Words on the Street

In the fictional dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984, “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.” In the real world, history is also a palimpsest, though it’s rarely scraped entirely clean. Nothing proves that more than our maps.

Beyond their utility, maps and the place names they contain are many things. They are testaments to geography (South Street, Lower Water Street), to architecture (Wall Street, Church Street), to nature (Oak Avenue, Steller’s Jay Place), to sports and culture (Northern Dancer Boulevard, Taylor Swift Way), and to patriotism (Confederation Drive, Avenida 9 de Julio). Perhaps most contentiously, at least in the current climate, they are also acknowledgements of lives lived (Dundas Street, Granville Street).

When a firmly established place name offends modern sensibilities, it can be difficult to scrub it completely from the maps we use to navigate and make sense of the world...