In Chicago, where I live, odd numbered buildings are always on the south and east side of the street.
Is this universal in all US cities or do each do their own thing?
Also, in Chicago, they set 0,0 at the street intersection of State and Madison in the Loop. Every address is labeled N, S, E, W of that intersection. 800 North is one mile north of that intersection. And so on. (In Chicago every 800 by address is one mile…so 1600 North is two miles from that 0,0 intersection).
ETA: As an aside (not the US) I was told by someone that house numbering in Japan is impossible to follow (maybe just Tokyo…I forget). Apparently if you are the first house on a street you get something like #1 Main St. If you are the 5,000th house built on Main St. you are #5,000…but you may well be next to #1. Dunno of that is true though. They may have been messing with me.
I lived on 17207 NE 7th Place, a short cul de sac between NE 6th and NE 8th, just off 172nd Place. Sort of, the streets weren’t very gridlike out there, but it was easy to find our place based on the address alone.
Pffft. That’s only 2000 square miles. The largest 100 counties in the country are at least 4000 square miles. And that doesn’t include Alaska, which has boroughs.
San Bernardino County, in southern California, is the largest county by area in the continental US, at over 20,000 square miles.
I live in NYC and I’m pretty sure there are more street numbering systems than boroughs. In Brooklyn , I think the odd numbered addresses are on the west side of the street, in Queens they are on the east side of the street.
Queens addresses have hyphens that will usually tell you what the cross street is - 83-11 77 Avenue is between 83 St and 84 St . This becomes confusing in some neighborhoods where you will have streets and avenues with the same number like 60 Drive , 60 Street , 60 Ave, 60 Place . Named streets end up using the number that they replace - for example, a building on 68th avenue between Fresh Pond Road and 62 St will be numbered 61-XX as FPR took the place of 61 street. This works for most of Queens except near the Brooklyn border where some streets will have Queens numbers and others will continue the Brooklyn numbering system.
Brooklyn and Queens also have smaller grids that don’t really connect to the larger one - Beach 19 St in Queens is nowhere near 19 street and Brooklyn has “Bay” and “Brighton” streets.
For most of Manhattan , you have East and West streets. Either 5th Ave or Broadway is the divider between East and West depending on exactly where you are. But the old part of Manhattan seems to be based on cowpaths and good luck trying to figure out where an address is without a map. In fact, phone books and maps used to have a list of formulas for determining cross streets when you had the address - found one. I think the Bronx continues the Manhattan grid but I’m sure Staten Island has it’s own.
And then we have missing numbers when a building takes up more than one lot and fractional numbers or letters when there are two buildings on a single lot. Not to mention buildings with two addresses , one on the avenue and one on the street.
That’s just one city ( and probably not every numbering scheme) - there are surely hundreds of different systems in the country.
Of places I’ve lived:
Odds are North and West sides in all three counties of greater Miami.
Odds are North and West in St. Louis.
Odds were South and West in at least some of Orange County CA.
Odds were South & West in Las Vegas.
It might be a state-level standard, but I know I don’t know.
I wonder if this is because New York City just kinda grew organically? Maybe various parts had some rhyme and reason but each part was not in-line with other parts and they just kinda grew together.
Chicago was a planned city (at least at the start). I think Washington D.C. was too.
Another data point: I’ve lived in an odd-numbered building on the north side of the street, in Manhattan, and just mailed a birthday card to a friend in Manhattan, also in an odd-numbered building on the north side of the street. I’ve also lived in even-numbered houses on the north and, currently the east side of the street, a few miles outside NYC.
Strangely enough, my in-laws live in an even-numbered house on the west side of the street only 3 blocks from me. They’re in a different municipality; I never realized until now that we have that variation in the area.
I would think so - except they changed every street name/number and house number in Queens between 1911 and 1925 or so because they wanted to create order out of the even worse chaos that existed before.* For some reason, they only did it in Queens so while it may have originally happened because of how the city grew, it was a deliberate choice not to re-number all five boroughs in a single system.
* You can see it on deeds -
Beginning at a point on the westerly side of Thrall avenue now called 91st Street distant 360 feet northerly from the northwesterly corner of Fulton Street formerly Puthim Place now called 91st Avenue and Thrall Avenue.
Not unusual, because many times the numbers were allocated by the way the street was originally platted. This meant lot sizes were relatively small – may 30’-35’ wide. As new buildings were built, the lots were often combined into a single property, which might be two or three times the size of the original lot. Thus, the first house might straddle the #1 and #3 lines and be numbered 1. The next would straddle the #5 and #7 lots and be numbered 5 (or 7), etc.
In many large metro areas, small towns which were originally separate with separate numbering systems have grown together. In my area, the Post Office imposed an area-wide numbering system on the major through streets that link the towns, but the individual towns could keep their original numbering systems on the smaller streets. So while my house is in the 600 block, the Domino’s Pizza 1000’ feet behind my back window is in the 11200 block.
Minor nit since it’s the Dope, but there are exceptions from Madison south to 31st, where you have 1200, 1000, and 900 addresses to the miles, so two miles south of Madison would be 2200 S (Cermak), not 1600S.
Anybody who has lived in or spent some time in Utah knows that they have the easiest and most logical numbering system. This explains it much better than I could:
Yes, that’s basically true. The Japanese address system is strange and, as far as I know, unique. To put it simply, most streets do not have names. Instead, a block or a group of blocks has a name — sort of. Houses are numbered within that block.
There’s no way I can explain it properly, so here’s Wikipedia:
Huh, TIL. I’ve always lived in houses with 2 digit numbers, except when i lived in Manhattan, and the building had a 3 digit number. I’m on a short road, and the numbers run from 1 to ~40.
