City Breakdown Terminology?

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by rabbit33

Consider, though, what these intersections looked like in 1770. You'd basically have a big open place with roads/paths leading away from it. In that context it really was more like a square.

Actually, most of those "squares" would have resembled the town centers of a number of towns in New England and on eastern Long Island: two streets meet at a wye junction to become one main street then split again at another wye junction.

Easthampton on Long Island is one of the purest examples of such a square. Harvard Square also takes this form, though it has been significantly altered by events and construction that has happened since Cambridge Common at the far end of it (that's another common feature of many of these "squares") was established sometime in the 1630s. The old Scollay Square also had this form.

[rabbit33]

OK, so if you imagine a wide main "street" in form of a rectangle, with businesses and houses around its four sides, and roads leading off from all four corners, that's what you're describing and that's what, I suppose, led to the term "square" for the intersection of two (or more) roads.

I expect the term "square" goes back to England and probably to the middle ages.

[engineman]

Neighborhoods by name.