50 Fun Facts About Famous Streets

The crossing on London's Abbey Road that won listed status in 2010 is named after which animal?

Zebra crossings rarely become monuments, but the Beatles walked across this one for an album cover and it was Grade II listed. Fans still pose on it despite the busy traffic.

Which San Francisco road squeezes eight sharp turns into one steep block on Russian Hill?

Lombard Street got its curves in 1922 because the hill's natural 27 percent grade was too steep for most vehicles. The bends earned it the nickname of the world's crookedest street.

Wall Street is named after a real city wall that stood there from 1653, built by which colonists?

The Dutch built it on Peter Stuyvesant's orders to protect New Amsterdam when the first Anglo-Dutch war broke out. The wall came down in 1699, but the name stuck.

Bourbon Street in New Orleans was named in 1721 in honour of what?

A French royal family, the House of Bourbon, ruled France when engineer Adrien de Pauger laid out the city's streets. He named others after royal houses and Catholic saints.

Which Paris street has hosted the Tour de France's final-stage finish nearly every year since 1975?

Champs-Élysées is French for the Elysian Fields, the resting place of dead heroes in Greek mythology. The avenue also stages the annual Bastille Day military parade.

Which author housed his detective at 221B Baker Street before the street's numbers ran that high?

Arthur Conan Doyle's invention drew so much mail for Sherlock Holmes that the building society later based there employed a full-time secretary to answer it.

The Great Fire of London began in 1666 at Thomas Farriner's bakery on which small street?

Pudding Lane owes its name to offal, not dessert: pudding was the word for the animal waste carted down the lane to barges on the river.

London's red-surfaced road The Mall, meant to resemble a giant carpet, leads to which landmark?

Buckingham Palace has had its red approach since the 1950s, when the road was coloured with an iron oxide pigment. Earlier, The Mall was a fashionable tree-lined promenade.

Which novelist popularised Route 66's nickname, the Mother Road, in a 1939 Dust Bowl novel?

John Steinbeck used the name in The Grapes of Wrath, which follows Oklahoma farmers driving the highway west in search of work.

Boardwalk and the other streets on the original Monopoly board lie in which New Jersey resort?

Atlantic City and its neighbours supplied the names, and one is a famous typo: the game's Marvin Gardens is really Marven Gardens, in nearby Margate. Parker Brothers apologised for the slip in 1995.

Which Manhattan thoroughfare predates the 1811 street grid and so cuts diagonally across Midtown?

Broadway is said to follow the Wickquasgeck trail, a Lenape path that wound the length of the island long before Europeans arrived.

Soweto's Vilakazi Street housed two Nobel Peace laureates: Desmond Tutu and which future president?

Nelson Mandela lived at number 8115 from 1946 to 1962 and later donated the house to a heritage trust, which runs it as a museum.

La Rambla, a tree-lined walk that began as a stream bed, ends at a Columbus monument in which city?

Barcelona's most famous walk so charmed the poet Federico García Lorca that he called it the one street he wished would never end.

Which Washington street, nicknamed America's Main Street, links the White House and the Capitol?

Pennsylvania Avenue runs diagonally across the city's grid, and the stretch between the two buildings is the stage for official parades, processions and protest marches.

Beale Street, named the Home of the Blues by an act of Congress, runs through which Tennessee city?

Memphis won the title for its street in 1977, when urban renewal had left it a virtual ghost town. Today its blues clubs are a major tourist draw.

E Street in Belmar, New Jersey, gave its name to the backing band of which rock star?

Bruce Springsteen's group took the name because it rehearsed there, in the garage of keyboard player David Sancious's mother at 1107 E Street.

Harry Potter grows up at number four on which road in the fictional Surrey town of Little Whinging?

Privet Drive is where Harry is raised from infancy by his aunt Petunia and uncle Vernon Dursley, while Arabella Figg, living nearby, secretly keeps watch on him for Dumbledore.

Which Manhattan street divides East from West addresses on the borough's numbered cross streets?

Fifth Avenue is where house numbers on the cross streets begin, climbing in both directions as you move away from it. Its stretch beside Central Park is nicknamed Museum Mile.

Which Edinburgh route runs downhill from the castle to Holyrood Palace through the Old Town?

Royal Mile is a nickname for a chain of streets, among them Castlehill, the Lawnmarket and the Canongate, that together stretch almost exactly one mile.

Which London road, once home to most British national newspapers, is named after a now-buried river?

Fleet Street stayed shorthand for the British press even after the papers moved out in the 1980s. Reuters, the last major news outlet there, left in 2005.

The three luxury-boutique blocks of Rodeo Drive that shoppers know best are in which California city?

Beverly Hills holds the famous stretch, just three blocks of a two-mile street whose southern end actually crosses into Los Angeles.

Which Christopher Street bar in New York saw the 1969 riots that sparked the gay liberation movement?

Stonewall Inn began life far from nightlife: its two buildings were put up in the 1840s as horse stables, and the name belonged to a restaurant until 1966.

Which fictional Weatherfield terrace names the soap Guinness called the world's longest-running in 2010?

Coronation Street has been on ITV since December 1960, and Guinness gave it the record on the programme's 50th anniversary.

Which London street of bespoke tailors saw the Beatles give their final live performance, on a rooftop?

Savile Row was home to the band's Apple Corps headquarters at number 3. At number 1, the Royal Geographical Society once planned expeditions to Africa and the South Pole.

Which institution has been nicknamed the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street since a satirical cartoon of 1797?

Bank of England staff have worked on the street since 1734. The nickname comes from a James Gillray cartoon and has stuck for more than two centuries.

Which nickname stuck to the block of West 28th Street that housed New York's sheet-music publishers?

Tin Pan Alley is said to owe its name to a journalist who likened the din of cheap upright pianos, all playing different tunes, to the banging of tin pans.

Signs for which Liverpool street were stolen regularly after the Beatles named a 1967 single after it?

Penny Lane's roundabout, then a major bus terminus, was a regular stop for John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison in their school and student days.

Khaosan Road, a backpacker hub whose name means milled rice, is in which Asian capital?

Bangkok's backpacker strip takes its name from the rice once traded in the area. Budget guesthouses began to open there only in the early 1980s.

Avenida 9 de Julio, often called the world's widest avenue, honours the independence day of which country?

Argentina declared independence on 9 July 1816, and the avenue named for the date is about 110 metres wide. The Obelisk of Buenos Aires stands where it meets Corrientes Avenue.

Baldwin Street, which Guinness calls the steepest street in the world, is in which country?

New Zealand briefly lost the record in 2019 to a lane in Harlech, Wales, then won it back on appeal in 2020 when Guinness ruled that slope must be measured along the centre line.

Ebenezer Place, credited by Guinness as the world's shortest street at about two metres, is in which country?

Scotland's record-holder, in the town of Wick, has just one address: the front door of a bistro in Mackays Hotel. Guinness recognised it in 2006.

Yonge Street, long listed by Guinness as the world's longest street, starts at the lakeshore in which city?

Toronto's main artery was credited with 1,896 kilometres because Guinness lumped it together with Ontario's Highway 11, an error it repeated until 1999.

York's Shambles, a medieval street of overhanging timber houses, once held which tradesmen's stalls?

Butchers' stalls were called shambles, from an Old English word for a bench. The street still held 31 butchers' shops in 1885, but none remain.

Which processional route through Jerusalem's Old City is marked by 14 Stations of the Cross?

Via Dolorosa is Latin for Sorrowful Way. Its present course dates only from the 18th century, and five of the stations lie inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Which Roman road to Brindisi, begun in 312 BC, did the poet Statius call the queen of the long roads?

Appian Way is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the censor who began it as a military road to the south during the Samnite Wars.

Which Berlin boulevard runs east from the Brandenburg Gate to the rebuilt Berlin Palace?

Unter den Linden means under the linden trees, which Britons call limes and North Americans basswood. They have nothing to do with the citrus fruit.

Nevsky Prospect, the avenue whose bustle Gogol captured in an 1835 story, runs through which Russian city?

St Petersburg's great avenue takes its name from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, the monastery at its eastern end, which Peter the Great founded to honour the prince who beat the Swedes on the Neva.

Ramsay Street, in the fictional Melbourne suburb of Erinsborough, is the setting of which soap opera?

Neighbours named the street after Jack Ramsay, grandfather of original character Max Ramsay, and filmed it in a real Melbourne cul-de-sac, Pin Oak Court.

The French term cul-de-sac, used in English for a dead-end street, literally translates as what?

Bottom of a sack is the literal sense, and English first borrowed the phrase in 1738 as an anatomical term for a pouch that ends blindly.

Edgar Allan Poe set what is often called the first modern detective story on which Paris street?

Rue Morgue, an invented address, is where amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin works out that the killer of two women was not human.

The Las Vegas Strip lies just outside Las Vegas city limits, mostly in which unincorporated Nevada town?

Paradise was created in 1950 after casino bosses lobbied for town status, which stopped the city annexing the Strip to widen its tax base.

President Kennedy's limousine had just turned left onto which Dealey Plaza street when shots were fired?

Elm Street carried the motorcade past the Texas School Book Depository, on a route planned to give the president maximum exposure to the crowds.

Delhi's Chandni Chowk market street was designed in 1650 by Jahanara, a daughter of which Mughal emperor?

Shah Jahan, the emperor behind the Taj Mahal, had the market built. Canals once ran down the middle of its street, engineered to reflect moonlight.

The piccadills thought to have given London's Piccadilly its name were which fashionable 17th-century item?

Lace collars called piccadills, broad and held up by a stiff support, are believed to have made the fortune of local landowner Robert Baker around 1612.

Hamburg's Reeperbahn, the nightlife strip nicknamed the sinful mile, is named after which old trade?

Rope making gave the street its name, which means ropewalk in Low German. Hamburg moved its ropewalks there, outside the city walls, as the inner city filled up in the 1620s.

The word boulevard, now a broad tree-lined street, originally meant the flat top of which military structure?

A rampart was the original boulevard in 15th-century French, a garbled borrowing of the word that also gave English bulwark. Later it meant a promenade laid out where a fortification had been demolished.

Rome's Via Veneto, a haunt of film stars in the 1950s, was immortalised by which 1960 Federico Fellini film?

La Dolce Vita means the sweet life, and it captured a street whose bars and restaurants drew Audrey Hepburn, Orson Welles and Coco Chanel.

Which street, the first property on the London Monopoly board, is the only one south of the River Thames?

Old Kent Road costs just £60, making it one of the two cheapest squares. The real road follows an ancient trackway that the Anglo-Saxons called Watling Street.

Eddy Grant's hit about the 1981 Brixton riot is named after which real market street in that district?

Electric Avenue earned its name as the first market street to be lit by electricity. The song grew out of tensions over unemployment, racism and policing.

Paseo de la Reforma, an avenue first laid out for Emperor Maximilian, crosses the heart of which capital?

Mexico City's avenue was first called the Promenade of the Empress, after Maximilian's consort Carlota. It was renamed once the empire fell and he was executed.