Dear Folks,

I'm respectfully going to have to disagree with Lloyd Snook. If we're going to do it at all (a separate issue, of course), I think the whole of 10th St. and the connector should be renamed as one street. It's simply too confusing to see the connector -- which clearly is a continuation to the south of 10th St. -- suddenly pick up a new name. Charlottesville already has enough of these anomalies -- e.g., the phenomenon of what seems to be a single continuous street becoming in turn Preston Ave., Rugby Rd., and then Barracks Rd. is only one of many such examples in this City. Besides, other cities intersperse named streets among numbered ones. In New York, Park and Madison Avenues break up the progression of numbered avenues (they do not replace but merely interrupt them, however). In Chicago, the named streets replace the numbered ones, e.g., Roosevelt Road for 12th St.; Cermak Road for 22nd St. Philadelphia does so as well; in fact Broad Street takes the place of 14th St. We would therefore be following an oft-invoked tradition by giving the name "Hemings" to the whole of the physical avenue notwithstanding the parallel existence of 9th and 11th Streets. I would, by the way, give it an Avenue, Drive, or Road designation to distinguish the corridor from the "streets" among which it is nestled. It is a special thoroughfare and deserves a distinguishing mark for that reason.

Dave Nelson (electronic mail, May 15, 2000)