The other day folks on Twitter were wondering who the Hicks-Ellis Tunnel is named after. I tried to find out and couldn't. This is really weird, if you think about it. We name things after people to honor them, to try to ensure that a little bit of them will not be forgotten. But then we all forget who they are anyway.
Maybe Edwin and Percy Warner were famous enough nationally that a person with the internet can find out who they were, but folks like Mildred Shute, who obviously was deeply important to the city, or at least the neighborhood with a street and park named after her, are now unknown.
Someone in Metro must know why things were named what they were named. Couldn't the city put together a database and put it online? It wouldn't even need to be richly detailed, just a little something that would let a curious person know where to start — Douglass Park, named after, say, Joe Douglass, local park connoisseur who lived in the 19th century or whatever.
That way we could actually remember the folks we claim we're remembering with this great honor.
