picture.

Then he wondered if any self-respecting Princeton fan/alum/student/professor/worker could ever live on either one of those streets.

Seriously.

Could you imagine having to give directions to all of your friends who were coming over for a Reunions event? "Yeah, it's the house on the corner of Harvard and Yale."

What if you were a coach? Can any Princeton coach ever say that they live on Harvard or Yale Street?

And would this go into the whole house shopping venture?

Finding the right house is hard enough. What if you found the perfect one, with just the right number of  bedrooms, great lighting, a perfect sized yard, affordable taxes, great schools - all of it? And you couldn't find any other house anywhere else that measured up.

Except it was on Harvard Street or Yale Street. Or at the intersection of both.

TB couldn't do it.

It's bad enough that he went to Penn.