Miss Heather has uncovered some nice evidence of old street names in Greenpoint. When you look at it, it seems as though all of the streets in North Brooklyn were renamed subsequent to the annexation of the Eastern District by the City of Brooklyn in 1855.
Greenpoint’s cross streets were A through Q; they were then renamed Ash through Quay. (Although how this Clinton Street got into the mix, I don’t know – I guess Calyer Street was always an outlier.) Other changes included West Street (which had been Washington), and Manhattan Avenue (which had been Union Place).
The same thing happened in Williamsburg, where the north/south streets had been First through Eleventh Streets; they are now Kent Avenue through Hewes Street.
Miss Heather also discovered that this created a hell of a lot of confusion:
This practice resulted in a slew of duplicate street names* which took years to unsnarl. It was a long and very contentious process. One which, amusingly enough, often saw “North Brooklyn” (AKA: “The Eastern District”) in opposition to “South Brooklyn” on a number of occasions.
The merger of the two cities (Williamsburgh and Brooklyn) also required the renumbering of a lot of streets. This too created a lot of confusion, and revealed the true independent sprit of North Brooklynites. I’ve read elsewhere that most residents just ignored the law requiring them to renumber their houses. This went on quite literally for decades.
In the 1920s, Eugene Armbruster assembled a scorecard of obsolete street names, which can be found here (the link to all of the pages is here).
