8. Fruit Streets of Brooklyn
In Brooklyn Heights, three short, east-west streets are named after fruit: Cranberry, Orange, and Pineapple Streets. As covered in a previous Untapped Cities article, there are two competing theories as to how these streets just south of the Brooklyn Bridge got their names. One theory from NYC Parks attributes the tropical goods to local landowner Lady Middagh, who has a street named after her family just north of Cranberry Street. She was upset with the neighborhood’s streets being named after local aristocratic families (her own aristocratic family name must have slipped past her sense of irony), and tore down the street signs and installed her own.
The other theory, posed by the New York Times, places the seeds for these street names with the Hicks brothers, who unsurprisingly also have a street named after them in the neighborhood. The Hicks also owned real estate in the area and sold exotic fruits here, placing the street names to represent this commercial activity.
