Stuart Levitan was coming out of the library recently after researching the life of Dimetra Shivers when he began counting the letters in her name.

Sometimes an honor like having a street named for you doesn't just depend on the good work you did in life. Sometimes there are practical concerns, like having a name that is short enough to conform to a city ordinance.

Levitan has been thinking about these things lately. He's the chairman of the Madison Community Development Authority (CDA), which is overseeing the ambitious redevelopment of the Allied Drive neighborhood that is scheduled to begin Monday with the demolition of a series of apartment buildings purchased by the city in 2006.

New low-income housing will be built in Phase One of the project, on the Southwest Side, with Phase Two consisting of owner-occupied townhouses, duplexes and single-family homes.

Six new streets will also be part of the redevelopment, and those streets need names. Levitan and Brian Solomon, the neighborhood alderman, in consultation with neighborhood residents, have been working hard to come up with appropriate names for the new streets. It's not as easy as you might think. Their suggestions will be given to the CDA for approval on Thursday.

The six suggested new names are: Revival Ridge, Diversity Drive, Dunn's Marsh Terrace, Percy Julian Way, Mike McKinney Court and Frida Kahlo Crest.

Levitan said this week that they tried to strike a balance between historical figures who might prove inspirational, especially to young people who live in the neighborhood, and names with a broader scope that speak to the neighborhood's anticipated renaissance. (In fact, Renaissance Row was under consideration for one of the street names, but was rejected because of the neighborhood 's proximity to the Renaissance on the Park development in Fitchburg.)

Dimetra Shivers, alas, had a name that is one letter too long to be eligible for a street name in Madison.

The ordinance states: "New street names shall be no longer than 17 character spaces including the postal-approved abbreviated suffix."

With a space between "Dimetra" and "Shivers," and a space between "Shivers" and "St.," the total number of characters is 18.

Shivers would have been an excellent choice. Not only was she a gifted jazz singer who performed with such Madison greats as Doc DeHaven, Shivers was also a civil-rights pioneer, participating in the 1963 March on Washington and helping found the Madison chapter of the NAACP.

Betty Franklin-Hammonds was also considered, but fell into the same category as Shivers -- her name was too long. Certainly the late publisher of the Madison Times, and head of the Urban League of Greater Madison, was deserving.

When neighborhood residents were polled, Levitan said, the name that kept coming up was Mike McKinney, the NBC-15 news anchor and community activist who died in 2006, at 41, after a long fight with colon cancer.

Levitan himself went to bat for Percy Julian Jr., a pioneering Madison civil-rights lawyer who died earlier this year. Julian was one of the first lawyers to take the civil-rights laws passed in the 1960s and turn them into effective tools for social justice, especially for African-Americans.

With McKinney and Julian, the other individual name being submitted to the CDA Thursday is the late Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, which helps the ethnic and gender balance of the new street names.

On Tuesday, Levitan expressed one regret. "It breaks my heart not to name one for Gene Parks," he said.

Parks, of course, was the former Madison alderman, mayoral candidate and affirmative-action officer who was this city's most persistent critic -- and in the view of some, its conscience -- for the better part of four decades before his death in 2005.

Naming a street for Parks might have been controversial, but so what? In Chicago in the 1980s, a street in Wicker Park was going to be renamed in honor of writer Nelson Algren, a fierce critic of the city who loved it despite its faults. (Algren Way, incidentally, never became an official street. Neighborhood residents complained, not because of Algren's incendiary prose, but because they didn't want to have to spend a few bucks to change the addresses on their driver 's licenses.)

Parks, like Algren, loved his city enough to knock it. With all due respect to Frida Kahlo (and granting the gender imperative), it would have been nice to see Parks get a street in his honor in Allied. After all, when Parks was fired as Madison affirmative-action officer, and won a lawsuit that required his rehiring, where did he end up? In the city street sign department. Gene would have liked the idea of coming full circle.

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com.