What's up, Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curious City.

In our last episode, a third grader, Tristan Haupt, asked why one stretch of Ashland in Uptown has some street signs that say Ashland Boulevard.

So I asked the city, and they told me basically,

Oops, that's not supposed to be there.

And then they fixed all the signs quite quickly.

I went over there and checked a few days ago.

The Ashland Boulevard signs are gone,

and now they all say Ashland Avenue.

My apologies to anybody who wanted to get a selfie.

But while answering Tristan's question, we learned about some other interesting quirks when it comes to Chicago streets, including this one from historian Paul Dorica.

So I work at the Chicago History Museum and we're at North and Clark.

And a co-worker when I was telling her about this story, it was like, well,

you've probably noticed that North Avenue becomes North Boulevard when you're east of Clark.

And I was like, what? And it does. And it's because here we are now in the park. Yep, where North Avenue rubs up against Lincoln Park is called North Boulevard. And this is because,

historically, naming something a boulevard meant it had a landscaped median or it was adjacent to a

park. So whoever asked this question, they were like catching on to something that probably

for a lot of us, you know, we're just kind of going about our day and we don't even notice these

sort of subtle

differences or distinctions.

We also learned a bunch of odd history specifically about Ashland Avenue in general.

Like, the name literally means land of ash trees.

A lot of people believe originated with the estate that belonged to the Kentucky statesman Henry Clay.

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