Tips on navigating the Denver Metro area

[BPTactical]

Good info and pretty spot on with one minor correction-streets west of Broadway are not "Spanish" names but rather names of Indian Tribes (North American Aboriginal Peoples groups to the PC crowd)

[hollohas]

Then you have GJ or Limon? You cant even get to a good place from Denver

285 is your best bet.

[BigBear]

I lived in a grid city before.


Streets North to South were alphabetical names.
Streests East to West were numerical.

Made finding anything super easy.

[trlcavscout]

Thats the ONE nice thing about Greeley, at least the older/main part, east/west 1st through like 103rd ave, north/south 1st through 49th street. Then you have east and north, but for the most part all the numbers line up. Streets/Ave's should be numbered, not named.

[StagLefty]

You guys would have been lost back in my small town in New England. All the streets were named-no numerical anythings. When I moved out here my first thought was "why don't they do this everywhere ?"

[hollohas]

Salt Lake City still confuses the hell out of me. W 300 S or S 300 W, WTF does that mean? People that live there tell me it's super easy...supposed to be based around the Temple...those Mormons have some sort of secret code I think.

[hollohas]

You guys would have been lost back in my small town in New England. All the streets were named-no numerical anythings. When I moved out here my first thought was "why don't they do this everywhere ?"

My extended family is in Maynard, MA. It's like all the roads follow old deer trials or something.

[patrick0685]

ya back in tennessee its not like this, streets all over the play

[BPTactical]

My extended family is in Maynard, MA. It's like all the roads follow old deer trials or something.

A lot of this is due to the way properties are divided and geography. East of the Mississippi the majority of land tracts are surveyed by what is known as "Metes and Bounds" which use geographical points such as a stone wall or rivers and the descriptions are something else to read such as: "From the large rock bounding along the river upstream to the bridge thence proceeding south to the old stone wall thence returning to the large rock next to the river".
That is why the roads are goofy, they tend to follow property lines.
West of the Mississippi land tracts are generally surveyed on a NS-EW grid system and again, the majority of roads follow property and section lines. You can really pick up on it in rural areas.

[chrisguy]

Oh yeah, and the reason that Downtown Denver is crooked, literally, I'm not talking about the politics this time, is because the trappers started setting up buildings where the Platte River and Cherry Creek met. You build one building, then build all the rest of the buildings square with that first building. After they started getting past Broadway, they decided that Denver was going to be a "real" town and starting building everything on a north/south grid like every other town.

Interesting... I heard a while back that orientation was purposeful, something about getting sun on the streets in winter to help the snow melt/clearing.

It does look on the map like someone cut out a chunk of the grid, rotated it a few degrees and stuck it back in.

Chicago is on a perfect grid too.... "ground zero" is State and Madison, and every 800 numbers in any N/E/S/W direction are a mile. The diagonal streets of course don't follow the distance figure. I can still name all the even mile streets, it's handy to always know where you are, how far something else is just by the address, etc.