Almost every North American city has a Euclid Avenue. Surveyors, beholden to that most spatially oriented of Greeks, made sure that at least one reference to the founder of geometry slipped into every freshly drafted city plan. The same Hellenic leaning at roughly the same point in the development of urban America led to the founding of Troy, two Spartas, an Ithaca, two Athenses, an Olympia, a Corinth and a Smyrna, scattered through the United States.

(just one of the zesty ideas found in Hugh Kenner's Massey Lecture, The Elsewhere Community)