Blackstone Avenue is a major roadway arterial in

Fresno, California Fresno () is a major city in the San Joaquin Valley of California, United States. It is the county seat of Fresno County and the largest city in the greater Central Valley region. It covers about and had a population of 542,107 in 2020, maki ...

, United States, running from Stanislaus and O Streets near Downtown to Highway 41 northeastern part of the city. This street is the location of a number of historic structures and is also the locus of a considerable concentration of retail commercial land usage. The campus of the

Fresno City College Fresno City College (FCC or "Fresno City") is a public community college in Fresno, California. It is part of the State Center Community College District within the California Community Colleges system. Fresno City College operates on a semester ...

straddles Blackstone Avenue in the vicinity of McKinley Avenue.

History

In the late 1880s residents jokingly referred to the street as Blackstone after the English legal scholar

William Blackstone Sir William Blackstone (10 July 1723 – 14 February 1780) was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the ''Commentaries on the Laws of England''. Born into a middle-class family ...

, due to the number of lawyers living there. The local history may be best recorded by some of the old surviving homes on Blackstone Avenue which are in the Register of National Historic Places, including the Ella Hoxie Home (251 N. Blackstone Avenue); Brix Home (313 N. Blackstone Avenue); Griffen Home (319 N. Blackstone Avenue); Hines Home (333 N. Blackstone Avenue). Earth Metrics Inc. performed an analysis of historic aerial photographs in the Blackstone Avenue vicinity.Earth Metrics Inc., ''Environmental Site Assessment for the North Blackstone Avenue area, Fresno, California'', January 8, 1990 In 1946, the area contained many residences on large lots.1946 USGS-CO Aerial Photograph 3-52, #75 1:20,000 The photographs observed indicate that many of these large lots included

row crop A row crop is a crop that can be planted in rows wide enough to allow it to be tilled or otherwise cultivated by agricultural machinery, machinery tailored for the seasonal activities of row crops. Such crops are sown by drilling or transplan ...

s. Surrounding lands at that time were predominantly used for agriculture, with orchards lining much of the western side of Blackstone Avenue. A mixture of row crops, vacant fields, orchards, and scattered residences made up much of the landscape on the eastern side of Blackstone Avenue. The aerial photographs taken in 1962 indicate that land use in the subject site vicinity showed significant change between 1946 and 1962. Urbanization occurred in the Blackstone Avenue vicinity during this period. Orchards and row crops had been largely replaced by commercial and residential structures by 1962.

Geology

The elevation of Blackstone Avenue is approximately above mean sea level. The underlying

sediment Sediment is a naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of wind, water, or ice or by the force of gravity acting on the particles. For example, sa ...

s of the Blackstone Avenue area are a heterogeneous mix of generally poorly sorted

clay Clay is a type of fine-grained natural soil material containing clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolin, Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4). Clays develop plasticity when wet, due to a molecular film of water surrounding the clay par ...

silt Silt is granular material of a size between sand and clay and composed mostly of broken grains of quartz. Silt may occur as a soil (often mixed with sand or clay) or as sediment mixed in suspension with water. Silt usually has a floury feel ...

sand Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural class o ...

and gravel.

Reference line notes

Roads in Fresno County, California Transportation in Fresno, California Streets in California {{California-road-stub