Attribution

Various streets in the outer boroughs used to be roads for long-distance (as defined in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries) travel, usually named for the town, or former town, at the further end. Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn was the road to Flushing; Jamaica Avenue in Queens was the road to Jamaica. There were two similar roads in Manhattan, but one was wiped off the map and the other has a name that doesn’t fit the pattern. The remaining one is, of course, Broadway north of Union Square, cutting an irregular diagonal across the street grid. It used to be the Bloomingdale Road north of Columbus Circle, but what it really was, originally, was the western path used by Native Americans before colonization. I mentioned the eastern path in passing a week ago. Here’s the map I posted then with the “Old Boston Road” (note that “Boston Post Road” is a street in the Bronx) made a bit more obvious: 1867 streets and buildings with a much older path. The irregularity of the line of this, the…