I was having lunch a couple of weeks ago with my editor and her colleagues from National Geographic in Washington DC. They took me to a fantastic restaurant near their offices on K Street, and as we were walking there, the conversation turned to why there is no “J” Street in DC. I’d vaguely heard that it was because the city’s designer had a grudge against someone whose name began with J. Someone else mentioned that there was no letter J in the early-American alphabet. So I looked it up.
The reason is a bit less interesting than the city-planner-with-a-grudge story. According to most sources I consulted, the letters I and J were largely interchangeable in the 18th century. Even Thomas Jefferson swapped them around—he tended to initial his possessions with the letters “T.I.” So the city planners probably figured it would be too confusing to assign separate streets to what people perceived as interchangeable letters.
Go figure.