Germany: street names - Grosse Bleiche (bleaching lawn)

I just finished reading a blog post by ‘The guy’ at www.flightsandfrustration.com. He wrote a nice review of a quaint 1920s hotel in Hamburg.  According to the post, the hotel is located on a street called ‘Grosse Bleichen’.

That started me thinking… As I roam through Europe, especially Germany, I often wonder how the streets got their names. It is quite obvious many of the streets are named for German industrialists (Bosch, Siemens, Daimler) while others are named for famous people (Schweitzer, Goethe, Gutenberg).

Other names are clearly meant to provide travelers with directional information. Apparently any street which is named for a town or city leads directly to that place. For instance, the ’Mainzer Landstrasse’ leads from the countryside into the city of Mainz (‘land’ means countryside). Similarly, ‘Hauptstrasse’ means main street, ‘Bahnhofstrasse’ means trainstation street, and so it goes.

However, there is also a classification of street names which are even more descriptive; and, I find, quite intriguing. ‘Grosse Bleichen’ is one of those names.  In the ‘oldest’ part of almost any old town or city in Germany, you will find a group of streets which bear some form of the word ‘bleiche’.

In Mainz, for instance, there is an entire old district named the Bleichenviertel. The streets in this quarter are named: Große Bleiche, Mittlere Bleiche und Hintere Bleiche (that is: the big bleiche, the middle bleiche, and behind the bleiche).

The word ‘bleiche‘ means ‘bleach’. In Mainz from the Middle Ages to the 17^th century, the Bleichenverteil – a relatively flat area which was located near two streams of water - was the area where the women of the town and the laundresses from the military hospital took their newly washed, wet laundry and laid it on the lawns (meadows) to dry ... and to be bleached by the sun!! As a result that area was called the ‘bleaching lawns’.

While I do not remember such descriptive street names in the upstate New York area where I grew up in the USA, I do however remember the names of the towns which were indicative of the trades of the people who lived there: ‘Gloversville’ (the people made gloves), ‘Tannersville’ (the people tanned the leather to make the gloves and other leather products), Mechanicsville (these were the master craftsmen: millers, carpenters, butchers who worked in what was called the Mechanical Arts in the early 1890s). 

I also remember that the names came from not just one, but from many sources. The Dutch (Spuyten Duyvil, Stuyvesant, Kinderhook, Amsterdam, Bleecker), the British (York, Albany, Charlestown, Jamestown) and of course, because the Dutch and the English were not the original settlers of the area, many of the villages, towns as well as the streams, lakes and rivers bear names bestowed upon them by the Native Americans tribes who lived there: Wappinger, Tuckahoe, Ticonderoga, Taghkanic, Susquehanna, Saratoga, Saranac, Sagaponack, Nyack, Niagara, Copake,  Cossayuna, Coxsackie Canandaigua, etc. And, for some odd reason, even to this day if you visit towns in the Hudson valley south of Albany, you will find lots of families with Dutch family names.

While I think it is really nice to understand the derivation of German words, it makes quite proud to think about how multi-cultural my homeland is… and has been since ‘the beginning’.