THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Saturday, October 15, 1994             TAG: 9410150011
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A13  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Opinion 
SOURCE: George Hebert 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   44 lines

GETTING LOST IS EASY

With everything so close together and so many good resources handy, you'd think that keeping urban geography straight - as in maps and street signs - would be a simple proposition.

Occasionally maps of the wide-open areas of the country prove to be a bit sketchy or not quite in line with reality - and the chart-makers may be forgiven since they've so much scattered detail and highway change to draw.

But in old, built-up areas? Shouldn't accurancy be easier?

One recent puzzler was an odd omission on a standard commercial map of lower Hampton Roads.

One day not so long ago, I needed to find Park Avenue in the old South Norfolk section of Chesapeake in order to reach another street nearby. This Park Avenue is a considerable thoroughfare as I have since found out. But the street index on the map I consulted had only one Park Avenue in the region and that was in Norfolk. Ultimately, by driving I found the one in Chesapeake, prominent as all get out. And sure enough, it was on the map itself and well-labeled - despite its strange absence from the index.

Not long ago, I was traveling on a street in Norfolk that crossed venerable Omohundro Avenue. And there confronting me was was one of the standard, neatly framed metal signs on a pole, a sign that boldly spelled the avenue ``Omahundro.'' True enough, I have checked since, and the misspelling has disappeared. It was Omohundro everywhere I looked.

Not so good, however, has been the persistence of one of the signs along Diven Street, also in Norfolk - one near the south end that adds an ``s'' to make it ``Divens Street.'' Incidentally, the map I referred to earlier has this one right.

I originally intended to comment that it's easy enough to get lost on our jumbled thoroughfares without any little bits of professional misguidance.

Instead, it looks like my point will have to be this:

Oh, well. I guess we all make mistakes. MEMO: Mr. Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. by CNB