:: Seventy-one percent of the surface streets in the city run within one degree of north-south or east-west. The most noteworthy exception is Algonquin Avenue, which changes direction by more than five degrees 16 times along its length.
:: The Bedford Gate, marking the point where Essen Boulevard enters West Arcadia, was erected in 1963, and opened to vehicular traffic in 1973.
:: As of December 31, the total number of potholes in city streets contained an estimated volume of 480,000 cubic feet, or roughly the volume of St. Albert’s Cathedral on Lourdes Avenue.
:: Algonquin Avenue has more stoplights (59) than any other street in the city.
:: From 1912 until 1959, Hornbeck Bridge contained the longest unsupported span in the city. That distinction now belongs to the entrance ramp to the Drummond Expressway from Darrow Blvd., where it crosses 19th street.
:: Ralston’s Furniture on South Denison St. at Dartmoor Avenue has replaced the window in their display case 12 times in the last four years.
:: If all the surface streets in the city were laid end-to-end, they would reach to Reykjavik, Iceland and halfway back.
:: Dartmoor Avenue has the greatest angle of incline in the city, sloping upward 29 and ½ feet in the two blocks from Denison St. to Haven St.
:: The first color photograph ever published in a local newspaper, the now-defunct Union-Star-Sentinel-Telegraph-Bee Gazette, was a photograph of an automobile accident at the corner of Algonquin Avenue and Henderson St. in 1967.
:: The Ralston Point Civil Rights Monument, in the neighborhood of Ralston Point, commemorates the civil disturbance in 1963 that claimed two lives and caused nearly two hundred injuries with over a million dollars in property damage. It stands in the median of Essen Blvd., thirty feet east of West Arcadia.
:: Native Americans of the Algonquin tribe have never lived in this area.
– D. Andrews