, Portugal
Origin Avenue as a
street name in French, Spanish (
avenida) and other languages implies a large straight street in a city, often created as part of a large scheme of
urban planning such as
Baron Haussmann's
remodelling of Paris or the
L'Enfant Plan for Washington D.C.; "avenues" will typically be the main roads. This pattern is very often followed in the United States, indeed all the Americas, but in the United Kingdom this sense is less strong and the name is used more randomly, mostly for suburban streets developed in the 20th century, though
Western and
Eastern Avenues in London are main traffic arteries out of the city, if not very straight.
Cities In
cities which have a
grid-based naming system, such as the
borough of
Manhattan in
New York City, there may be a convention that the streets called avenues run parallel in one direction – roughly north–south in the case of Manhattan – while "streets" run at 90 degrees to them across the avenues; roughly east–west in Manhattan. In
Washington, DC the avenues radiate from the centre running diagonally across the grid of streets, which follows typical French usage of the name (in France "
boulevards" are often main roads running round the city centre). In
Phoenix, Arizona, "the avenues" can colloquially mean "the west side of town", due to the numbered north–south-running roads being called "Avenues" in the western part of the city, separated from the eastern "Streets" by a "Central Avenue". Similarly, "the avenues" in
San Francisco, California refers to the
Richmond District and the
Sunset District, the two neighborhoods on the Pacific coast, north and south of
Golden Gate Park, respectively. In Anglophone
urban or
suburban settings, "avenue" is one of the usual suite of words used in street names, along with "boulevard", "circle", "court", "drive", "lane", "place", "road", "street", "terrace", "way", "gate" and so on, any of which may carry connotations as to the street's size, importance, or function. Avenues were usually lined with trees when first built, although many avenues have lost their trees to make way for overhead wiring, parking or to allow light into properties. ==Notable avenues==