The street that has existed for 150 years that never existed

I found something interesting while working on mapping historical streets in my hometown of Cincinnati. Take a look at Alexander St on J.H. Colton & Co.’s 1855 map, the oldest map I’m aware of that includes the street:

Colton 1855 showing Alexander St

Here’s how S. Augustus Mitchell depicted Alexander St on his 1860 map:

Mitchell 1860 showing Alexander St

And just for good measure, here it is in Mendenhall 1867, Phillips 1868, Titus 1869, Robinson 1884, Fisk c.1893, Mendenhall 1900, and Mendenhall 1927:

Mendenhall 1867 Phillips 1868 Titus 1869 Robinson 1884 Fisk c.1893 Mendenhall 1900 Mendenhall 1927

Why am I so interested in finding maps with this old street? Well, mainly because it doesn’t exist! In fact, it has never existed!

Don’t believe me? Here’s modern satellite imagery with elevation overlaid:

Aerial view of a steep hill covered in trees, with Rice St running next to it

(source: Ohio Statewide Imagery Program, USGS contours)

Supposedly Alexander St should appear to the southeast of Rice St (the street in the middle of the picture), running parallel to it for most of its length. I don’t know too much about road construction, but I don’t think a steep hill is a great place to do it.

So how did this road get on all those maps? Well, thanks to this 1883 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer about street name origins, we have some hints:

Text: "Alexander street" and "McGrew street" were named by Alexander MaGrew, who laid them out on his land. He was the leading watch-maker and jewler in Cincinnati sixty years ago. He was succeeded in business by his nephew.

So Alexander McGrew (who died in 1844) owned this hill, and he declared two streets to exist, and I guess that’s all you had to do back then to get a street named after yourself. It would seem they made it to the county recorder’s office, as I’ve found records of the street being used as the boundary for land plots. And it would seem that all the mapmakers followed suit.

I’ve seen paper streets before, but generally I expect them to be either copyright traps or planned streets in rural/developing areas – not in the urban core of a large city! I’ll take this as yet another lesson that even if something appears on many maps – even ones that promise they’re “from actual surveys” – it might look very different in the real world.

This initially caught my eye when I saw how Sanborn maps marked the street:

1891 Sanborn map, showing Alexander St and McGrew St with the subtitle "Not Opened". We can see there are no buildings on either street, and there's also curvy text in places reading "Very Steep Bluff" and "Steep Hillside".

I wondered what “Not Opened” means – turns out it means the street doesn’t exist (apparently “unopened right-of-way” is the legal terminology for this).

Despite all the maps these appear on, I think these probably shouldn’t be added to OHM – they wouldn’t be included in OSM, so why should OHM include them? Perhaps they could be added with a highway=proposed tag? Hmmm… if we were going to add them, we’d need to have an end_date… so I’ll need to figure out when they were removed from the map. When might that be?

Well, arguably, never. One last map for you – the official city of Cincinnati map, 2025:1

Screenshot of CAGIS online map showing Jackson Hill Park. Overlaid on the park are faint white lines showing property boundaries, and the supposed locations of the streets are plainly visible (although the streets aren't labeled).

Alright, technically the streets aren’t visible here, just the property boundaries of where the streets used to not-be. Still neat. ↩