A paper street is a road or street that appears on maps but does not exist in reality. Paper streets generally occur when city planners or subdivision developers lay out and dedicate streets that are never built. Commercial street maps based only on official subdivision and land records may show these streets, which are legally public rights of way though usually undriveable.
Paper streets (and, by extension, paper towns) may be deliberately included in published maps as trap streets, forming a copyright trap.
A play on the term is found in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, as well as the film based on that book, where the protagonist lives in a house on "Paper street".
Paper towns play a large role in John Green's novel, Paper Towns.
Read more about Paper Street: See Also
Famous quotes containing the words paper and/or street:
“It is hard to believe that England is so near as from your letters it appears; and that this identical piece of paper has lately come all the way from there hither, begrimed with the English dust which made you hesitate to use it; from England, which is only historical fairyland to me, to America, which I have put my spade into, and about which there is no doubt.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“And in these dark cells,
packed street after street,
souls live, hideous yet
O disfigured, defaced,
with no trace of the beauty
men once held so light.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)