IF YOUR Block COULD Talk
Fascinating facts about the streets where we live
One bitterly cold morning a few years back, I shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the water to brush my teeth. Nada. In a fog, I trudged to the kitchen faucet hoping for better. Nope. My next shuffle was to my phone to call my city water department. The voice that answered was that of someone who’d already answered the phone one too many times that morning. I learned that my waterline was frozen. Only one company could remedy the problem, and it was booked for two days.
Two days later, after I got the all clear, the guy at the water department told me,
“Unless you wanna go through that again, open a faucet and let a pencillead stream of water run for the rest of the winter.” For the next six weeks, we did just that.
The endless trickle became a gnawing reminder of everything I didn’t know. I really had no idea where our water came from. Or where it went. Or, for that matter, how my phone call to the water department had gotten through to the water department. As I stared out the window, I further realized I knew nothing about the concrete sidewalk leading to our door, the lawn beneath the freshly fallen snow, the squirrels in the trees, the ancient walnut tree on the boulevard ... nothing.
And these were just the things I could see through one dinky window. I’d read books about journeying across Antarctica, down the Amazon River, and up Mount Everest; I’d written books about 50,000-year-old wood buried in the bogs of New Zealand and the violin makers of Cremona, Italy—but I knew nothing about the world right outside my front door. So I started doing some research, and I learned the most fascinating things ...
If your home address is an odd number, you probably live on the south or east side of the street; if it’s an even number, you probably live on the north or west side.
Let’s look at street names too. If you’re strolling in Oklahoma or Arkansas, you’ll find the most popular street name to be Oak; if in Wisconsin, Vermont, or a dozen other states, the number one prize goes to Park; in the Deep South, Dogwood and Magnolia take the cake. But the most commonly found street name in the United States is, interestingly enough, Second. Why? The most logical explanation is that in some cities, the main drag is Main Street and in others, it’s First. Rounding out the top ten U.S. street names, in order: Third, First, Fourth, Park, Fifth, Main, Sixth, Oak, and Seventh.
“The selection of place names has often been, almost without exception, careless,” says Don Empson, author of The Street Where You Live: A Guide to the Place Names of St. Paul. “We have such misnomers as College Avenue with no college, Palace Avenue with no palace, Ocean Street with no ocean, and Hunting Valley Road with no valley or hunters.”
Your block is home to 8.1 squirrels.
With 106 species, southern Asia is considered the “squirrel capital of the world.” North America has a mere 66 species, with a density of about 1.5 squirrels per acre. And since the range of most squirrels is only a few acres, chances are the same old squirrels you see day after day in your backyard are exactly that. Some 1.12 billion of them live in the United States at any given time. They have an uncanny ability to thrive
in a wide range of environs—urban parks, suburban backyards, wilderness forests.
“They flourish because they—like humans—are ‘generalists,’” says John Moriarty, senior wildlife manager for the Three Rivers Park District in Minnesota. “Squirrels can live in treetop nests, hollowed-out tree trunks, or your attic.”
Letter carriers bring you 41 pounds of junk mail a year.
You don’t open 44 percent of it, and you recycle about a quarter of it. Over the years, the United States Postal Service has delivered mail—junk and otherwise—via stagecoach, roller skate, motorcycle, ski, Segway, toboggan, dogsled, boat, biplane, supersonic jet, snowmobile, and hovercraft. If you live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, your mail is brought to you by mule.
In New York City, pneumatic tubes once helped deliver six million letters a day, including one third of the city’s first-class mail, via 27 miles of tubing that ran beneath the city’s streets and even across the Brooklyn Bridge. Each capsule could travel 35 miles per hour and hold up to 600 letters (or an unspecified number of submarine sandwiches, which, according to lore, were delivered to hungry postal workers this way).
In 1958, Harry Winston had such faith in the postal service that when he donated the $38 million ($350 million in today’s dollars) Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian, he shipped it by registered mail—in a plain brown envelope stamped FRAGILE—FROM New York City to Washington, DC. The cost was $145.29: $2.44 for postage and the rest for $1 million worth of insurance.
Garbage collectors pick up 6,424 pounds of your trash a year.
That’s the average for a family of four in the United States, encompassing all kinds of trash from urban, suburban, and rural cans and dumpsters. Based on those averages, if I were to kidnap your week’s worth of trash on garbage day and pick through the 50 pounds of waste left after you’d separated out the conventional recycling, I’d still find:
✦ 10½ pounds of food waste
✦ 9 pounds of plastic
✦ 7½ pounds of paper and cardboard
✦ 5½ pounds of rubber, leather, and textiles
✦ 4½ pounds of metal
✦ 4½ pounds of yard trimmings
✦ 4 pounds of wood
✦ 2½ pounds of glass
✦ 2 pounds of “other stuff”
The grass really does look greener on the other side of your fence.
The old adage is true because when you’re standing in your yard looking straight down, you see the dirt and bare spots between the blades of grass. But when you look over at your neighbor’s yard at an angle, you see only the green blades.
A healthy lawn contains about eight
grass plants per square inch—meaning that your 50-by-100-foot lot has 5,760,000 plants for you to tend.
According to Paul Koch, a plant pathologist from the O.J. Noer Turfgrass Research Facility at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the life cycle of any single blade of grass is only three to six weeks. “Just as your body replaces cells so you don’t have the same bones you had ten years ago,” he says, “a lawn replaces cells so you don’t have the same grass you had a year or two ago.”
If you push a button at a crosswalk in a major city, it probably won’t do anything.
Only 9 percent of New York City’s 3,000-plus pedestrian crosswalk buttons actually do anything; in Dallas, at one point, it was zero percent. In outlying areas, small towns, and suburbs and at many urban intersections, those buttons do indeed communicate with the traffic lights. But in large cities, they’re often little more than thumb calisthenics devices for naive pedestrians. They remain because they are expensive to remove and sometimes, as happened in Dallas, inactive buttons are reactivated.
Steve Misgen, district traffic engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, explains that in dense urban areas, operable pedestrian crosswalk signals muddle the flow of vehicle traffic. To compensate, pedestrian traffic is allotted adequate time as part of the overall timing cycle. Signal timing changes with the ebb, flow, and direction of traffic; cycles can range from 90 to 250 seconds.
If you had X-ray vision, you’d see that a concrete sidewalk is typically four inches thick; a driveway, six inches; the interstate, a beefy eleven inches.
We manufacture and use more concrete than any other substance on the planet. Worldwide we generate ten billion tons of it per year; 3,000 pounds for every man, woman, and child. Pound for pound, we use twice as much concrete for building as steel, wood, plastic, and aluminum combined.
The history of concrete follows a bumpy road. The Romans developed the kilns and techniques for formulating it more than 2,000 years ago. They built some of the most magnificent structures ever created, including the Pantheon, which stands today. With the fall of the empire, the formula
IN LARGE CITIES, VERY FEW PEDESTRIAN CROSSWALK BUTTONS ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING.
was misplaced—for nine centuries. In 1414, the recipe was rediscovered in a copy of Vitruvius’s On Architecture found in a Swiss monastery and has played a vital role in our lives—and our walks and drives—ever since.
You have a one in six chance of receiving a speeding ticket this year.
About 41 million speeding tickets are issued in the United States every year. Fines range from $10 for minor infractions in North Dakota to $2,500 for driving faster than 85 mph in Virginia. The average ticket amounts to $150— which might seem like a lot until we visit Finland or Switzerland, where fines are based on income. A wealthy driver clocked doing 180 mph in Switzerland was fined $835,000.
Men are 50 percent more likely to be issued speeding tickets than women. And the hour or two following the morning rush along with the traffic lull between 1 and 3 p.m. are the times you’re most likely to get a citation—with less traffic, drivers have more room to speed up and are more prone to being spotted and ticketed by law enforcement.
You probably live within a ten-minute walk of a park.
Seven of every ten Americans are fortunate enough to live within a tenminute walk of a park. Some areas, naturally, provide more green space than others. If you step out your door in Scottsdale, Arizona, you have only a 40 percent chance of a short stroll to a park. But Missouri’s Kansas Citians have a 70 percent chance, Clevelanders an 83 percent chance, and San Franciscans a 100 percent chance—an absolute certainty—of being able to wiggle their toes in park grass within 600 seconds of walking out the door.
Just as community developer Andres Duany once posited that “great cities are nothing more than a series of villages artfully stitched together,” great park systems are little more than people and places sewn together by grass, activities, and mutual respect.
Says Mitch Silver, commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, “I can’t imagine a great city that doesn’t have a great park.”