Recently, I was driving to LaGuardia Airport to pick up a child who was coming home from college, when I somehow found myself heading south toward Union Turnpike, instead.
At the very next interchange I got out, turned myself around, and soon found myself…heading back to “Eastern Long Island.”
It took me another two tries before I actually made it to the airport.
I felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, when she tries to walk up a hill, away from a house, and keeps finding herself walking in the front door, instead.
“‘Oh, it’s too bad!’ she cried. ‘I never saw such a house for getting in the way! Never!’”
In my case, I never saw roads so determined to confuse me.
Is there any other explanation for why the Northern State stays resolutely to the south of the LIE, for so much of its length?
Or for why the road which runs along the western shore of Manhasset Bay, in Great Neck, is called East Shore Road, whereas the one in a similar location in Port Washington is called West Shore Road?
Add to all this confusion the fact that West Shore Road is therefore to the east of East Shore Road, and you can join me in realizing that this problem, whatever it is, is bigger than me.
It gets worse whenever I’m driving in Queens.
No matter which expressway I want, be it the Clearview or the Cross Island, I somehow always end up on the other one.
“But I wanted the one with the gorgeous view!” I wailed at my husband, who was trying to guide me from home through my hands-free phone connection. “You know, the one with all the pretty boats in Little Neck Bay!”
“That’s the Cross-Island,” he said.
“You’re joking,” I told him. “Why would they call it that? What’s the Clearview, then? You want me to believe that’s the name for the one with a ‘clear view’ of nothing but traffic?”
“What can I tell you?” he answered. That’s his phrase for when I’ve clearly beaten him in an argument, but he still says I’m wrong.
Now, whenever I need one of those roads, I just head for the one whose name is precisely not what I want, and I get where I’m going.
Eventually, I realized that there was something more than sheer cussedness going on; that some deliberate deception was involved.
For example, not too long ago, when developers tried to put up a building in the middle of my town, they kept calling it “Harbor View.”
But here’s the thing: they were putting it in the middle of a landlocked valley. It had neither Harbor, nor View.
That’s when it all clicked, for me.
When a name is that wrong, you can be sure that a real estate professional has had a hand in the naming process.
Take the neighborhood where I grew up, in Maryland.
There was a street, there, named Knollcrest: a name composed of two different words that mean the top of a hill.
And where was that street located? You’ve guessed it: the bottom of a hill.
In fact, it was the lowest point in the entire development.
Like you’re going to pull up to a property near the garbage dump, on a street called “Perfume Place,” and tell your spouse, “Gosh, it sure smells purty ‘round here! Let’s buy this sucker!”
Sadly, this kind of pretzel logic isn’t even new.
Once I started looking for examples, I found them everywhere — even back in time.
For example, take a case from the late 900s.
When Leif, son of Eric the Red, wanted to persuade people to leave their cozy homes and sail off with him into the sunset, he talked up the beauties of the destination he had in mind. He called it “Greenland.”
This was to distinguish it from the place they were leaving, which was “Iceland.”
Guess which one of them turned out to be almost entirely covered in ice? Yup, Greenland.
So watch out for those place names.
And when you’re looking at someplace with a name that seems completely the opposite of anything that would make sense, hold on to your wallet.
As for me, I plan to stick to the kind of names no one could “spin.”
Roads with names like Chicken Valley. Shades of Death. Or my absolute, all-time favorite: Skunk’s Misery Road!
With a name like that, it’s got to be real.
