HASSO HERING

The far (east) end of this footbridge leads to a house whose address is on 15th Avenue, which makes no cartographic sense at all.

Albany’s system of street mapping sometimes defies common sense, which explains why in a recent story I wrote a confusing description of  the footbridge you see in the photo above.

The bridge crosses Periwinkle Creek south of Lowe’s home improvement center. Its west end connects to the Periwinkle Creek Bikepath. That much is clear.

It’s on the other end, the end pointing east, where confusion ensued.

I couldn’t remember exactly which numbered avenue leads to the bridge from Geary Street, the nearest main road. So I looked on a Google map, which says the street at the end of the bridge is 15th Avenue. That is what I wrote in the Nov. 29 story about the bikepath and how clean it looked.

Wait a second, a commenter chimed in. The bridge leads to 12th Avenue, not 15th.

He’s correct if you want to reach that bridge to cross it from the east. You have to turn off Geary Street on 12th. If you turned on 15th, you would not get there.

But 12th west of Geary is only two blocks long before it turns left, or south. And what is it called then?

There are houses on that left turn. Their addresses are 1403 and 1410 15th Ave. SE. This makes no map sense because 15th Avenue should be running east and west, and it should be three blocks south of 12th, instead of just around the corner.

The reason for this anomaly is that Google extended 15th northward along an interior street in the Brookshore development, reaching north as far as its gate near 12th.

To add to the confusion, the street map on the City of Albany website calls that north-south interior street Brookshore Street SW. Yes, it says SW, even though it’s in the southeast quadrant of the city’s street-naming system.

So as I said, this is all a little confused. The good thing is that it doesn’t matter much. People who use that little footbridge know where it is. (hh)

This is where 12th Avenue turns into 15th, supposedly, according to Google’s map of Albany.

And this is the same area on the City of Albany map of streets and tax lots. The narrow rectangle on the left represents the footbridge.