This will probably seem like a strange question to Americans, but it’s been puzzling me for a while. How do house numbers work in the US?
Here in the UK, it’s simple. On most streets, the numbers go up in odds (1, 3, 5, 7,…) on one side of the street, and in evens on the other side. For small cul-de-sacs, the numbers sometimes go consecutively up one side, round the end of the road and back down the other side.
But I see American addresses like (just a made-up example) 28300 Smith Street.
I know the US is big, but surely there aren’t streets with tens of thousands of houses on them? I was wondering if maybe the numbers are split into blocks somehow, like 28300 would be house number 300 in block 28, but the numbers still seem too high.
Can somebody enlighten me? On a related note, is it the US that is “unusual” in this respect, ie not using consecutive numbers, or is it the UK that’s doing things weird? How do other countries number their houses?
Often times, each city block gets its own block of 100 numbers. Starting from whatever point, the buildings on the first block are 0-99, the second are 100-199, and so on. For those of us who live out in the middle of nowhere, houses are often numbered by the miles from the center of the nearest town. Each mile gets its own block of 1000 numbers. My parents, for instance, live a little over 10 miles out of town, so their house number is 10445, even though they live on a road with fewer than 10 houses on it.
How specific house numbers are assigned within a block varies from town to town. However, odd and even numbers are usually on opposite sides of the street, and the numbers always go up as you move farther from the point where counting begins.
Why there are sometimes gaps of 6 or so between buildings right next door to one another, I have no idea.
Where I’ve lived houses are numbered that way. Sometimes the number gives a clue to the house’s location. For example, my old address was 2234 West Avenue K-13. The streets were laid out in a grid. (Tengentally, I think that the whole country went to a grid system about 200 years ago, which is why older cities have European-style meandering roads and newer ones are laid out in blocks.)
In my town the northernmost street was Avenue A. One mile south was Avenue B. A mile more brought you to Avenue C. And so on. There wasn’t a lot up that way, but when you got to around Avenue H or I there were smaller streets. Between Avenue K and Avenue L were such streets as Ave. K-2, Ave K-4, and Ave. K-13.
Major north-south streets were also a mile apart: 10th Street West, 20th St. W., 30th St. W. and so on. They were mirrored on the east side of town, and the dividing line was a street called Division St.
So 2234 W. Ave. K-13 was west of 22nd Street W. and east of 23rd St. W. It was between Ave. K and Ave. L, and closer to Ave. L. As an even number, it was on the south side of that street.
But the question seems to be, “Why are house number so big?” I understand how the first house on the street shoulf be, say, 1 Hedgehog Drive. Your guess about block numbers sounds reasonable to me.
Johnny, where the hell do they number streets that way? That’s even more insane than Washington D.C.
As said before, most towns number streets in blocks of 100, and if there’s room for less than 100 houses, they’ll gladly spread the numbers out.
In rural areas, there will be major highways that have extrvavgantly long addresses because they are over 100 “blocks” long. Sometimes, streets coming off the highway maintain the highways’s numbering (i.e., Lonely Rd. will branch out at 10000 State Route 22, and will start its numbering at 10000.
What’s insane about it? I’ve always thought it was quite logical (although not very creative).
In any case, yeah; we often say a place is “in the x-hundred block”. So CrazyCatLady and Nametags anwers are closer to the OP. I was just going to say that where I used to live the numbers are odd on one side of the street and even on the other; and incidentally, the streets are named so that it’s not easy to get lost. But I got a bit carried away.
Few communities number their houses in serially by 1. Several places I’ve lived increased each house number by 10 over its neighbor.
In addition, some of the streets are long enough and sometimes the numbering system is based on a large-area pattern.
For example, a major street may run through multiple communities that have all agreed to use a shared numbering system. This prevents the problem of running up to 5000 and suddenly finding the houses across the next street winding down from 7000. Most (not all) of the cities in Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland, Ohio is located) share a single numbering system. This allows someone looking for an address at 26117 Euclid Ave. or 29012 Broadway to find the correct building on the street, even if they start in downtown Cleveland and have to drive through several different cities to get to the address.
The corollary to this is that streets that are parallel to Euclid or Broadway or other main streets will use the same numbering system, even if they are short streets that did not originate in downtown Cleveland. So driving up Euclid looking for a house at 26115 Tungsten, the driver could go to the 26100 block of Euclid, then go left or right on a cross street to Tungsten and find the house in the correct block. (The 26100 block of Euclid is approximately 12 miles from downtown Cleveland.)
Similarly, Geauga County, to the East of Cleveland uses a single numbering system for all the rural streets. The West and North boundaries of the county are point 5000* and the numbers increase across the entire 30 mile length and 25 mile breadth of the the county. Since the northern border goes up in “stair steps” from West to East, the northernmost addresses on North-South roads and streets in the West begin around 11000 so that all the North-South roads will be numbered evenly by latitude across the county.
*(I don’t know why they started at 5000 instead of 1 (or even 100), I’m just describing the system in place.)
Every municipality has its own system for determining house numbers. There is no one system used throughout the US. Indeed, there is little standardization within individual states.
Regarding even and odd numbers, it is quite common that one side of a street will be odd and the other side even, but going in the same order. (So 34 Elm street would be right accross from 35 Elm street.) The suburb where I grew up used this system, rarely skipping any number.
In huge cities like Los Andgeles, streets can go on for hundreds of blocks. In a lot of places in LA a block number is stuck before the house number, so you end up with five digit numbers. Systems like this usually skip numbers so that you can guess the position of the entrance to a building relative to the block by knowing the number.
In the midwest, where things are very very spread out, you will find all manner of grid systems that often measure the distance from a center point.
In Manhattan, numbers on avenues increase as you go north, with odd numbers on the east side and even on the west, and numbers on streets increase as you move away fro Fifth Ave (seperating the East and West side), with even numbers on the south side and odd numbers on the north. Thus, 239 West 27th street is is a wholly seperate building from 239 East 27th street.
Most of Queens uses a block-number type system, with a hyphen seperating the block from the number of the building. Thus you get buildings with numbers like 143-51 and 30-02.
Picture the City Hall in your local county seat. Imagine there was a major street running directly north/south of it, and another major street running east/west, both running the length of the county.
If your street (regardless of how long it is or where it’s located) runs mostly north-south, your house number measures how many tenths of a block you are located from the imaginary east-west axis. If your street runs east-west, your house number measures the tenths of a block you are from the north/south imaginary axis. Diagonal? No clue.
Not all cities do this; Manhattan starts from zero on the West and South sides, IIRC, but most cities/counties measure from the middle out.
r_k, you’d love Carmel-By-The-Sea, California. (Usually just called Carmel). There are NO house numbers. They either have names (“Driftwood End”) or descriptions. (The blue house 2nd from the corner).
AFAIK, it’s the only place in the US like this. I’d sure hate to deliver a pizza or the mail there. I’ve also always wondered how emergency services find the right house.
Where I live (Just north of Boston), pretty much every street is done in the “British” system of 1, 3, 5, 7, etc. I had always assumed that that was the default for most of the rest of the US, too, but I guess I’m wrong. I had always assumed it was just the big grid-cities that used the “X hundred block” approach. Huh…I guess you DO learn something every day.
I’m still having trouble comprehending this. I think it’s that the concept of “blocks” is alien to me. Take a look at this map of my local area and you’ll see what I’m used to. Each street stands alone, and is numbered from one end.
I vaguely remember reading that the whole of the US (or most of it) was historically divided up into 1 mile squares. Are these what are used when planning and building towns? (As a side note, what does it mean when a town is “incorporated”? I hear about incorporated and unincorporated places a lot but don’t really know what significance it has.)
Hmm, I can relate to this. I used to deliver papers in the village where I grew up, and a lot of the houses just had names. And of course the round was listed in alphabetical order, which bore no resemblance to where the houses were actually located. Boy, did I do a lot of back-tracking until I had the route memorised!
The space from one street intersection to the next is a block. If your streets run pretty much either parallel or perpendicular to one another, on a map the area of land between streets forms a square or rectangular “block” shape.
Yes, I know what a block within a city is (in fact we do use that expression in the UK, as in “go for a run around the block”).
I just have trouble visualising a “block” system that has you measuring from a point in a whole different city. Are the miles somehow marked out between cities too?
The Phoenix, Arizona and Denver, Colorado metropolitan areas have very expansive address grids. In both metros, you can theoretically have addresses in the 50000s (east for Denver, west for Phoenix) – 50 miles from the main north-south axis.
Buffalo, New York is a worse case scenario when it comes to address numberiing in the US. The first house on a street, no matter where it is in the city, is addressed “1,” the house next door “7,” and so on. (Numbers increment up by 2 every 15 feet.) If a new street is platted which continues into an existing street, the new street will have a different name. With few exceptions, streets in Buffalo will have two or more names along its run … just like those in the UK.
Many American cities and metropolitan areas have standardized suffix naming, too … avenues run one way, streets another, drives and ways are curvilinear, circles begin and end at the same street, courts are dead end streets, and so on.
The Phoenix, Arizona and Denver, Colorado metropolitan areas have very expansive address grids. In both metros, you can theoretically have addresses in the 50000s (east for Denver, west for Phoenix) – 50 miles from the main north-south axis.
Buffalo, New York is a worse case scenario when it comes to address numberiing in the US. The first house on a street, no matter where it is in the city, is addressed “1,” the house next door “7,” and so on. (Numbers increment up by 2 every 15 feet.) If a new street is platted which continues into an existing street, the new street will have a different name. With few exceptions, streets in Buffalo will have two or more names along its run … just like those in the UK.
Many American cities and metropolitan areas have standardized suffix naming, too … avenues run one way, streets another, drives and ways are curvilinear, circles begin and end at the same street, courts are dead end streets, and so on.
In Spokane, addresses start at the intersection of Sprague Ave.(which runs east-west) and Division St. (which runs north-south) downtown. If you stand at Sprague & Division and walk one block south, you’re at 100 South Division. If you then walk one block west to Browne St., you’re at 100 South Browne.
The numbers on each block are 100 more than the previous block, but of course most blocks don’t have 100 buildings. They usually go from xx02 to xx24 on one side, and xx01 to xx23 on the other. Larger buildings take up more numbers - if massive Circuit City is 9501, the tiny coffee shop next door might be 9521. One mile is about 15 blocks (1500 numbers).
Buildings located on north-south streets are numbered according to their distance away from Sprague, either north or south, with even numbers on one side and odd numbers on the other. Buildings on east-west streets are similarly numbered according to their distance from Division. (Incidentally, if you walk on a Spokane street in the direction of increasing numbers, the even numbered buildings are always on the right.)
Both Sprague and Division are very long streets in the north and east directions, so there are addresses like 11110 E. Sprague and 10124 N. Division. In contrast to Buffalo, streets that could meet usually have the same name, even if they aren’t connected. For example, you can’t drive straight through from 3000 W. 34th to 5000 E. 34th, but if you look at a map you can see that the streets line up.
