Mospratt Street. The skin around my left eye twitches with stress whenever I begin to type the phrase. I don’t know how many S’s or T’s to use and whichever letter I double-up is the wrong one, no matter what source I check. I lose confidence and go on to spell street as Ssstreett.
There doesn’t seem to have ever been a definitive spelling. Mospratt Street co-creator Erika Hobbs referenced this quirk when she shared the Sanborn Map Company fire insurance map, Volume 4, 1912 – May, 1950. There, in parentheses and in a smaller font below the new name of Aberdeen, like a vestigial tail, it is spelled with one S and one T.
The Chicago Tribune, on page four of its Wednesday, September 30th, 1936 edition spelled it as Mosspratt, the S’s and the T’s side by side as if heading to an alphabetic arc. Spelled like this, the street appears in a story about an aldermanic subcommittee’s ordinance draft to “change the final group of 138 broken link and duplicate street names.”
I wonder if these aldermen were re-elected. I don’t think they did the best job because I live off Throop Street, which is about half a mile southwest of…Throop Street. That’s the Throop Street with St. Barbara’s, where my mother was baptized.
The Report of the Fire Marshal for the year ending December 31st, 1895, lists a building at 3314 Mossprat as having burned on September 13th of that year. An unnamed man was severely injured. 3314 is the Mospratt address later occupied by Erika’s maternal fore-bearers.
I’m sure one day I will discover it spelled Moßprat as well.
What accounts for all these spelling discrepancies? Transliterations? Dyslexic type-setters? Phonetic approximations? It’s easy to forget that one-hundred years ago it was still difficult to travel with ease and our neighborhoods were remained isolated from one another. Each one was self-contained with its own corner bars, its own grocers, its own places of worship and its own idiosyncrasies. Someone even from nearby Pilsen might have heard the name Mospratt without ever having seen it written in its own geography by those who walked it. Consistent spelling of streets beyond one’s own neighborhood hardly seemed a priority.
And why was Aberdeen chosen as the new name? The Bridgeport of the past was rich with the Irish and the Italians to the east, and the Poles and the Lithuanians to the west. But the Scottish? Although I favor tradition over change, I confess I prefer the “new” name. Aberdeen is soothing and evokes imagery of refreshing misty hills in a land far from the stockyards. Saying it aloud literally forces the mouth to smile.
With apologies to its cryptic etymology, Mospratt sounds like a tool one uses to hack at unwanted moist vegetation. One might pronounce the first syllable as we do the spore-bearing non-vascular plant. Or we might say it as in the Spanish for “more.”
The second syllable leaves us no such choice. The letter T stops the airflow at one’s teeth. Prat is British vernacular for an idiot. It also has a secondary meaning of buttocks. A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a sedentary prat just might.
Does the spelling matter? It does to Erika and me, because you have to spell it as we do in order to find us on the internet (and subscribe!). I think, otherwise, it does not matter. Nor ultimately does the reason behind the renaming of the street.
Names, labels, symbols and their ilk are as alive as you and I; they progress, regress, alter and fail to alter just as we do. We have private meanings for each of these things, and concurrently have a collective description of them so that we might know about what someone is talking.
“Meet me on Mospratt Street,” someone in 1940 might have said. “You mean Aberdeen,” might have come the reply.
“I remember Mospratt Street,” Erika might say, and then imagine Stephan Pekusko stocking the shelves of his store all those years ago.
Streets take on new names. They become something else to someone else. But the old names hang on, too, despite their erasure from the maps. They were something to someone once, and they remain something to someone still. Tomorrow there will be another name, another spelling, another remembrance.
Mospratt Street is your street, too.
Mospratt Street goes live on Lumpen Radio Nov. 5.
Do you know why Mospratt was renamed Aberdeen? Do you know the etymology of the name? Email us at mosprattstreet@gmail.com.