The most notable establishment in the area is the Allandale Farm, which straddles the Brookline-Boston area. Not far away is the Brandegee Estate, now occupied by Dana Farber at the top of a long, long, driveway. Complicating things even further is the fact that the United States Post Office has given the area a zip code that most people think is relegated to Newton and Brookline – 02467 – which is the zip for Boston College.

Whenever I have to give an address, I ask the inquirer if she/he is from New Jersey; otherwise, I have to spell out H-A-C-K-E-N-S-A-C-K, not to be confused with the game “hacky sack,” first developed in the 1970s.

It was not a Jersey person who first developed our Boston area. European settlers who, after being deeded the land by Chief Oratam in 1664, anglicized an original Native American Lenape word – such as Ackingsah-sack, Achkinheshcky, or Achsinnigeu-haki – into the exonym, “Hackensack.” Depending on the specific dialect and translation, these Lenape words roughly translate to “place of stony ground,” “mouth of a river,” or “flat meeting of streams.”

How is all this related to the Hackensack neighborhood of Boston? The Brandieee Estate was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Mary Bryant Pratt Sprague Brandegee (the name “Sprague” gave us that Hyde Park street). She was related to the prominent Weld family – the grandaughter of the wealthy Boston shipping magnate Willian Fletcher Weld (from whom we got Weld Street, left over from the now defunct Weld Farm). Her family inherited large areas of land that originally stem back to the 1642 colonial land grant bestowed upon Captain Joseph Weld.

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While the word “Hackensack” traces back to the Lenape tribe of New Jersey, its presence as a cluster of street names in Boston resulted from 20-century real estate development. When large estates such as the Brandegee property were parceled out and sold to residential developers in the mid 1900s, developers sometimes named clusters of streets after Native American words that sounded prestigious or rustic. And so became Hackensack Road, Terrace, Court, and Circle but don’t bother looking for Hackensack Boulevard, Avenue, Street, Lane, or Drive.

Because there ain’t none.