I work with mail received from all over the U.S. One thing I can’t understand is why numbered streets in Florida are almost always provided with cardinal rather than ordinal numbers.
For example: The address “657 24th Street” in Florida is almost always given as “657 24 Street”.
It seems to be just Florida. For the same type of address, I would say about 99% outside of Florida provide the ordinal “24th", and from Florida it is about 90% cardinal “24”.
I can’t find anything on Google. So, what gives with the ordinals, Floridians?
Well, like I said it is about 90%. Almost every Florida address I see on the Internet uses the ordinal, but Floridians who write their address down on paper rarely use it.
It’s actually due to standardization by the US Postal Service, which has decreed that ordinals be eschewed. The official standard (big PDF; see pg. 13) says numbered street names should be taken exactly as they appear in the ZIP+4 database, which USPS is constantly updating to conform to their standards.
I’ve almost never seen a numbered Florida street represented by a cardinal- certainly not in Pinellas or Marion counties, which are the two number-heavy areas I can think of- except on documents which are addressed by a computer.
That’s not a bad idea. I did some google searches on things like “13 AVE” and “25 ST” and of those cases where it found an address, a large majority were in Brooklyn or Florida.
Perhaps I’ve found a secret way to identify people who have moved to Florida from New York.
