Bowery

New York City has two famous one-word street names (or “suffixless streets”): Broadway and Bowery. I wondered how many more there were and couldn’t find an answer online. So, I downloaded NYC’s Street Name Dictionary and ran the following python script with | sort | uniq -c:

import csv

with open('bobaadr.txt') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
        stname = row[15].strip()
        if ' ' not in stname:
            print(stname)

The result is:

      1 ALLEY
      1 AMBROSE
    225 BAYSIDE
      1 BMT-J-ZR-BOWERY
      1 BMT-L-BUSHWICK-ABERDEEN
      1 BMT-N-WP-BROADWAY
     25 BOARDWALK
     54 BOULEVARD
    269 BOWERY
   3447 BROADWAY
      1 CONNECTOR
      2 DRIVEWAY
      1 DUSTBOWL
      3 EASTWAY
    144 ESPLANADE
      1 FEATHERBENCHES
      1 HERNSHEAD
      1 IND-BP-D-F-MP-BROADWAY
      1 IND-G-BROADWAY
      1 IRT-4-WOODLAWN
      1 LULLWATER
      1 PEKING
      1 PIONEER
      1 RANAQUA
      1 VESSEL
      3 WESTWAY
      1 XBILLXBROWNXPLGDX9/11XMEM
      1 stname

After cleaning up, we get 9 total streets¹, which we can arrange by purity:

There are 5 Broadways, all tied for least pure by sharing a name that is, in spirit, Broad Way.

Still, it’s interesting that there’s 5 of them. The famous one stretches across Manhattan and through the Bronx. There are also two well known ones in Brooklyn and Queens. Lesser known is the one on Staten Island, and even lesser known is the second Broadway in Queens in Howard Beach.

Bayside in Breezy Point, at the end of the Rockaway Peninsula, despite being the most interesting street on this list, is also a compound word. At least “side” is not a common street suffix, so it pulls ahead of Broadway.

Esplanade in the Bronx and Boulevard in Whitestone are arguably streets that are only a suffix rather than suffixless streets.

Finally we have Bowery in Manhattan, the purest one-word street.

After getting all these photos, I wondered what street names appear in all 5 boroughs. The answer is: 2 Avenue, 3 Avenue, 4 Avenue, Park Avenue, Main Street, and Broadway. All of these street names are generic (and I’m inclined not to count Park Avenue and Broadway since they are the same street in Manhattan and the Bronx), so the answer isn’t as interesting as “What are all the one-word street names in New York?”