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Downtown's Main Street isn't actually the city's historic principal thoroughfare, so how did it come to get its name, and which street actually was? Next, imagine heading to a bar called "7 Charity" instead of 7 Grand, and a time when the name Broadway was a moniker selected to evoke "American-ness."
The Natural History Museum recently launched a six-part video series that explains the origins of many of our street names, starting with this video and the man who first recorded those streets, Edward O.C. Ord. And yes, the man is a street, too, in Chinatown.