AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) – For both drivers and pedestrians alike in Amarillo, sight-seeing and daily life are guided and garnished by a large collection of signs – stop signs, street names, neighborhood historic designations, and directional information included.
However, as Amarillo’s network of city streets has developed and become a familiar sight for its residents through the decades, a few attentive motorists have noticed peculiarities in a few of its street signs.
Here’s a look at a few of Amarillo’s misspelled or otherwise eye-catching street signs, how any apparent typos may have happened, and how they might be fixed.
Paramount Boulevard
Drivers around Amarillo may have noticed that the street sign for Paramount Boulevard at its Westhaven intersection is missing a “u”, making it “Paramont Boulevard” for a few square meters of the neighborhood road.
While some other signs around Amarillo feature official spellings that are just unusual or unfamiliar to the point they could be presumed to be mistakes, the Paramount and Westhaven sign appears to be a legitimate typo. Across the intersection, the Paramount and Westhaven signs are spelled correctly – and the street is registered in city documents as “Paramount” and not “Paramont,” supporting the idea of an unintentionally dropped letter on one of the signs.
Amarillo to Panhandle
Another confirmed instance of a misspelled road sign in the Amarillo area can be found on Lakeside Drive near the exit toward Panhandle, with a directional sign detailing the roads to Amarillo and Panhandle, respectively.
However, while the Paramount sign typo dropped a letter, this sign appears to have added one; instead of “Panhandle,” the directional sign reads “Panhanndle.”
Similar to its misspelled cousin, the sign’s typo can be confirmed through official map records. There is no town near Amarillo called “Panhanndle,” but “Panhandle” is the true destination referred to by the well-intentioned road marker.
The “misspelled” Pittsburg Street
Although there are street signs that have typos in the Amarillo area, not every bit of unusual spelling is unintended. Pittsburg Street may appear misspelled to those familiar with Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. However, the official city maps of Amarillo do drop the “h” in the name; according to mentions of the street in documents as early as a 1908 edition of the Palestine Daily Herald, the spelling has been in place since before the Pennsylvania town added the letter to its name.
While it is unclear whether or not Pittsburg Street in Amarillo was named after the city, “Pittsburgh” was not the official spelling in Pennsylvania until 1911. According to local newsletters, the “h” had previously been dropped in 1891 to align with federal rules on official place names. The Amarillo street could have also been named for Pittsburg, Texas, or its namesake, W.H. Pitts.
How do sign misspellings happen?
There are reasonably as many opportunities to misspell a street sign as there are people involved in its creation and construction.
Streets are generally named through the official processes of their specific governing bodies. As noted by the Texas Department of Transportation, that could mean a road being named through an act of the federal or state government – such as with numbered highways – or through a resolution or ordinance by a city that then gets approved by public service agencies and transportation officials before it is updated in official maps and registries.
Often, street names are submitted to city governments like in Amarillo by real estate and subdivision developers. Historically, as detailed in “Old Town Amarillo” by Judge John Crudgington, street names were sometimes originally decided by whoever drew the first maps of a community before being updated through the administrative process.
Applying for and approving a street name, like many other government actions, takes a lot of paperwork; there are several opportunities for simple clerical errors in filling out application forms, writing meeting agendas, marking approval letters and updating official maps and other documents. When those happen, a name could end up appearing on a map or street sign with a different spelling than originally intended because of a misprint or mistake far earlier in the administrative process.
Or, when one street sign is misspelled while the others for the street are not – like with “Paramont Boulevard,” it could have been a mistake with the signmaking process itself.
Governing bodies for streets, like cities or regional transportation departments, can award contracts to different signmaking companies. As with administrative paperwork, constructing street signs themselves requires a multi-step process including cutting steel or aluminum, painting, weather-proofing and adding reflective material that can involve several people. While TxDOT and the federal government have guidelines and manuals that must be followed for the size, design, construction and coloring of road signs, spell-checking might at times fall victim to an all-too-human error.
Can the typos be fixed? How?
With as much paperwork as there is involved in creating a street sign in the first place, there is a fairly equal amount of paperwork and administrative effort in updating one.
According to the Amarillo City Code of Ordinances, creating a new street sign or changing one to add a historic street name, commemoration, or changing the name – including fixing a typo – can only be done by certain people through a specific process.
In Amarillo, street name change applications can only be started by an owner of property abutting that street, the director of the planning department if the change will address public safety concerns, or by at least two agreeing city council members.
For fixing a typo or another non-safety-related change, the charter also states that the application must also be submitted with a petition indicating that at least 51% of the owners of all lots abutting the street section favor the name change.
After the application is submitted and processed by planning and zoning officials and accepted by them and/or the city council, in the case of Amarillo, it will generally be up to the city – or whatever governing body has jurisdiction over a particular road – to pay for repairs or replacements for road signs.
While only a few people may have the ability to directly apply for any given street name change or sign update, Amarillo did recently open a live-updating map of street and road-related suggestions for community members to use to leave comments and suggestions and to draw attention to issues around the area. That Amarillo Safe Streets & Roads Interactive Map can be found online here.