OLEAN Street, in the heart of Brooklyn in Midwood, runs for two diagonal blocks between East 22nd and East 24th Streets between Avenues N and O. In a confusing situation it was once called Ocean Avenue…a separate route from the Ocean Avenue which runs between Prospect Park and Sheepshead Bay in the line of East 20th Street.
So if it’s not called Ocean Avenue here, why Olean? I can harbor a guess.
Running north-south between Bedford-Stuyvesant and Flatbush are several streets named for prominent cities in New York state. New York itself gets the ball rolling, followed by Brooklyn (which was a separate city when the avenue was named), Kingston, Albany, Troy, Schenectady, Utica, Rochester, and Buffalo. (Strangely, Syracuse is skipped.) The order after Brooklyn seems to follow the Hudson north to Albany, and then west, roughly along Interstate 90 (the New York State Thruway) to Buffalo, but when the streets were laid out in the 1800s, the Mohawk River or Erie Canal was likely the route followed in naming the streets.
The best educated guess I can figure is that, in order to not confuse ‘this’ Ocean Avenue with ‘that’ Ocean Avenue, it was decided to change a letter, from Ocean to Olean. Your guess is as good as mine as to why Olean, but with Brooklyn’s penchant for naming main streets after NY State towns…maybe they decided to name a little street after a little town…
Olean is a town of about 20,000 souls in western New York near the Pennsylvania border. The closest town of bigger size is Jamestown, NY, where Lucille Ball and the 1980s folk rock band 10,000 Maniacs came from.
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10/10/22