Government
Louise’s Lane Man Seeks To Remove Apostrophe-S from Street Name, Sign
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New Canaan traffic officials said Tuesday that they received a request from a Louise’s Lane man to remove the apostrophe-S from the street’s name and sign. The resident also asked whether a more decorative sign than the standard white-lettering-on-green could be installed at the head of the short, dead-end lane that runs south off of upper Oenoke Ridge Road, according to Police Capt. John DiFederico. “He has two requests—one was to change the name to just ‘Louise Lane,’ and the other was to change the street sign itself to make it more decorative and appealing,” DiFederico said at a meeting of the Traffic Calming Work Group, an administrative team of police, public works, emergency management and fire officials that fields such requests. One of the reasons that New Canaan would be careful about pursuing any change to a street name—even one of punctuation—is that the names themselves have been carefully selected (see a full database here of the history of New Canaan street names). In the case of Louise’s Lane, according to a 1960 annual of the New Canaan Historical Society, the street “was laid out in 1950 and named for the late Louise Warren Higley.”
A look through the files at the New Canaan Historical Society shows that Higley was the wife of the ultra-prominent and influential Stuart Higley, of Brotherhood & Higley renown, and was a woman who died at a rather young age after marrying into a New Canaan family when she was 29.