by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

This is Murray: a noble, weather-beaten street in Griffintown where unscrubbed Irish used to drink and box and still reassemble periodically to ritualistically await a legendary ghost. One of the few local streets where you can sometimes trip on tumbleweed was named after Wolfe's successor, who hooked up with Amherst to force Governor Vaudreuil to sign over the city in September 1760. James Murray, like Dorchester, liked the French once he hung out with them and later incurred the wrath of his British brethren by favouring their interests.

For as long as anybody knows, a street bearing Murray's name has run from Wellington to Notre-Dame, where it ended at a fenced off field once flanked by bridges that straddled railway tracks. The tracks and the bridges disappeared a few years back and the field was slated to become home to power hitters and southpaws, but the dream of the downtown ballpark never materialized.

The unkempt field has instead been filled with shiny condos and a street so new that it hasn't even been paved yet. Soon drivers will zoom over its virgin tarmac into an impressive downtown skyscraper vista.

The new block will link Murray to a tiny section of empty road. The stretch has no addresses and is more of a highway exit than anything, but since 1973 it has an official name: Jean-d'Estrées, after a little-known French viceroy who served in 1686.

Within a few weeks Murray and Jean-d'Estrées will be married by geography, connected by a new street that bisects the condo-clad field. The sign that has stood at the head of Murray has been removed. The shiny new block will be known as Jean-d'Estrées; below Notre-Dame it'll still be called Murray.

Why two names for one street when provincial toponomy folks favour a one-place, one-name policy?

Street naming issues are decided by boroughs and then approved at the city level. Murray is in the Southwest borough, but the area north of Notre-Dame is downtown borough turf. Despite of a week of trying I couldn't get either councillor Louise O'Sullivan nor her colleague Jacqueline Montpetit on the buzzer to explain the double-name scenario.

The theory is that the new block is slightly wider than Murray, which means that they deserve different names. Alas, James Murray, you won't be going to the Bell Centre.

This flies in the face of the province's place-naming rules, which suggest that the entire new street from Wellington to St-Antoine should not only have one name, it should have the name of the place with addresses - in this case Murray. "They should be intelligent and keep the one with more addresses," says Marcel Fourcaudot, a rep for the provincial toponomy folk. "It's the logical choice because changing addresses inconveniences people."

In recent years we've gotten really bad at naming streets.

Our downtown borough recently inspired much head-shaking by naming three newly built streets on the east end of the Old Port after existing streets they're not even physically connected to. Amherst, St-Timothée and St-André don't reach the new development; you wouldn't know it by checking out the waterfront addresses, which will suggest that those streets continue to the river. Unconnected streets sharing a name are something denounced by all bureaucrats, as they worry emergency vehicles will be confused by trying to reach the addresses down there.

Here's another: an employee at Hagen Pet Supplies has been tirelessly campaigning to name the street where the company sits in Ville St-Laurent after its still-breathing founder, Rolf C. Hagen (shh, it's supposed to be a surprise for the company's 50th birthday next year). However, I also chatted with Rolf Junior, who says that they wouldn't want such an ostentatious distinction. Apparently since Côte-St-Luc went berserk naming parks after local councillors, it's become trendy to ignore the wait-one-year-after-they're-dead rule.

And meanwhile newly minted street names include first names, inspiring marathon monikers that don't fit on envelopes, like Rue du Parc-Marguerite-Bourgeoys (confusingly, the same street as Liverpool below Wellington), or Beaconsfield's Sidney Cunningham Street.

Were Elm and Maple so bad?

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca