Addressing can get very, very tricky. I do it as part of my job. GIS systems addresses need to make sense or EMS can’t be routed to a location.
The biggest mess that I know about is when years and years ago developers where allowed to assign addresses. We have some condo buildings where the first floor is addressed 600. The second floor 6000. For an address system, that would put the two floors of the same building about a mile apart.
Glad I’m retiring in a few years. I do NOT want to deal with that mess.
My family didn’t actually live in any places that had no names but there were a few close by. Suburban Sacramento had a few. These were areas with extensive housing developments and four-lane avenues lined with strip malls and fast-food joints but no actual names to identify them. Residences and businesses there used “Sacramento” for their mailing addresses but they were way outside the city limits. They also fell outside the vaguely established borders of unincorporated suburban communities like Carmichael and North Highlands so they weren’t part of them either. Thus, people living and working in these areas were in the position of being someplace and no place at the same time. Eventually. as a result of popular consensus, the Census Bureau’s creation of the “Census Designated Place” (CDC), and at least one failed incorporation attempt, some of the areas did get names (e.g., Foothill Farms and Arden-Arcade).
Such places are all over Northern Virginia. For example, Falls Church proper only covers ~2 square miles but its zip codes extend well beyond that. Then there is completely unincorporated Arlington County but is does have the specific and commonly used designation of “Arlington”.
I do.
It’s locally known as my surname Hill.
My mail box is in a town 27 miles from me.
I vote in another county. The courthouse, my polling place is 33 miles from me.
My county road is a number that is the same as a large state road that’s 10miles ( as the crow flies) from me.
My house sits on a county line. I’m virtually in no man’s land.
Some of those are former farms, whose owners didn’t see any point to be part of the town that grew around them. Some of them were swamps that no one wanted before someone filled them in. One of them is the main campus of Washington University, which was there before the town that surrounds it.
Amusing anecdote. When my family moved to St. Louis we rented an apartment in a brand new complex, built on the border between two towns. No one, it seemed, knew exactly which town we were in - in fact, officials in both towns said we were in the other one, and we were in the school district of a third town. At least, we thought we were. Years later they finally got the boundaries straightened out, and it turns out we were in one town, but in the zip code of another, and yes, in the school district of a third.
Sometimes even when an area has a CDP name, it’s never used. For example, the Las Vegas Strip is actually located in the CDPs of Winchester and Paradise but nobody (not even the USPS) ever refers to this area as anything but Las Vegas.
I lived for some years out in farm country, where the Post Office and the County both assigned addresses, independently of each other and without coordinating with each other. Every place that had an address, had two addresses. I never knew which one to use when. I chose to get all my mail at a P. O. box in town.
For about a decade, I lived with my family in “subdivision” a few miles south of Havre, MT, out in unincorporated Hill County. The house has a hard address in Havre, but it isn’t in the city limits and the USPS doesn’t deliver mail to that address; my parents, who still live there, rent a PO box in town. It’s actually in a kind of subdivision with two other houses, but the location has no name.
My mom was born in Havre and grew up north of Hingham – 20 miles north. Their mailing address was just “rural route” (no proper address) but “rural route Guildford, MT.” They were ~6 miles farther away from Guilford than they were to Hingham.
When I was growing up, I would address letters to my grandparents at RR#3 and RR#5. They didn’t have house numbers.
When my paternal grandparents built their house, they were outside the town limits. My dad joked that going to town took less time than when he was a kid. That house is now within the town limits.
The house of my maternal grandparents is still outside the town limits, but it has a street address. The mailbox may or may not exist, since it was a favorite for setting off fireworks and my grandparents eventually got a P.O. Box.
I grew up in an unincorporated part of the county, which has since been incorporated. So my parents’ address has changed, but just the city name. The earlier regional names are still used quite a bit, also because the local library carries the regional name. The library with the town name is on the other side of town.
Similar here. except RR#1. The mailman was contracted out (I guess). And drove a regular left hand drive car from the right seat so he could reach out and put mail in the roadside mail box that is on the right hand side of the county road.
Even as a tween that nearly killed himself in various different ways, I thought that was a very, very bad idea.
When I first moved here, heading for 35 years ago now, this house had a rural route number. When I went into the post office to tell them that I’d moved there, I discovered that they were in the process of changing to what they called the fire numbers; individual numbers for the houses, along with a road or street name, that had just been assigned by the fire department working in conjunction with the post office. (They had to rename some roads while they were at it; there were a number of roads in the town that shared a name with another road in the town.)
So I was just barely in time to be able to tell everybody my new address once, instead of having to tell them first the RR# and then, sometime later, tell everyone what the new address was.
– I don’t think the house I grew up in, in the 50’s and 60’s, and also in New York State, even had a rural route number. Mail just came to [firstname lastname / road name / village that was our mailing address.] Sometimes there was, and sometimes there wasn’t, an old farm name included. Eventually we got a zip code, but even then we didn’t get a house or route number. Maybe it’s got one now.
I still see that once in a while.
The carriers are employees of the post office; but they don’t all get a post office van assigned, and some drive their own cars, which aren’t always modified for mail delivery except by sticking a magnetic sign on top of them.
We gave up our land line about 2 years ago. The county plows would just knock them over the phone pedestals. No fault of theirs, can’t see it because it’s already buried and the snow has to go somewhere.
Cell phone and Sat dish works just fine for us.
Well, not plows in what most people think plow trucks are. A 6x6 grader with a wing blade and a blade on the front. And, of course the blade of the grader itself.
Someone from Florida bought the property across the road from us. They requested and got a 20’ variance to put the house closer to the road. Umm… That’s where all the snow gets plowed, and the house will be about 20’ lower than the road. All run off goes there too.
My Wife and I fought this, for them as much as us. Those folks are in for a rude awakening. I doubt a contractor will take the job. It would be a mess.
