THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601210044
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By MAC DANIEL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
There's Willow Oak Drive, Willow Oak Way, Willow Oak Road East and Willow Oak Grove West. And that's all in one new Chesapeake subdivision.
The city has at least 20 streets named Meadow-something, 19 named Pine-something and 10 named Oak-something.
You would think that similar-sounding street names within Chesapeake's 353 square miles could be avoided.
But in a city where pastorally named developments sprout faster than crabgrass, confusing street names are becoming the norm.
To make matters worse, Chesapeake uses the same series of house numbers for parallel streets - streets which sometimes have almost identical names.
The problem has affected a number of homeowners in the city, resulting in misdirected mail, unwanted pizza deliveries and a host of other suburban woes.
Chesapeake's former postmaster asked city staff and developers for some cooperation in making addresses more distinct.
But before things could get going, the postmaster left his job and Chesapeake City Manager James W. Rein was fired.
Chesapeake officials, the new postmaster, public safety officials and developers are now forming a task force to tackle the problem.
The task force has yet to meet, but the ball is rolling, according to city staff members.
If they need inspiration, they need look no farther than City Hall itself. An employee in the city manager's office lives on Wild Duck Circle. Nearby is Wild Duck Crossing.
Since the standard abbreviation for both circle and crossing is Cr., and because her home on Wild Duck Circle shared the same house number with one on Wild Duck Crossing, things tended to get fouled up.
Once, when the family was getting their home appraised, the appraiser took pictures of the other house.
Pizza and packages were often delivered to the wrong home. The two families frequently exchanged mail and eventually became friends as a result of the glitch, said the city official, who asked that her name not be used.
``It was a mess,'' she said. ``We thought about changing the street name, and we needed to choose a bird name. But it seemed as if every bird name was already used as a street name in Chesapeake.
``After a lot of research, the only ones left were, I think, Flamingo and Coot,'' she said. ``And I didn't want to live on Coot Circle.''
As for delivering the mail, forget about it. Just ask mail carrier Ray Evans, who works out of the Postal Service's Deep Creek office.
``It can be confusing,'' he said. ``All someone has to do is leave off a `court' or a `lane' on the address, and you're lost.''
In Chesapeake, mail carriers have often found themselves wandering in circles. There have been problems with delivering mail to Featherbed Court and Drive, Whitehaven Crescent or Court, and Lampost Drive or Court. And that, again, is in the same subdivision.
So far, the problem does not seem to have affected fire and police, who use an advanced 911 system that relays the caller's exact home address, according to Chesapeake Police Capt. Edward White.
The city's subdivision ordinance prohibits the exact duplication of street names, according to city planner Karen Shaffer.
``Whenever we get a proposed street name from a developer, we enter it into our street database to make sure it has not already been used,'' she said.
Only identical street names are rejected. Like-sounding street names, however, can be used.
``Naming streets is always an unenviable task, to say the least,'' said Bill Darden, marketing director for the Hearndon Construction Company of Virginia Beach, one of Chesapeake's longtime developers.
``You try to correlate some kind of theme when you build a community. It presents a cohesive identity.''
But along Cedar Road near Deep Creek, developers are running into problems.
``You try to use `cedar' in the name of your community, and it naturally follows that the names of the streets should have a similar identity,'' said Darden. ``But then you find out that everyone is doing this.''
The engineers designing the developments usually are the first to name the streets. And as far as Darden can tell, there are still plenty of options out there. The muse for new names, however, comes from a bevy of sometimes weird sources.
``What I try to do is look at communities in other parts of the country and world sometimes to come up with names of subdivisions,'' said Darden, who also admitted to naming some local streets after famous basketball players. ``But you really end up, in a way, putting all these names in a box and shaking them up. Basically, that's what we do.''
``It's a problem for us,'' he added. ``It's hard to be original. We try to be creative all the time.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot
In many of the city's suburbs, the same name takes many forms, as
the challenge to find creative names increases.
by CNB