1) To answer your questions, I believe that Bray-bant street sounds correct from my experience. Just think about the word "dry" in English which rhymes with the pronunciation "bry-bant". It's just like the "bry" in Bryant Park. I'm only going off of just seeing the word. Here is an audio clip of the word and it makes sense. Dutch has a lot of what I would call silent letters in it so there is a "y" sound that doesn't appear. Dutch, German and English are all related and are very close to each other actually, so the silent letter trend can be found in English as well. http://www.forvo.com...alcolm_brabant/
2) As for Arlington, I'm willing to bet that it's an English Anglo-saxon name... Clinton, Princeton... All Anglo names to my knowledge... http://www.houseofna...ory?A=54323-292 As for Simonson Avenue, I'm not sure, but I would be comfortable going with what the B/O used... Simon-son as in Simon the name and that too is probably an Anglo name based on the ending... The -"son" ending though could be Scandinavian also as in Norweigan for example. The Northern European countries (Great Britain would be included actually, as well as Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, etc.) share much history together. Don't think that everything is Dutch.
1) Makes sense. Thanks.
2) I thought Arlington might've been the earlier name of one of the cities or regions in the Netherlands. I remember a fable about a small child who went to visit an old man, and when he was coming home, he saw there was a hole in the dike, so he put his finger in there to stop the water from leaking and eventually breaking the dike. Anyway, I think I remember the story being set in a town called Arlington. But I didn't realize they were a family.
And the thing is that a lot of the streets in that neighborhood are named after Dutch places and people (Van Name Avenue, Van Pelt Avenue, Holland Avenue, Netherland Avenue, etc), so I figured that the other streets probably fall into that category. I did a quick search on the word "Brabant", and it mentioned the Duchy of Brabant, which covered the Netherlands, so I assumed that was where the name originated, but now that I look at it again, it could've originated from several European countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabant I just looked up Walloons, and it turns out they were a French-speaking people who lived in Belgium, which is adjacent to the Netherlands, so I guess since, like you said, they share a lot of history, it makes sense.
And now that I think about it, some names that I thought were Dutch sound French to me now that you filled me in with the history (like Mersereau Avenue)
