Washington, DC’s street names are maniacally rational. Numbered streets run east to west, and lettered streets (A, B, C) north and south. (After W Street, the pattern starts again, with each name now two syllables—Adams, Bryant, etc.—and then at the end, restarting with three-syllable street names, Allison, Buchanan, etc.) The diagonal avenues that break up the grid were named for the states in the Union (fifteen of them, then), with the longest avenues given the names of the three largest states at the time, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Now every state in America has a street
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