Many of you have probably noticed that there's a sequence of streets in Crown Heights, Brooklyn named for a bunch of seemingly semi-arbitrary NYS cities. From west to east the avenues are named New York, Brooklyn, Kingston, Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Utica, Rochester, & Buffalo.

I have no special knowledge on this. I was just curious so dug around a bit. It's quickly apparent that they're ordered by distance from Manhattan. But still, why is a small city like Kingston included? Why not a much larger one like Syracuse?

The earliest Brooklyn street map I could find was from 1843, where these names are already in place. But note that Kingston Ave is actually named Hudson Ave here. Also note that the map is oriented with North pointing downwards.

So what where the largest cities in New York State in 1840? That was actual rather difficult to find, but fortunately, the largest NY cities were also the largest US cities, and they all appear at the top 100 in the nation.

The earliest map I can find where Hudson Ave is renamed to Kingston Ave is 1874.

Around this time, the population of Kingston began to skyrocket relative to Hudson.

It's been suggested that these names are related to the major ports along the Erie Canal. I think it's a good hypothesis, but from my lay perspective, I don't know if the streets were named for the canal cities, or if the cities were prominent because they were on the canal.

Anyway, I have nothing more conclusive to say. But I do wonder what it was like to be in the room where it was decided that Hudson, NY no longer warranted the prestige of a street name. Or maybe there were too many Hudsons already, it being a defining feature of NYC.

But what would it look like if our top 9 cities were now ordered geographically in the same style? Let's say we fold Brooklyn into New York because they are not longer separate cities. The avenues from west to east would change as follows:

New York = New York
Brooklyn = Yonkers
Kingston = Mount Vernon
Albany = New Rochelle
Troy = Albany
Schenectady = Schenectady
Utica = Syracuse
Rochester = Rochester
Buffalo = Buffalo

Interestingly, 5/9 are still included and 4/9 are even in the same position.

And that leave (excluding Brooklyn) what appear to be our oddballs today: Kingston, Troy, and Utica.

Sources:

@NYPLHistory
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-f019-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

https://www.biggestuscities.com/1840 

@librarycongress
https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3804n.rr003520

@Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson,_New_York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston,_New_York
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal 

@worldatlas https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-10-biggest-cities-in-new-york-state.html