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HOMEtown Reflections
The original Grosvenor Park survey in the 1913 Yorath Plan map.
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - Acc. 2016-001
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STREET NAMING IN SASKATOON
BY: JEFF O’BRIEN
From First Avenue to 117th Street, from A.E. Adams Way to Zimmer Court, from Avenue A to Avenue Z (yes, there was once an Avenue Z planned), they’re the streets we live on. What we name them says a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves in a changing world.
Saskatoon’s Oldest Streets
The oldest street in what is now the city of Saskatoon was the trail that led from Whitecap (Moose Woods, as it was then called) to Batoche, part of a network of prairie highways that had been used for trade and travel for generations before European settlement. In Saskatoon, it travelled up Broadway, followed the river along University Drive, then headed north where the University Gates are today. Settlement-era trails include the Bone Trail, on the west side of the river leading toward Delisle, and the Battleford Trail, which you guessed it, led to Battleford. These settlement and pre-settlement era roads are mostly gone now, built on, ploughed over and cut by fences. A bit of the Moose Jaw Trail has been preserved in Mark Thompson Park in Stonebridge. The route of the Battleford Trail, which went out 22nd Street and turned northwest at about Avenue P, remains in the road that runs southeast from Dalmeny Drive down into the new Elk Point subdivision.
Like Warman Road (literally, the road to Warman) these names derive from usage. Traditionally, this is how streets got named. Fish Street probably had a fish market. Church Street? You
guessed it. But in newer cities like Saskatoon, and in the newer parts of older cities, names are more likely to be arbitrarily assigned.
Nutana and the Temperance Colonists
Saskatoon’s first modern streets were laid out in 1883 by the Temperance Colonization Society (TCS) in the present-day Nutana neighbourhood. Broadway was the widest street in the colony townsite. Main Street—nowadays a sleepy, tree-lined residential street— led to the first ferry crossing, built in 1884. Otherwise, the Nutana street names are reflective of the life and times of the Temperance colonists. Victoria is named for the Queen. Temperance, of course, is a nod to the Temperance Movement, ostensibly the
A "street" on Saskatoon's pre-First World War fringe.
guiding purpose behind the colonization venture. The Marquises of Lorne and Dufferin, and the Earl of Lansdowne, were Canada’s governors-general from 1878–1888. McPherson was the federal Minister of the Interior who authorized the
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH 5265
Temperance Colony land grant. Eastlake and Melrose were originally named for John Lake and George Rose, the TCS chief land agent and president, respectively. When and why the other syllables were tacked on is a mystery. Nutana is also home to Saskatoon’s only unofficiallynamed street, Cherry Lane, which is really the alley behind 11th Street between Victoria and McPherson. It was named for the chokecherries that grew along the river slopes and the flats there.
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Saskatoon’s western fringe in 1955, completely surveyed by 1913 but not built on until 1955.
Photo Credit: CoS Archives - 1103-04-2-003
The Boom Era
Saskatoon boomed in the years just before the First World War. From 1907–1913, dozens of new subdivisions were surveyed and brought to market, both within city limits and for miles outside. These required hundreds of new street names.
Nowadays, the naming of streets is tightly controlled. But in those days, developers just wrote down any old name they felt like. As a result, there’s no definitive source for many of the street names from this period. John Duerkop, in the book
Saskatoon’s History in Street
Names, lists 41 streets for which he couldn’t find the origin. Included in this list were otherwise quite well known names like Preston Avenue and Rusholme Road. But Duerkop was writing more than 20 years ago. Today, thanks to the magic of the internet, it seems fairly certain that these two names, as well as several others, were taken from streets in London, England.
In Saskatoon, as the saying goes, we’ve always been able to “Rusholme and P.” Now we finally know why.
Even with the internet, the origin of the name ‘Idylwyld’ is a mystery. It first shows up as a neighbourhood name in 1912. Later it was applied to the new freeway. But while there are several other streets and parks with similar names, including in places like Guelph and
Cambridge, nothing jumps out as the source for our Idylwyld. The best answer, or at any rate, our favourite, may be the one proposed many years ago, that it’s where “the men are idle and the women are wild.”
Post-War Expansion
After the Second World War, Saskatoon grew enormously, spilling out over its historic boundaries and into the surrounding countryside. Lots of those old boom-era subdivisions still existed (as lines on a map in Land Titles) and had to be cancelled to make way for the new ones. But even though they’re gone, their names frequently live on. Streets like Highlands, Highbury, Leland and Penryn in Wildwood, for example, are all old subdivision names, and the streets in Meadow
Photo Credit: Local History Room - Saskatoon Public Library - LH 4832
Green, like Wardlow and Appleby, are street names from some of these vanished neighbourhoods. For obvious reasons, Swastika Park, a proposed industrial subdivision in the north end, never made the cut. Sadly, neither did Utopia or the gloriously-named Megantic Park, a tiny subdivision that once occupied the southeast corner of Preston and Louise.
Getting Familiar
After the Second World War, there was more emphasis placed on names with local connections. In Grosvenor Park and Brevoort Park, we got names of early settlers. The streets in Greystone are named for University of Saskatchewan professors. There are real estate men a-plenty, particularly dating from the boom-era, as well as mayors and members of city
council, the Sutherland town council and the RM of Cory (now part of Corman Park). Stonebridge is thick with municipal names, including a dozen or so named for Saskatoon city councillors from before 1920, as well as some more modern ones, and several high-ranking members of the civic administration.
Local builders are also well-represented in Saskatoon’s streets. James Arrand oversaw construction of the Broadway Bridge, a project in which A.W. Heise was also involved. Both men now have streets named for them in Parkridge. Mike Boychuk was an Eatoniaarea farmer who built his first house in Saskatoon just after the Second World War, then never looked back.
One early pioneer who never made the list was Louis Gougeon. He was the engineer aboard the steamship the ‘May Queen’ on its one and only trip to Saskatoon. He liked it here so much, he stayed. Gougeon’s name was originally applied to a cul-de-sac in Brevoort Park. But residents there in 1965 demanded it be changed as it was “too difficult to pronounce.” We wonder what they would have thought of Pawlychenko, Taube, Stechishin, Feheregyhazi and Wakabayashi, all of which can be found on street signs here today.
The Alphabet Streets
Saskatoon alphabet street names—Avenue A, Avenue B, etc., all the way up to Avenue Y—first appeared on city maps when Riversdale was laid out in 1903. Why they used letters of the alphabet is not known. Even the internet couldn’t help us with this one. There are several American cities with streets named for letters, including the famous “Alphabet City” area of Manhattan. But whether there’s a connection between it and Riversdale, we’ll probably never know. The other thing we’ll never know is why there’s no Avenue Z. Although you can find it on some of the old subdivision plans, it never made it onto an actual street.
Sutherland’s Numbers
A potentially confusing legacy of Saskatoon’s past are the numbered streets in
NAME DROPPING
Members of the public can submit naming suggestions for streets, parks and civic facilities. For more information and an online form, see the City of Saskatoon website at www.saskatoon.ca/community-cultureheritage/neighbourhoods-communityassociations/naming-saskatoon
Sutherland, which start at 102nd and go up to 117th. A visitor, noting that the numbered streets otherwise end at 71, might wonder what happened to the rest of them. The answer is that until 1956, Sutherland was a separate town. When it joined Saskatoon, it already had numbered streets. To avoid duplication, they just added a hundred to each one.
The Changing Face of Saskatoon
In fact, it’s only been in the last generation that our street names have begun to show Saskatoon as it actually is, instead of as an appendage of the British Empire.
But there are still only a handful of street names that explicitly reflect Saskatoon’s Indigenous and Metis heritage. This includes Riel and Dumont Crescents in Nutana Park, Whitecap and Batoche Crescents in Parkridge and Trotchie Crescent in Silverwood. The naming of the new North Commuter Bridge after Chief Mistawasis in 2018 has given new impetus to the use of Indigenous and Metis names and words for Saskatoon’s streets. Names like “shakamohtaa” (a Michif word meaning “connection”) and “amisk” (Cree for beaver) have already been tapped for street names in new neighbourhoods. More will soon follow.
Jeff O’Brien
