Long before Queens officials thought of doing it, the city of Williamsburgh laid out streets that were all numbered, with the odd rare named street here and there. North-south streets were numbered 1 to 12 beginning at the street closest to the East River and running east. Then there were two sets of east-west numbered streets, North 1-15th and South 1-11th, divided by Grand Street, which runs between North 1st and South 1st. For many years, Metropolitan Avenue was called North 2nd, which is absent from modern maps.
This led to some unusual and ultimately confusing intersections, such as 2nd Street and North 2nd Street and so on, so sometime between 1860 and 1890 (I haven’t nailed the year down) the City of Brooklyn, which by that time had annexed Williamsburgh and dropped the h, decided to give names to the north-south streets, which became Kent, Wythe, Berry, Bedford and so on.
There are still some reminders of the all-numbered era on building street signs, like this one at Wythe and North 8th.
12/18/12