Today I received an email via this website from someone off-Island (Western Canada, I believe) who related a story of visiting Charlottetown in the early 1970s only to spend the wee hours of the night wandering the city, vainly attempting to locate a B&B that had been booked in advance. This person claims to have been on somewhat of a wild goose chase because there “weren’t any road signs or numbers on the houses”.
I think it’s highly unlikely Charlottetown as a whole had no street signs or house numbers just 35 years ago, but as I explained to this person, I was still in diapers at the time.
I immediately employed the services of a reference librarian using the Isle Ask service and received a well-researched sameday response, but without any definitive answer. It read in part:
I looked at a few PEI Accomodations guides, telephone directories, and city maps from the early 1970s, and also at the “History throught the headlines” millenium issue of The Guardian and its Charlottetown 150th (2005) booklet. Nothing in any of these sources suggests any irregularity with Charlottetown street signage or house numbering in the 1970s. I did find a 1975 PEI government report on subdivision growth in the “greater Charlottetown area” (which then included Bunbury/Southport, Parkdale/Sherwood, the Royalties, and North River area) which noted that the explosion of badly-regulated subdivision growth since the late 1960 was causing lots of problems : street signage is not mentioned, but perhaps the person who contacted you got lost in a new subdivision …?
Another possibility that comes to mind (though this is pure speculation on my part) is that all, or part, of Charlottetown was then using the old blue metal street signs that you can still see mounted on the sides of some old corner houses. They’re very pretty, I think, but they would have been hard to see, especially for a stranger wandering in the dusk/dark.
There was also a suggestion I contact Catherine Hennessey or Frank Zakem, either of whom would probably be a big help. I think I might just do that. Meanwhile, if anyone else can shed some light on our purported unmarked streets of the ’70s, I would appreciate it, as would my new Western Canadian friend who has apparently been wondering about this for decades.
“Another possibility that comes to mind (though this is pure speculation on my part) is that all, or part, of Charlottetown was then using the old blue metal street signs that you can still see mounted on the sides of some old corner houses. They’re very pretty, I think, but they would have been hard to see, especially for a stranger wandering in the dusk/dark.”
That was my first thought as well. Although I do seem to recall that, growing up back in the seventies, many of the streets in the ‘hood were lacking the familiar green & white markers. I always assumed that they had been knocked off by a snow plow or something and they just hadn’t gotten around to replacing the signs.