The Missing J Street Was Never L'Enfant's Grudge

The John Jay grudge is a myth. The 1792 map already skipped J, nobody wrote down why, and an 1855 engraver slipped one in by mistake.

Show Notes

Walk north from Lafayette Square and the streets go H, I, K. For more than two hundred years, people have blamed a grudge against John Jay, but the man they blame never named a single street.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2013/01/30/why-is-there-no-j-street/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

DC's Missing J Street Was Never L'Enfant's Grudge
Ghosts of DC

Walk north on Sixteenth Street from Lafayette Square.

H Street. I Street.

K Street.

There's no J. There never was. And for more than two hundred years, people have been trying to explain why.

There's a story about a grudge. A story about the metric system. A story about handwriting.

So who left J off the map of Washington?

And did anybody ever write down why?

Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice.

This one goes back to the early days of the blog, when a friend named Wayne emailed me the question everybody asks about this city.

The answer comes from twenty-four sources, from a seventeen fifty-five dictionary to a twenty twenty newspaper column in Anchorage. They're all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Let's start with the story you've probably heard.

Pierre L'Enfant, the French engineer who planned the city, couldn't stand John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So he left J off the map.

A grudge, written into the streets forever.

The motive usually offered is the Jay Treaty, a deal with Britain that a lot of Americans hated. Jefferson's side leaned toward France. L'Enfant was French.

It's a tidy story.

It falls apart on the dates.

The Jay Treaty was signed in seventeen ninety-four.

L'Enfant was let go in seventeen ninety-two. Jefferson wrote to him on February twenty-seventh of that year, and the key line was short.

Your services must be at an end.

So he was gone more than two years before the treaty existed.

And there's a bigger problem with the story.

L'Enfant never named the streets at all.

So who did?

In September of seventeen ninety-one, the new capital had three commissioners in charge. On September eighth, they settled two things. The city's name. And how to name its streets.

The next day, they wrote to L'Enfant from Georgetown. Here's the line that matters.

We have also agreed the streets be named alphabetically one way, and numerically the other.

That's it. Letters one way. Numbers the other.

Not a word about J.

And L'Enfant's own plan, the one at the Library of Congress, doesn't letter its streets at all.

A few months later, L'Enfant was out. The city's surveyor and his brothers redrew the plan, and in seventeen ninety-two it was engraved and printed in Philadelphia.

Check this out.

On that map, little letters climb north from the President's House. E. F. G. H. I.

K.

There it is. One of the first printed maps of Washington, and J is already gone.

No note. No explanation.

So if nobody wrote it down, what's the best guess?

There's a clever one involving the metric system. K Street, the street sitting where J should be, was planned extra wide, a hundred and forty-seven feet. And K is the symbol for a thousand. Kilo.

Clever.

Also impossible. France didn't adopt the metric system until seventeen ninety-five. Washington's lettered streets were decided in seventeen ninety-one.

The best explanation is simpler.

In the seventeen hundreds, I and J weren't quite separate letters. Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary, from seventeen fifty-five, files them together. I words and J words, mixed in one run.

Even in eighteen twenty-eight, Noah Webster's dictionary called J a recent addition to the English alphabet. Printers marked their sheets with an alphabet that treated I and J as one letter.

So to a lot of people back then, leaving out J may not have felt like leaving anything out.

And that's what Washington told itself for decades.

In nineteen eleven, a reader wrote to the Washington Times asking why there wasn't a J Street. In the same letter, the reader asked how to get rid of blackheads.

The paper answered both.

On J Street, the answer was that J and I look so much alike when written, it would be confusing to tell them apart.

On the blackheads, ether and green soap.

In nineteen twenty-two, the District's own surveyor's office, the people who named the streets, gave the same reason. And the War Department said that's why the Army had no Company J either.

Not everyone bought it. In nineteen fifty-one, an Evening Star columnist pushed back. Here's how he put it.

Really, it wasn't too good an idea, for it would have been confused no more than Q street is with O street.

Fair point.

And here's the thing. Nobody in seventeen ninety-one wrote down a reason. The first written explanation we could find came from a Washington judge in eighteen ninety-seven, more than a century later. Here's his wording.

Doubtless to prevent confusion from the resemblance of I and J when written.

Doubtless.

That's a guess. A good guess. But a guess. Even today, the National Park Service says the letter was most likely left out because it looks like an I.

Most likely.

But J did make it onto the map of Washington once. Just not on purpose.

There's an eighteen fifty-five map of the city at the Library of Congress. Find North Capitol Street, and read the street labels just to the west, going south.

L. J. I. H.

No K. The engraver put a J where K Street belongs. And the same slip turns up again on a map from eighteen sixty-two.

So for a few years, if you went by the map, Washington had a J Street. On paper, anyway.

Later, as the city grew past its original boundary, the new streets kept the alphabet going with names. Two syllables, then three. Those use J all the time. Jackson. Jefferson. Juniper.

But up in Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, the run goes Irving, then Kenyon.

No J there either. And nobody seems to know why.

Then there's Jay Street. Spelled out. It's in Northeast, east of the river.

In nineteen thirty-six, a reader wrote to the Washington Times insisting every old resident knew it was named for Chief Justice John Jay. We couldn't confirm that.

But if he's right, the man supposedly snubbed by the city got a street after all.

Now head out past Jay Street to Eastern Avenue, the line with Maryland.

Just across that line, in Fairmount Heights, there's a J Street. A real one. One letter.

Washington never got its J. Its neighbor did.

So that's the case of the missing J. Thanks for puzzling through this one with me.

That seventeen ninety-two map, the old newspaper clippings, and the eighteen fifty-five mistake are all on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

We dig up the lost and untold stories of Washington and the whole region.

This has been Ghosts of DC.