Directions

[totient]

On the way home from a delicious dinner at Jean and Lee in Newton Upper Falls, I passed the famous West 16 South 3 East 2 sign at Alewife and got to wondering which way that road actually went. And the answer I came up with was "Widdershins". Literally true in the polar coordinate system of the Hub, but also expresses the very Boston concepts of "the navigation techniques you may be used to will not help you here", "no we're not going to call anything what you expect us to call it" and finally "driving down this road is probably bad luck".

Comments

[jasra]

It sounds like a kind of fun adventure!

[totient]

It was! Most of the fun was a nice walk at the nearby Cutler Park Reservation. But also Jean and Lee has a cumin lamb dish which is not to be missed, and their Steamed Buns with Braised Pork were incredible, and I'm quite curious about the rest of the menu. (The soup dumplings were only OK -- competently executed but too much of the flavor was in the ginger dipping sauce and that's hard to balance properly.)

[kevin_standlee]

I've driven on a West/East road a lot (a stretch of freeway that runs north-south by the compass in the Bay Area is simultaneously East I-80 and West I-580 (and vice versa)), but never a triple. I also think there's a quadruple out there somewhere.

[totient]

A lot of people think that, but none of them have been able to come up with it on forums for this sort of thing.

For a few years in the 1920s, Route 1 in New England was labeled East/West instead of its current North/South. It's possible that it contributed to a four-way concurrency at that time, but it'd be pretty hard to attest to that if it did.