Governing Magazine/September 1999

ASSESSMENTS

NIGHTMARE ON NUTHATCH LANE

By Alan Ehrenhalt

One night in the fall of 1997, fire broke out on Lyndon Street in
Concord, New Hampshire. The residents called 911, and the trucks
responded quickly. But they went to the wrong place. They went to
Linden Street, on the other side of town.
 Nobody was killed in the fire; no one was even seriously injured. And
yet the incident ignited a local controversy that has consumed local
politics for the past two years. Council meetings in this placid state
capital city have turned into shouting matches. Citizens have accused
their elected leaders of being dictators.
 The people of Concord aren't fighting about their fire protection, or
about the quality of their emergency services, or about their building
code. They're fighting about the names of their streets. What the
Lyndon-Linden episode did was focus public attention on an odd problem
Concord had long known about: its remarkable proportion of streets
with identical or very similar names. All places live with this to
some degree, but Concord, with just 37,000 people, is an extreme case.
Among its 730 named roadways, it has two Washington streets, two
Pleasant streets and two Walnut streets, a Lyndon and a Linden, a
Center and a Centre, a Tremont and a Fremont, and on and on and on. It
is a tough town for pizza delivery; there are also many who consider
it a 911 disaster waiting to happen.
 In fact, the state of New Hampshire has been urging the city for
years to do something about its street name confusion. But the state
can't do much more than urge. Although state law forbids new
communities and subdivisions from using "like-sounding or confusing
names," the law doesn't affect the vast majority that were there
before its passage.
 In the wake of the near-miss on Lyndon, however, City Manager Duncan
Ballantyne decided the time had come to do something. He appointed a
Street Renaming Task Force, and persuaded Elizabeth Hager, the city's
widely respected former mayor, to chair it. Within a few weeks, the
task force had decided that 51 street names were dangerously
confusing, and had to be changed.
 As it happened, Ballantyne knew something about this issue. He had
been involved with it in Bath, Maine, where he had worked in local
government before. One thing he knew was that the process would not be
fun. "I told the city council that we were entering an area that had
very strong emotions," Ballantyne says. "I told them to anticipate a
high degree of controversy."
 He should have told them to anticipate a war. Within a few weeks,
residents who were dead set against the change had formed a pressure
group, Save Our Streets (SOS), and begun agitating at meetings and in
the press.
 They made a couple of reasonable points. For all the concern about
fatal street confusion, nobody could point to a time when it had ever
occurred. Most people, even in a moment of stress, could be counted on
to tell the dispatcher whether they were calling from Pleasant Street
in downtown Concord or Pleasant Street in Penacook, on the outskirts
of town. Of course, the caller might be a stranger with a cell phone,
unsure which of the two he was standing on. But how often was that
going to happen? Once every six years, SOS members estimated, claiming
to have worked out the statistics.
 The real issue, though, wasn't the numbers. It was the dissidents'
unyielding belief that in revising the names of Concord's streets, the
task force was stripping the 272-year-old community of its history,
even of its soul. "When you change the familiar feeling of comfort a
resident has for his own street," one of the protesters warned, "you
also change the way he feels about his city." Another one pleaded with
the city council to stop the treachery for the sake of future
generations. "Do this for the children," he said. "Don't sacrifice
their heritage." Another swore that, faced with a choice between
safety and tradition, she would stick with tradition every time.
 The task force tried hard to do its work democratically. It may have
tried too hard. It decreed a name change for one of the town's two
Walnut streets, for example, but told the street's six households that
they could choose just about any new name they wanted. Four of the six
decided that since they all owned black dogs, the street should be
renamed Black Dog Lane. The other two thought that was one of the
dumbest names they had ever heard. It sounds like a beer, not a
street, one of them complained. Soon the two sides had stopped
speaking to each other.
 In some cases, burdened by the sheer volume of the job, the task
force simply stumbled into unwise moves. They decided to rename Canton
Street, and since Canton was in the general vicinity of Jay, Robin and
Cardinal streets--Birdland, as the neighborhood is sometimes referred
to--they stuck with the bird motif. They chose Nuthatch Lane. "You can
see how it happened," Hager says. "It was a hot summer day with the
window open. Someone was a bird lover. I'm a bird lover myself.
Somebody suggested Nuthatch, and we did it."
 The residents of the erstwhile Canton Street weren't quite as
enamored of their new name. In fact, they were a little insulted. I'm
not sure I blame them. I wouldn't want to wake up one morning and find
that I had suddenly become an inhabitant of Nuthatch Lane.
 Multiply these sensitivities by a couple of dozen, and you get a
rough idea of the mood the whole city was in by the time the city
council got around to voting on the changes in the summer of last
year.
 "The task force is government run amok," says Dick Lemieux, the
guiding force behind SOS. "It was phenomenal the lengths they were
willing to go to."
 The council only made things worse. First it voted unanimously to
rename six streets. Then it lost its nerve and sent all six back to
the task force for reconsideration. But the task force insisted on
hanging tough, and ultimately the council approved 31 name changes,
and they went into effect last October 14, with opponents declaring it
one of the darkest days in Concord's long history. "You have made a
mockery out of the democratic process," one of them complained.
 As the new street signs went up--dual signs, with the old name in
blue and the new one in green--the SOS forces appeared to have the
renamers on the run. In December, the council voted 7-6 to have the
city manager conduct a four-month review of the entire process, and
left open the possibility that some or all of the 31 changes might
ultimately be undone.

Then something bizarre happened. There was another fire, not in
Concord, but in Swanzey, a short distance away. The fire was on Grove
Street. Swanzey had three Grove streets, all in different parts of
town. By the time the firemen got to the right place, two children had
died.
 No one could prove that street confusion had caused the deaths, but
the Swanzey fire took much of the momentum out of the SOS protesters.
What made it more embarrassing was that the Swanzey selectmen had
actually voted four years earlier to change the name of the street,
but had backed down in the face of citizen resistance.
 Three months ago in Concord, City Manager Ballantyne submitted his
long-awaited report: 400 pages based on interviews with 109 residents
and details on how other communities had dealt with similar problems.
"We committed ourselves to being as data-driven as possible,"
Ballantyne said. He also pointed out that since 31 names were already
officially changed, changing them back might be a violation of the
state law against new duplications.
 At this point, there at least appears to be a consensus that last
year's work won't be undone. And some of the task force members are
quietly hoping that the city's long street-name nightmare may finally
be winding to a close.
 But it isn't over yet. Just a few weeks ago, Save Our Streets
activists warned that with one batch of mischief under their belt, the
task force fanatics would soon set to work on the 200 or so streets
whose names aren't exactly identical, but might be easily confused
(Hazel and Hazen, Loon and Loop, Grove and Grover, Chicory and
Chocorua). "Stop the Madness!" an SOS broadside demanded.
 It sounded a little hyperbolic, but you don't have to look hard to
notice that the whole town seems more than ready to put this
unpleasant controversy to bed. Even the Concord Monitor, up to now a
steadfast supporter of the changes, is sounding a bit weary. Finish
the last few names on the table, the newspaper advised recently, and
then "let this issue rest. Confusion isn't good, to be sure, but
neither is investing more valuable civic energy in pursuit of
diminishing returns."
 On the other hand, one thing the whole episode seems to show is that
street-naming is a political Pandora's box. Once you open it, there's
no easy way to get it shut again.
 A few weeks ago, for example, the residents of one of the two former
Walnut streets wrote to the city council with the news that their name
change wasn't working. "We didn't realize," one of them said, "that we
would have to spell Orion every time to escape being listed as living
on O'Ryan Street. Even worse, some of us are getting mail for Oriole
Street, which does exist in Concord, and Onion Street, which does
not." They wanted to know if Black Dog Lane was still a possibility.
The council is scheduled to take that one up in a few weeks.

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