Famous Streets

Baker Street is one of the most known streets in the world, based in London. It forms part of the A41. It is most famous for its connection to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who lived at 221B Baker Street, an address that does not actually exist. The street is named for builder William Baker who laid the street out in the eighteenth century. It was originally a high class residential address, but now is mainly occupied by commercial premises.

Baker St is in postcode areas NW1/W1 and is a busy thoroughfare. It runs south from Regent's Park, the intersection with Park Road, parallel to Gloucester Place, intersecting Marylebone Road, York Street, Portman Square and Wigmore Street. At the intersection with Wigmore St, Baker St turns into Orchard Street, which ends when it intersects with Oxford Street.

The street is served by the London Underground by Baker Street tube station; next to the station is Transport for London's lost property office. Baker Street Station is the world's first underground station.

A significant robbery of a Lloyds Bank took place on Baker Street in 1971.

In 1835, the first permanent exhibition of Madame Tussauds waxworks was opened on Baker St. The museum moved, just around the corner, to Marylebone Road in 1884.

In 1940 the headquarters of the Special Operations Executive moved to 64 Baker Street, Marks and Spencer office; they were often called the "Baker Street Irregulars" after Sherlock Holmes's gang of street urchins of the same name.

The Beatles Apple Corp was based at 94 Baker Street,

The head office of Marks and Spencer, formerly the UK's largest retailer, was at "Michael House" (named in parallel with the group's "St Michael" brand) in Baker Street for many years until the company relocated to the Paddington Basin in 2004. This was one of the best known corporate buildings in the UK. It is expected that Michael House will be demolished and replaced with a new mixed use development.

British singer Dusty Springfield lived on Baker St in the 1960s.

In fiction, Sherlock Holmes, DangerMouse, Sexton Blake, Basil the Great Mouse Detective and James Black (Case Closed) have all resided along the road.

“Baker Street” was a song by Gerry Rafferty, released in 1978; the song is particularly noted for its saxophone solo.

The original title of "A Samba for Sherlock", by Jo Soares, makes a mention to the street: "O Xango de Baker Street".

The street was also mentioned by the progressive rock band Jethro Tull in the song "Baker Street Muse" and by H.G. Wells at the end of The War of the Worlds.

The 2008 film, The Bank Job was based on the 1971 robbery of Lloyds Bank in Baker Street

Beale Street is a street in Memphis, Tennessee, which runs from the Mississippi River to East Street, and last for 1.8 miles. It is a significant location in African-American history and the history of the blues. Today, the blues clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street are major tourist attractions in Memphis. Festivals and outdoor concerts periodically bring large crowds to the street and its surrounding areas. As of August 2007, local media reports point to an increase in violent crime on the part of nightclub security guards and clientele at this tourist destination. Panhandling is also seen as a problem at this time. Though given an exemption by the state of Tennessee to keep clubs open until 5 am, there is now an effort to scale back the hours of operation to reflect a 3 am closing time.

Beale Street was created in 1841 by entrepreneur and developer Robertson Topp (1807-1876), who named it for a forgotten military hero. The original name was Beale Avenue. Its western end primarily housed shops of trade merchants, who traded goods with ships along the Mississippi River, while the eastern part developed as an affluent suburb. In the 1860s, many black traveling musicians began performing on Beale. The first of these to call Beale Street home were the Young Men's Brass Band, who were formed by Sam Thomas in 1867.

In the 1870s the population of Memphis was decimated by a series of Yellow Fever epidemics, leading the city to forfeit its charter in 1879. During this time Robert Church purchased land around Beale Street that would eventually lead to his becoming the first black millionaire from the south. In 1890, Beale Street underwent renovation with the addition of the Grand Opera House, later known as the Orpheum. In 1899, Robert Church paid the city to create Church Park at the corner of 4th and Beale. It became a recreational and cultural center, where blues musicians could gather. A major attraction of the park was an auditorium that could seat 2,000 people. Some of the famous speakers in the Church Park Auditorium were Woodrow Wilson, Booker T. Washington, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In the early 1900s, Beale Street had a huge amount of clubs, restaurants and shops, many of them owned by African-Americans. In 1889, NAACP co-founder Ida B. Wells was a co-owner and editor of an anti-segregationist paper called Free Speech based on Beale. Beale Street Baptist Church, Tennessee's oldest surviving African American Church edifice built in 1864, was also important in the early civil rights movement in Memphis.

In 1905 Mayor Thornton was looking for a music teacher for his Knights of Pythias Band, and called Tuskeegee Institute to talk to his friend, Booker T. Washington, who recommended a trumpet player in Clarksdale, Mississippi, named W.C. Handy. Mayor Thornton contacted Mr. Handy, and Memphis became the home of the famous musician who created the "Blues on Beale Street". Mayor Thornton and his three sons also played in Handy's band.

In 1909, W.C. Handy wrote "Mr. Crump" as a campaign song for political machine leader E. H. Crump. The song was later renamed "Memphis Blues". Handy also wrote a song called "Beale Street Blues" in 1916 which influenced the change of the street's name from Beale Avenue to Beale Street. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Albert King, Memphis Minnie, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, Rosco Gordon and other blues and jazz legends played on Beale Street and helped develop the style known as Memphis Blues.

In 1938 Lewis O. Swingler, editor of the Memphis World Newspaper, a Negro newspaper, in an effort to increase circulation, conceived the idea of a "Mayor of Beale St.", having readers vote for the person of their choice. Matthew Thornton, Sr., a well-known community leader, active in political, civic and social affairs and one of the charter members of the Memphis Branch of the NAACP, won the contest against nine opponents and received 12,000 of the 33,000 votes cast. Mr. Thornton was the original "Mayor of Beale St." an honorary position that he retained until he died in 1963 at the age of 90.

In the 1960s, Beale became run down and many stores closed, although on May 23, 1966, the section of the street from Main to 4th was declared a National Historic Landmark. On December 15, 1977, Beale Street was officially declared as the "Home of the Blues" by an act of Congress. Despite this national recognition of its historic significance, it was not until the the 1980s that Beale Street received attention from local lawmakers, which led to an economic revitalization, with many new clubs and attractions opening. The street is now home to a chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

During the first weekend of May (sometimes including late April), the Beale Street Music Festival brings major music acts from a variety of musical genres to Tom Lee Park at the end of Beale Street on the Mississippi River. The festival is the kickoff event of a month of festivities citywide known as Memphis in May.

Fifth Avenue is a major street in the center of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Lined with expensive park-view real estate and historical mansions, it is a place for rich people in New York. Between 34th Street and 59th Street, it is also one of the premier shopping streets in the world, on par with Oxford Street in London, the Champs-Élysées in Paris and Via Montenapoleone in Milan.

It is ranked as one of the most expensive streets in the world, on a par with Paris, London, and Tokyo lease prices: the "most expensive street in the world" moniker changes depending on currency fluctuations and local economic conditions from year to year. For several years starting in the mid-1990s, the shopping district between 49th and 57th Streets was ranked as having the world's second most expensive retail spaces on a cost per square foot basis after London's Sloane Street.

Fifth Avenue originates at Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village and runs northwards through the heart of Midtown, along the eastern side of Central Park, through the Upper East Side and Harlem, where it terminates at the Harlem River at 142nd Street. Traffic crosses the river on the Madison Avenue Bridge.

Fifth Avenue is the dividing line for streets in Manhattan. It separates East Fifty-ninth Street from West Fifty-ninth Street. As the zero-numbering point for its street addresses, numbers increase in both directions as one moves away from Fifth Avenue, with 1 East Fifty-ninth Street on the corner at Fifth Avenue, and 300 East Fifty-ninth Street located three blocks to the east of it.

The high status of Fifth Avenue was confirmed in 1862, when Caroline Schermerhorn Astor settled on the southwest corner of Thirty-fourth Street, and the beginning of the end of its reign as a residential street was symbolized by the erection, in 1893, of the Astoria Hotel on the site of her house, later linked to its neighbor as the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel (now the site of the Empire State Building). Fifth Avenue is the central scene in Edith Wharton's 1920 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Age of Innocence. The novel describes New York's social elite in the 1870s and provides historical context to Fifth Avenue and New York's aristocratic families.

Originally a narrower thoroughfare, much of Fifth Avenue south of Central Park was widened in 1908, sacrificing its wide sidewalks to accommodate the increasing traffic. The midtown blocks, now famously commercial, were largely a residential district until the turn of the twentieth century. The first commercial building on Fifth Avenue was erected by Benjamin Altman who bought the corner lot on the northeast corner of Thirty-fourth Street in 1896, and demolished the "Marble Palace" of his arch-rival, A. T. Stewart. In 1906 his department store, B. Altman and Company, occupied the whole of its block front. The result was the creation of a high-end shopping district that attracted society ladies and the upscale stores that wished to serve them. Lord & Taylor's flagship store is still located on Fifth Avenue near the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library.

In the early part of the 1900s, the very rich of New York migrated to the stretch of Fifth Avenue between Fifty-ninth Street and Ninety-sixth Street, the stretch where Fifth Avenue faces Central Park. This area contains many highly notable apartment buildings, many of them built in the 1920s by architects such as Rosario Candela and J. E. R. Carpenter. A very few post-World War II structures break the unified limestone frontage, notably the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum between Eighty-eighth and Eighty-ninth Streets.

Fifth Avenue carries one-way traffic downtown (southbound) from 135th Street to Washington Square Park, with the changeover from two-way traffic taking place on January 14, 1966, at which time Madison Avenue was changed to one way uptown (northbound). Two-way traffic on Fifth Avenue is allowed north of 135th Street only. From 124th Street to 120th Street, Fifth Avenue is cut off by Marcus Garvey Park, with southbound traffic diverted around the park via Mount Morris Park West.

Fifth Avenue is one of the few major streets in Manhattan along which streetcars did not run. Instead, Fifth Avenue Coach offered a service more to the taste of fashionable gentlefolk, at twice the fare.

Fifth Avenue is the traditional route for many celebratory parades in New York City; thus, it is closed to traffic on numerous Sundays in warm weather. These are distinct from the ticker-tape parades held on the "Canyon of Heroes" on lower Broadway, and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade held on Broadway from the Upper West Side downtown to Herald Square.

The latino literary classic by New Yorker Giannina Braschi, entitled "Empire of Dreams," takes place on the Puerto Rican Day Parade on 5th Avenue.

Bicycling on Fifth Avenue ranges from safe with a bike lane south of 23rd Street, to scenic along Central Park, to dangerous through Midtown with very heavy traffic during rush hours.

Madison Avenue is a north-south avenue in the borough of Manhattan in New York City that carries northbound one-way traffic. It runs from Madison Square (at 23rd Street) to the Madison Avenue Bridge at 138th Street. In doing so, it passes through Midtown, the Upper East Side (including Carnegie Hill), Spanish Harlem, and Harlem. It is named for and arises from Madison Square, which is itself named for James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. Since the 1920s, the street's name has been synonymous with the American advertising industry.

Madison Square Garden takes its name from the former location on the north east corner of Madison Square at 26th Street and Madison Avenue. (The New York Life Insurance Building now occupies that entire city block.) It was designed by Stanford White and had a bronze statue of the Roman goddess Diana on the tower of the sports arena. When it moved to a new building at 50th Street and Eighth Avenue in 1925 it kept its old name. (Madison Square Garden is now located at Eighth Avenue between 31st Street and 33rd Street).

Between 57th Street and 85th Street, Madison Avenue is identified as “the fashionable road”. In this area is where most of the very well known fashion designers and upper class hair salons are located.

Madison Avenue was not part of the original New York City street grid established in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811, and was carved between Park Avenue (formerly Fourth) and Fifth Avenue in 1836, due to the effort of lawyer and real estate developer Samuel B. Ruggles, a graduate of Yale University who had previously purchased and developed New York's Gramercy Park in 1831, who was in part responsible for the development of Union Square, and who also named Lexington Avenue.

Madison Avenue carries one-way traffic uptown (northbound) from 23rd Street to 135th Street, with the changeover from two-way traffic taking place on January 14, 1966, at which time Fifth Avenue was changed to one way downtown (southbound).

The term "Madison Avenue" is often used metonymously for advertising, and Madison Avenue became identified with the advertising industry after the explosive growth in this area in the 1920s.

According to "The Emergence of Advertising in America", an online exhibit at the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University, by the year 1861 there were twenty advertising agencies in New York City, and in 1911, the New York City Association of Advertising Agencies was founded, predating the establishment of the American Association of Advertising Agencies by several years.

Among various depictions in popular culture, the portion of the advertising industry which centers on Madison Avenue serves as a backdrop for the critically-acclaimed AMC television drama Mad Men, which focuses on industry activities during the 1960s.

In recent decades, many agencies have left Madison Avenue, with some moving further downtown and others moving west. Today, only a few agencies are still located in the old business cluster on Madison Avenue, including Young & Rubicam and Doyle Dane Bernbach. However, the term is still used to describe the agency business as a whole and large, New York-based agencies in particular.