All streets radiating from downtown Lake Jackson end in the word 'Way'
Where should you go when you’ve lost your way?
“We have This Way, That Way, Any Way, Circle Way, Parking Way, Winding Way and we have His Way, which runs behind a church,” says longtime city manager Bill Yenne.
About 50 miles south of Houston, Lake Jackson, with about 27,000 residents, offers lots of opportunities to give directions that sound less than helpful to a visitor.
“It’s not uncommon to give people directions that include some variation of, ‘Take This Way three blocks and make a left on That Way until you get to Any Way,’ which invariably provokes the confused response, ‘Which way?’ ” Yenne says. “That’s when you have to correct them and say, 'No, that would be the wrong way.’” (Abbott and Costello applied similar confusion to baseball with their hilarious sketch, “Who's on First?”)
Blame the never-ending confusion on town planner Alden B. Dow, a visionary who once dreamed of insulating homes with hair. Dow, who died in 1983, was the son of Dow Chemical founder Herbert Henry Dow.
As the senior Dow’s business was rapidly evolving into a multinational behemoth, the founder knew he would need a company town where his employees could work and thrive. He asked his son, by then an accomplished architect who’d apprenticed with iconic designer Frank Lloyd Wright, to do the job back in 1941.
