Boulevard, Avenue, Road, and Street in Detroit

Over the last three years working as a community health worker in Detroit, I have logged over 80,000 miles on my tiny car with the majority of those miles being from getting around Detroit to meet with clients, families, and community events. After a while I became really interested in street naming.

I first saw this street name mapping idea from Bill Rankin’s work in Vancouver to the Derek Watkins applying a similar effort to the Portland – Seattle area. I was finally given my last push and decided to create this map after following Bostonography. The piece that took the longest was finding a good file of Detroit streets (finally acquired one from my GIS professor this summer).

In order to understand the layout of Detroit “streets” you really have to know Detroit’s history. The different groupings of “street” names shows the development of Detroit and its…