X Marks the Street
There are two streets in New York City that begin with X, if you don’t count Brooklyn’s Ave. X in Sheepshead Bay. Both are nondescript, but I’m glad they’re there, since X has always gotten short shrift in the naming department, and when most words begin with x, the letter’s forced to adopt a different sound, since beginning a word with a “kz” sound would be awkward. Usually in English, a “z” sound gets the nod. Both are Xenia Streets: in Corona, Queens, and Old Town, Staten Island.
Xenia (which I’d thought was a flower, but that’s zinnia) is a Greek term meaning “strange” or “foreign”; it frequently turns up in combined terms like xenophobia, fear of strangers, or philoxenia, kindness toward strangers. It’s also a city in Ohio and a variety of coral.
In Corona, Xenia Street is amid a cluster of streets that run NW to SE in defiance of the overall numbered grid. It’s generally nondescript with mid-20th century homes along it.
Why does this cluster of odd, narrow streets exist? It predated the overall grid that was taking shape in Corona and Forest Hills, as seen on this map produced in 1915, and there were already homes constructed there, so the streets were left in place when the rest of the area was developed. I’d hoped to find another “x” street nearby because in Forest Hills, streets were named in an A-Z alphabetical system. X was passed over in this scheme, with Webb going straight to Yalu. All of these streets were numbered in the 1920s except one: Jewel Ave.
Washington, D.C. has letter streets as well as an alphabetical grid, but the letters go from A-W, skipping “J,” and the names generally go from A to W, with Yuma added. No “X.” Elsewhere around the country, the most likely. Named streets beginning with X are Xavier, Xerxes, Xanthus and Xanadu.
In Staten Island, Xenia St. runs for just one block between Hurlbert St. and Mason Ave. in Old Town. It seems to be a standalone “X” street not part of an alphabetical grid. Or is it? NYC website Untapped New York guesses it’s named for Xenia, the patron saint of St. Petersburg, Russia, but that seems like a longshot to me.
If you look at the map, there are alphabetized streets: Hickory, Jerome (the I is skipped), Kensington, Lamport, Malloy, Norway, Oberlin, Parkinson, Quintard, Reid, Vulcan and Winfield; the S, T and U streets, Scranton, Tacoma and Urbana, are about a mile west, west of the Staten Island Railway. That leaves the A through G streets; I’m not sure what happened to them, but an X street, Xenia, would fit in with this pattern.
South of here, there’s another loose alphabetical grid in Midland Beach: Baden, Colony, Freeborn, Grimsby etc. Queens has several in disparate neighborhoods. I’d love to know the story behind these alphabetical grids.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)