It’s 2800W – halfway between Kedzie (3200W) and Western (2400W). But I do pretty much drive by the grid. If I don’t know where a street is, I ask for its grid coordinate.Of course, as you note, GPS is making this all kind of obsolete, like memorizing phone numbers (I have a total of 2 current phone numbers memorized and about a zillion ones from childhood that are no longer relevant.)
And I, at least, am certainly not saying every Chicagoan would know that. The original question in the OP was would someone know that, and I think a good many people, especially someone like Jake Blues, certainly would.
The actual address is not important. It could be 1042 W Addison. Or 3602 N. Sheffield. Or even 1033 W. Waveland. Somebody with a good knowledge of Chicago geography, like Jake Blues, would realize while traversing their mental map of the city what is there. As you see in the scene, it takes him a moment to think, hmmm, where in the city is that? Wait a sec…that’s Wrigley Field! Like sorcha77 says, the scene is not played out like it’s insider trivia. You actually see Jake pausing and thinking about it, not an off-the-cuff reaction of “oh, Wrigley Field!”
I’m 28. I also have a good head for geography (and am a bit of a Chicago geek), and I’m aware that not everyone does. But I’m not saying that this is common knowledge that every jamoke out on the street knows; I’m saying that people who know the city–by which I mean, people who know how the streets are laid out and have a good memory of which ones are where–would easily have been able to go from “1060 W Addison” to “Wrigley Field” within the space of a couple seconds, without having had a movie tell them or having specifically memorized that address.
You have a good point there; one I got mostly backwards.
The question is not “Given Wrigley Field, what’s it’s address?” Instead it’s “Given this approximate address, what’s there?”
The former is a trivium; an arbitrary free-standing fact. The latter, as you and **BorgHunter **just above have said, is deductive reasoning from local geo-knowledge. The fact 1060 is the true number for Wrigley’s mail is immaterial to the question.
Yep. And I don’t think it’s that weird to mentally visualize where a location is based on an address. When somebody gives me an address, I try to imagine where it is and generalize it to a location with a nearby landmark. I particularly remember one scam email I got about a decade ago where they wanted to hire me for my photography services and gave an address of 116 W. Morse (there were other obvious clues this was a scam, but the address is the one that gave me a chuckle.) Now, I certainly don’t expect every Chicagoan or even most Chicagoans to know what’s wrong with that, but I do expect a good number to realize that that address is somewhere in Lake Michigan.
Sure, but there’s a big difference between knowing that the Astrodome is just north of 610 between Kirby and Fannin, and knowing that the actual mailing address is 8400 Kirby, Houston.
Or for that matter, I looked up my college’s stadium(Kyle Field) address (756 Houston St, College Station, TX 77843), and would have never known that the actual address is on that street. I’d have figured it was on Joe Routt, to tell the truth. But I’ve seen something like 50 games in that stadium over the years, and can tell you exactly where it is and how to get to it.
That’s the point- if you were to tell a Houston cop “8400 Kirby”, that wouldn’t automatically click as the Dome, any more than 1600 W. Addison did for the cops in the movie.
Agreed. I do the same thing. As could most folks in the pre-GPS-toy era where you had to generally know your way around to get someplace new.
Certainly many people did just drive to places by following main streets and the street numbers. Then be surprised by whatever they saw when they arrived.
The advent of GPS-toys has created people who’d be lost in their own neighborhood if the damn thing dies.
FYI: The 1991 video game, The Secret of Monkey Island 2, used the same gag when the protagonist has to give an address for his library card. The choices are:
FY-further-I: My other half is watching an old TV show called Dresden Files, and just now (in Episode #9) there’s a scene where the protagonist is looking at an estate agent’s ad for a rather fancy suburban house (definitely not a baseball stadium). Something caught my eye and I startled my beloved by demanding to rewind this quite throwaway scene.
Sure enough, the address of this des res on the sheet of paper: 1060 W Addison, Chicago, Ill.
It got me wondering whether the address is (either was already, or has become thanks to BB) a sort of film/TV device now, in the same way that made-up phone numbers in movies are given the nonexistent area-code 555, so they don’t inadvertently use a real person’s phone number. Or maybe it’s just an in-joke.
I’m sort of expecting to see it all over the place on TV now. I’ll certainly be keeping my eyes peeled
This reminds me of several scenes from Law & Order (and its spinoffs) where some detective will report obtaining an address and another will glance at it before dismissively noting that it’s “in the middle of the Hudson River.” I was always curious how they determined that, and my best guess was they came to know of the block of numbers on each street that would’ve been underwater had those streets actually crossed the river.
Closer to the topic at hand, I’m a big Packers fan and I happen to know that Lambeau Field is located at 1265 Lombardi Ave. I don’t know if most sports fans know the addresses of their favored team’s arena, though.
I’d disagree. It’s not ‘given this approximate address, what’s there’, it’s ‘given this exact address, exactly what’s there’?
Even if the cops knew that the address given was going to be right near Wrigley Field, doesn’t mean the would/should/did know that it was Wrigley Field. By that logic, and what you said earlier (Somebody who knows Chicago well could deduce the correct hundreds block number for Wrigley’s frontage on all 5 streets. But that’s it. Doing anything more takes specific knowledge of Wrigley’s actual address. “Addison” is only a guess with a one-in-fiveish chance of being correct), they would have assume that any address within a few blocks and on the correct side of the road would be Wrigley Field.
In any case, where does that end? What other addresses should everyone in Chicago have memorized?
I used to bring this up from time to time with one of my employees. If we were talking about anything involving money (specifically things like taxes or insurance), I’d start by saying ‘okay, let’s assume you make X/hour’ where X was some random number that would make the math easier. He’d always come back with ‘you don’t have to pretend like you don’t know how much I make, you do the payroll’. And, everytime I’d have to explain to him that I don’t know how much he makes, I don’t memorize it and for him to assume I know how much he makes implies I know, off the top of my head, how much everyone makes.
Manhattan street addresses west of Fifth Ave are numbered in increments of 100 at each intersecting Avenue. So if you’re on 23rd & 5th going west, you’d see 0-99 W. 23rd, then Sixth Ave, then 100-199 W. 23rd, then Seventh Ave, then 200-299 W. 23rd, and so on. So if somebody gives you an address of 983 W. 23rd St, you’d know that should be west of 14th Ave. And if you’ve spent much time in Manhattan, you’d know that to get to 14th Ave you’d have to take a long walk off a short Chelsea pier.
Going the other way, blocks to the east of Fifth Ave likewise go up in hundreds, with the highest numbers in the 800s east of Avenue D. So 983 E. 23rd St would get you about 1/4 the way to Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Stadiums are big things, that would take up the space of hundreds of addresses. If you know which direction the numbers go, and know which side of the street is odd and which is even (both standard things for a longtime resident of a city), and you know which street corresponds to which number (which you probably will know for at least some streets, even if not all of them), then you should be able to say “If that address exists, then it must be in the stretch of real estate covered by the stadium”.
Havin_it, you might be interested to know that in the books that show was based on, Harry does, at one point, actually have an investigation at that address. Though I’m pretty sure that story was written after the show was off the air.
I just saw a house I might buy and it has a sauna. First thing I thought of was the Blues Brothers sauna scene. Giants stadium is at 24 Willie Mays plaza.
Fenway Park used to be at 4 Yawkey Way, at least from 1977 to 2018. While most current Red Sox fans wouldn’t know the exact number, nearly all would be able to identify Yawkey Way, which was only 2 blocks long and held only Red Sox related establishments. It was renamed back to its original name of Jersey Street due to anger over former owner Tom Yawkey’s opposition to breaking the color barrier in baseball in 2018, but most folks still refer to it as Yawkey Way.
The old Boston Garden was at 150 Causeway Street. Most fans would know Causeway Street but probably not the specific address. The new TD Garden’s official address is 100 Legends Way, but most people still think of it as being on Causeway St.
Chicago has a very sensible grid layout of streets (with only a few diagonal ones to screw things up).
All addresses on the West and North side of a street are even numbered. All addresses on the East and South sides of a street are odd numbered.
In Chicago, 0 - 0 is State Street and Madison Street in the business district (aka Loop). All addresses are N, S, E, W of that 0-0 point. Which is a little odd because there is very little east from there and a whole lot west but that is what they went with.
Every 800 in numbers is one mile. So, 800 North State Street is one mile north of State and Madison.
With all of this in mind a long time resident can plot distances and times to get there with just an address. Admittedly, some do it better than others. My brother is a weird savant at this (he is normal otherwise). Some never twig to it at all.
tl;dr Some Chicagoans could tell you what 1060 West Addison is by only hearing the address and putting it all together without having memorized its address.
But I do pretty much drive by the grid. If I don’t know where a street is, I ask for its grid coordinate.Of course, as you note, GPS is making this all kind of obsolete, like memorizing phone numbers (I have a total of 2 current phone numbers memorized and about a zillion ones from childhood that are no longer relevant.)
