This is the first of an occasional series of articles from the HomeinHenderson.com staff during a summer road trip through the South.
Every town has its idiosyncrasies when it comes to getting around, resulting from history, nature and other forces beyond anyone’s control.
The town where I grew up, Reston, Va., has youth on its side after only 40 years of existence, but it’s a true child of the 1960s: lots of trees, few streetlights, endless cul-de-sacs and other dead ends, and an annoying tendency for roads to run in circles instead of straight lines. Plus there’s a massive toll road splitting the whole place in two in the highway era’s equivalent of the railroad tracks running through Henderson; I’ve never figured out which side of the toll road is the wrong side of the tracks.
Henderson’s curse, of course, is a unique sense of direction. Where else can a major highway run east-west and north-south at the same time (Andrews Avenue/N.C. 39)? Imagine if you’re a lake tourist coming off U.S. 1 Bypass at East Andrews Avenue, as the guide books suggest, and you stop at the first BP station for gas and directions. You’re told that to get to Williamsboro, you should continue going west on Andrews Avenue until you’ve traveled about 10 miles north. “So this road makes a sharp curve to the right up ahead?” you ask, figuring that country highways and byways are bound to have some bend in them. “Nope, this road’s as straight and true as a Michael Jordan jump shot,” you’re told And so it is: West is north and east is south and always the twain shall meet.
But we have far more than Andrews Avenue to confuse visitors. U.S. 158 in its various incarnations manages to define the northern border and half the southern border of Henderson at the same time. There’s the 90-degree turn from Raleigh Road to Garnett Street to keep going north on U.S. 1 Business. There’s the fact that the West End is in the middle of town. In fact, don’t bring a compass if you want to decipher whether you’re in North Henderson, South Henderson, East Henderson or West Henderson; you’ll wind up swearing penguins live at the North Pole.
While we’re at it, which way is Oxford from Henderson? Is it due west eight or 10 miles on Oxford Road/U.S. 158 Business, which naturally ends in a T with U.S. 158 Bypass? Or is it due south eight or 10 miles on Interstate 85? For that matter, is Warrenton east or north of Henderson?
I bring up our little Henderson quirks to shine light on the aggravations of traveling to places that don’t share the Vance County compass.
Our first overnight stop was in Atlanta. The first thing to know about Atlanta is that everything is at the intersection of Peachtree Street/Road/Avenue/Boulevard/Lane. I’m sure the most coveted addresses in Atlanta are the places where Peachtree and Peachtree cross, with the ultimate being a giant peachlike circle in which all those Peachtrees collide, forcing the driver to choose among a dozen paved Peachtrees to escape the deepest circle of Georgia hell. (Come to think of it, if Atlantans had been a little more clever in 1864, Gen. Sherman and his Yankee hordes would probably still be stuck in traffic and never would have burned their way to the coast.)
Anyway, having stumbled upon the great practical joke of Peachtree Street/Road/Avenue/Boulevard/Lane, Atlanta apparently decided to stick with the pattern as it expanded from the inland capital that Savannah sneered at to the economic engine of the New (read: Yankeefied) South. Everything revolves around the Perimeter, Atlanta’s equivalent of Washington’s Beltway and Raleigh’s Beltline (and don’t get me started on the stupidity of placing an interstate loop well inside the city limits, as Raleigh did, thus defeating the highway’s bypass value and forcing the construction of the Outer Beltline). But Atlanta also insists on referring to an area or areas (I’m not sure which) as the Perimeter, which is as meaningless a designation as “the corner of Peachtree”; you could be anywhere and be in or on the Perimeter.
As the final piece of the inscrutable puzzle, Atlanta seems to be a city of millions structured like Townsville, meaning that it only bothered to create a few street names, all referring to where the road is going or where it came from. There’s no mystery about Tungsten Mine Road off N.C. 39, for instance. But that setup collapses under its own weight in Atlanta. If you want to go to Dunwoody, as we did, you have to choose among at least four roads with “Dunwoody” in the name off the Perimeter. I’m still not sure how we found our hotel, especially considering that the name on the Internet, Holiday Inn Select Atlanta Perimeter Dunwoody, doesn’t match the name on and inside the building, Holiday Inn Select Chamblee-Dunwoody.
All I can say is that it was nice to get back to my native New Orleans, where we’re too sophisticated to confront such mundane matters as north and south, east and west. Here, you’re either headed uptown or downtown, toward the lake or toward the river. Sometimes nature provides all the answers.
— Written by Michael Jacobs