It might sound like a crazy question, but are you sure you were seeing the milky way? If you have any streetlights at all on your street, there is no way that you can see it with the naked eye (magnitude +5-+6). If you live in the north, it's more likely that you were seeing the aurora.
Our courtyard faces away from the road; so very little streetlight. And all the building lights go off at ~11pm, so there's no local lights around after that.
It's not bright by any means, but yes it's the milky way. (and I live in Melbourne, Australia; not north in any sense :P)
It would be very rare to see Aurora Australis from here; I don't anyone that has seen that in this area without driving out of the city and using a long exposure.
Can see the milky way much better when we drive 2 hours out of the city to the family farm.
By German standards, that is not very "inner city". Street lights are on all night, and I cannot see any but the brightest stars even on a clear night. Jupiter and Saturn are easily visible, Orion's belt, too, but Orion's, eh, "sword" is very hard to see. No trace of the Milky Way at any rate.
When I was in a rural area at night for the first time, I was floored to actually see a bright band spreading across the night sky. I had always thought one needs a telescope + CCD to get a view of that.
Most of the rest of us in suburban areas have streetlights that never go off, plus an incredible number of them point the wrong direction (some or most of their output goes straight to the sky, which defeats the point of the lamp) or have been replaced with LED versions that are far brighter than anyone actually needs. I can't say that I've ever seen the milky way outside of photographs.
Can attest to this. Australian cities aren’t as huge as US cities. Not Melbourne, but when I made a trip to central Australia to Uluru. We slept under the stars in the middle of the desert. It was absolutely gorgeous and you could see the Milky Way very clearly. Probably the brightest sky littered with stars I have ever seen.
