avenue

An avenue at Alexandra Park, London

In landscaping, an avenue or allée is traditionally a straight route with a line of trees or large shrubs running along each, which is used, as its French source venir ("to come") indicates, to emphasize the "coming to," or arrival at a landscape or architectural feature. In most cases, the trees planted in an avenue will be all of the same species or cultivar, so as to give uniform appearance along the full length of the avenue. The French term allée is confined normally to avenues planted in parks and landscape gardens.

History

Hobbema's Het Laantje van Middelharnis (1689)

A horse-chestnut avenue near a village of Łuskowo, Poland

The avenue is one of the oldest ideas in the history of gardens. An avenue of sphinxes still leads to the tomb of the pharaoh Hatshepsut (died 1458 BCE); see the entry Sphinx. Avenues similarly defined by guardian stone lions lead to the Ming tombs in China. British archaeologists have adopted highly specific criteria for "avenues"-avenue (archaeology), within the context of British archaeology.

In Garden à la française Baroque landscape design, avenues of trees that were centered upon the dwelling radiated across the landscape. See the avenues in the Gardens of Versailles or Het Loo. Other late 17th century French and Dutch landscapes, in that intensely ordered and flat terrain, fell naturally into avenues; Meindert Hobbema, in The Avenue at Middelharnis, 1689, presents such an avenue in farming country, neatly flanked at regular intervals by rows of young trees that have been rigorously limbed up; his central vanishing point mimics the avenue's propensity to draw the spectator forwards along it.^[1]

Street name

In 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" and so on, each of which may carry connotations as to the street's size, importance, or function.

In cities which have a grid plan, such as the borough of Manhattan in New York City, there may be a convention that avenues run in one direction – roughly north-south in the case of Manhattan – while street run in the perpendicular direction – roughly east-west in Manhattan. In Washington, DC the avenues run diagonally across the grid of streets. 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.

Trees portal

References

Notes

External links

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Avenue.

• Media related to Avenues at Wikimedia Commons