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I am a volunteer national tour guide in Washington DC. There is no J street in Washington DC, for the simple reason that during the time period in which Pierre L'enfant was planning Washington DC, the letters I and J looked almost the same typed, and when written were indistinguishable from each other. It would just be too confusing to have two street names that looked the same, right next to each other would be too confusing. For this same reason, the army has no J company. Some tour guides will tell you that Pierre L'enfant hated John Jay and deliberately left out J street in order to slight him, however there is no historical evidence to support this. In fact, in 1994 the Washington Post printed a story which completely dispelled the John Jay myth.
I found some online sources that can reinforce these facts:
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The legend is that the architecture, Pierre L'Enfant, did not include J Street in the alphabetical laying-out of DC streets due to his grudge against John Jay, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, for his ruling on on the "Jay Treaty".
But when this is considered historically, you will find that L'Enfant was fired from his job by George Washington before the Jay Treaty even happened, and was also supervised by a Board of Commissioners who more than likely wouldn't have let the personal feelings of an architect change the orderly plans they envisioned.
What is more likely to be the reason is the similarity between the letters J and I, when written in the style of the day. It was easy to confuse the two letters on an envelope to be delivered, and in the 18th century they were often used interchangably, so it would be considered redundant AND confusing to have both.
Plus it makes an interesting historical story!
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In Latin, "i" and "j" are usually treated as two forms of the same letter. You can see it on this coin:
On the back of the coin (right picture) the word on the left is "IVPPITER", meaning "Jupiter". The "u" and "v" were also treated as two forms of the same letter.
So, when it came to name the streets, they left out "j" because the Latin alphabet doesn't really have a "j" except as a variant of "i".
Nonetheless, we have both "U" and "V" streets in DC, partly because L'Enfant didn't design the streets out all the way to U Street and partly because people were inconsistent about the letters; sometimes they DID distinguish I/J and U/V.
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So the urban legen goes that L'eFant, who laid out the city plans had a beef againt John Jay, the first surpreme court chief justice and therefore ommitted J st. This however has been disproved (see link below for snopes.com article)
The most common accepted reason is that the letters "I" and "J" look too similar, especially when handwritten, and it was for this reason the street names were omitted.
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Anyway, I am old enough to remember that once-upon-a-time when we had rotary dial phones the letter "O" was not present. Which was especially curious because that was also back in the day when we had alpha exchanges, i.e., in New York "Murray Hill 3- 1234" was "683-1234" ANYWAY - there was no "O" because the worry was that the "O" would be used by mistake - as opposed to the "0" (numeric) or Operator...NOW don’t get me started on why the numeric "0" was used or a word (i.e, Operator) that started with a letter "O"...
My guess is that the "J" was too close to an "I" - I think it was also used in an interchangeable way with writing back then - much like the (believe it or not) "S" and that "_" key I cannot use!
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