Named after Avenue P, one of the lettered avenues of southern Brooklyn.
Avenue P is four lanes wide, from Bay Parkway in Gravesend to Flatbush Avenue in Marine Park. The next letter has gone: Avenue Q became Quentin Road in 1922. A popular story links the name to Theodore Roosevelt's son Quentin, killed over France in 1918, but Forgotten New York calls it apocryphal: Q was being confused with O on handwritten envelopes.