On yesterday’s ride home from work, I stopped to take this photo close to home. The road has been Uldriks Drive for the 30 years we’ve lived in the area, and probably for a lot longer than that. But a year or so ago this sign with a new name appeared: “1 Mile Road.” Uldriks has been demoted to smaller letters. Some of the roads in Calhoun County have long been named this-or-that mile road: 12 mile road for the north-south road 12 miles from the west edge of the county, and so on. But never before have I heard of this particular road being named 1 Mile Road.

Just a mile or so earlier, I had been listening to a part of Simon Winchester’s book, “Fracture Zone,” in which he told about the Sublime Porte in Istanbul. Here’s somebody’s blog entry about the place and the name.

Winchester says that for 300 years it represented the Ottoman Empire in a way that The White House represents the United States. (The above picture is lifted from Wikipedia, as is the one below.)

This is the Sublime Porte as it looks today. Winchester says it’s a fairly ordinary place now, a place that seems to be where one might go in to get a drivers license or library card. And the ultimate indignity? It’s now represented by a number on blue-and-white enamel plate attached to it (which I don’t see anywhere on this photo). Instead of being the Sublime Porte, it’s now 15 Some-Street-I-Can’t-Make-Out-On-Audio. Winchester concludes, “The mighty have fallen quickly and they have fallen far.”

When I heard that, I thought of the new sign on Uldriks Road. Something similar is happening to our county roads. Uldriks Avenue has fallen far if it’s now just a numbered road. So I stopped to take a photo before the old name is completely banished from the earth.

Yes, the numbers probably make it easier for police and fire departments to find, but is all that efficiency worth it?