When I was a kid I developed this idea that every street that shared a name with another street had to be connected somehow. Like maybe if you could just keep going from the end of one street and pass through whatever was in between, in a straight line, you eventually would end up on the other.  Or maybe there was some sort of hidden portal connecting them. 

I didn’t believe it, and it wasn’t exactly a fantasy either. It was just this recurring thought that would come into my head whenever I came across a street that shared a name with one more local or familiar to me: I think the first one was Cliff Street. There was one very near my home, a short one-block street. We sometimes drove by another in a town about 5 miles away.  

The idea never really left me, either. I remember driving past Riverside Drive in Los Angeles, in my 20s, and thinking how it might somehow link to its namesake on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

This 3rd Avenue is in Asbury Park, New Jersey.