The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

Penn couldn’t name his own colony, but he could name the streets. Though it seems that Holme wanted to name some of the streets after people (including himself), Penn rejected the idea as immodest. His alternative idea was probably inspired by Quaker practice. Quakers declined to use most of the names of the month in the Gregorian calendar because of their pagan origins; rather than January, February, for example, they said First Month, Second Month. (The months September through December, which were named after Latin numbers, were okay.) The same was true of the days of the week; Sunday School, for example, was “First Day School.” In this fashion, Penn prescribed numbers as names for streets running north–south—Second Street, Third Street, Fourth Street—matching the rational, straight lines of the grid.