College Hill, Maplewood

In Maplewood, there is a neighborhood known as College Hill. The streets are named for various US colleges: Harvard Avenue, Bowdoin Street, Yale Street, Oberlin Street, Rutgers Street, Colgate Road, Wellesley Road, and Amhurst Court.

This current google map shows the streets in College Hill as they are now and as they were in 1902. The blue line shows the neighborhood boundaries; the purple lines show streets that existed in 1902 that do not exist today; and the green lines show streets that exist now that did not exist in 1902.

View College Hill, Maplewood in a larger map

Below is the 1902 map that appeared in Maplewood, past and present : a miscellany, written in 1948 by Helen B. Bates.

Below is the detailed image of the College Hill area from the above map:

The streets must have been developed sometime between 1889 and 1902, as this map from 1889 shows no streets in the area. Tuscan, Prospect, and Springfield are in existence on the 1889 map.

The full map (Essex County, 1889 with ads) can be found at Rutgers.

Unanswered Questions:

• Exactly when did these streets get developed, and why? The majority of the homes were not built until the late 1920s.
• Why were some of the streets removed?
• Why were they named for colleges?