Tibet Road, Medina Avenue, Peru Alley: Travel the world on Columbus' streets
In Columbus’ Clintonville neighborhood, you can take a stroll along Tibet Road or Delhi Avenue.
In North Linden, you can stand at the corner of Manchester Avenue and Dresden Street.
Or — perhaps after a night out in the Short North — you might find yourself stumbling down Peru Alley.
It’s well-known that visitors can “travel the world in Ohio” by visiting towns named after foreign metropolises like Athens, Berlin, Medina, Dublin, or Lima (all localized with Ohioans' unique pronunciations, of course).
But Columbus itself has a sizable list of international toponyms contained in its street names.
More than 115 roadway names in Franklin County share their names with foreign countries, cities, rivers or mountain ranges, a Dispatch analysis found. Of those, the majority match place names in Northern and Western Europe, followed by Eastern Europe and elsewhere around the world.
You can zoom in on the interactive map in this article to find streets near you. The streets are color-coded according to where in the world their names come from.
Some of Columbus’ international street names — like East and West Frankfort Street, Bremen Street, and Aberdeen Avenue — reflect the city’s 19th and early 20th century history as a home for immigrants from Germany and the British Isles.
Other streets — like Dublin Road — are named after local places that are in turn named after foreign places.
But often street names were given by developers whose reasoning was not made clear in the plat records they left behind, which are maintained by the Franklin County recorder.
The names may reflect developers’ personal interests, or they might reflect the popular imagination of the time.
Tibet Road, for example, was named in 1901 — a time when the British-Russian imperial rivalry known as the Great Game was playing out in the Himalayan region.
Mecca Road was named by the Eastern Realty Company in 1926, the same year that T.E. Lawrence gained fame for publishing “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom," about his role as a military advisor to Bedouin tribes fighting the Ottoman Empire during World War I. (Lawrence was later the subject of the book and film “Lawrence of Arabia.")
In downtown Columbus, many street names originated from surveyor Joel Wright, whom the Ohio General Assembly hired in 1812 to lay out the town that would become the state capital. Some of Wright’s names have since been changed by city ordinances, but many— like High, Broad, State, Town, Rich and Mound — have survived, according to local historian and author Ed Lentz.
But most of Columbus’ international toponyms are found outside of Downtown. Some are mysterious.
Why did a developer choose the name Delhi Avenue in 1892?
Why did The Columbus Lands Company in 1909 name a Clintonville street Amazon Place?
This was more than a century before the founding of the online retail and web services giant. One online history forum suggests that “Amazon” was an alteration of the name of a previous owner of the land, Amason Webster. Perhaps the spelling was changed to make the street sound exotic.
In recent decades, new streets continue to be named by developers as they create plats for subdivisions.
Some choose international toponyms that clearly seek to evoke vacation destinations: Aruba Drive, Antigua Drive, Bermuda Bay Drive. (The latter two were named in 2022.)
However, few of the new street names reflect where Columbus' current immigrant groups come from — countries like Somalia, Nepal, Bhutan and countries in Latin America.
More: It's a long and winding road to new street names
Have you been to these streets with international names?
Amsterdam Avenue
Andes Court
Antigua Drive
Aruba Drive
Australia Alley
Bremen Street
Cyprus Court
Delhi Avenue
Denmark Road
Dresden Street
E and W Frankfort Street
Finland Avenue
Florence Avenue
Fuji Drive
Geneva Avenue
Genoa Place
Lisbon Drive
Malay Road
Mecca Road
Medina Avenue
Melbourne Place
Milan Drive
Norway Drive
Peru Alley
Riga Alley
Rome Way
Tibet Road
Venice Drive
How to look up early plat records
If you’re interested in finding out when a street in Franklin County was named and who named it, the place to start is with the Franklin County Recorder, which keeps digitized records of plats — some dating to the early 19th century.
Gail Wilson, a surveyor with the Franklin County Engineer’s office, explained to The Dispatch how to access plat records.
First, visit the county engineer’s online GIS map at: www.franklincountyengineer.org/survey_data_control/. Find the oldest-dated plat that contains the roadway of interest. You can see the date when you click on any given plat. Then, note the plat book number and page.
Next, visit the Franklin County Recorder’s search page, https://franklin.oh.publicsearch.us/. In the search bar, enter the book number followed by a backslash, then the page number (e.g. 34/110 for book 34, page 110). In the search results, choose the document that says “plat”.
Note that some street names were changed after their original plat designation. Changes by Columbus city ordinance may be kept by the Columbus clerk, according to Jerry Ryser with the city’s Department of Public Service.
Peter Gill covers immigration, New American communities and religion for the Dispatch in partnership with Report for America. You can support work like his with a tax-deductible donation to Report for America at:bit.ly/3fNsGaZ.
pgill@dispatch.com
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Tibet Road, Peru Alley: Columbus' street names reflect greater world
