Like a row house.
town house
noun
1
: a usually single-family house of two or sometimes three stories that is usually connected to a similar house by a common sidewall
also : ROW HOUSE
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Minneapolis alternates–in south Minneapolis, odd numbers are on the east side. North Minneapolis, odd numbers are on the west side. Southeast, west; northeast, east.
Yes, I think it was a townhouse.
It isn’t all that uncommon for the lots to be numbered before any construction has even occurred. So, as an example, lot 2036 and 2038 are bought together, one house is built, and the next house is 2040.
The OP should take a try at finding an address in the older portions of Salt Lake City (and possibly other pioneer cities in Utah). They use a grid system, giving the number of streets in one direction away from the Southeast corner of Temple Square and the number of streets (really streets and houses) in the perpendicular direction. That gives you some odd addresses, such as 205 West 400 South. Here is an entertaining explanation of that system.
I’ve done a lot of trolling the streets in my neck of the woods (suburban area in NE Ohio) due to campaigning, the local Santa delivery program, and picking up stuff I buy on the local buy/sell pages. It seems like there’s no rhyme or reason to our house numbering, other than you will definitely find odd on one side of the street and even on the other.
It just occurred to me that in general, in our city (which has developments from every city) has East/West streets with numbers under 1500 and North/South streets with numbers from 8000-9000.
My neighborhood has 57 houses and is shaped like a P with the stem of the P going East/West. So we all have little numbers (400-600) on the stem and the opposite side of the P, and the two streets perpendicular have numbers in the 8000s…going up by 12. We all have half-acre lots.
I don’t know that any house in our city has a 2-digit number.
My brother lives in a townhouse in the neighboring city and he has a 5-digit address.
At one time the numbers went up with each additional residence. If a house was built between two houses then a b or c was added. After a period of time the postmaster would renumber the houses. At one time the house I was born in was route 4 box 131.
But as cities grew the old method became too confusing. A central point was chosen. the houses numbers increased every so many feet. the address was changed in the 50’s to 1943 street name and post office that served the home.
When we need to call the police or emergency services they would have a hard time finding the house by address number. About a mile north of the ranch was the county line and address were related to San Jaun. For about 1.5 miles the address were related to Aromas. The South the address were related to Prundale.
Here is the code establishing a house numbering system for my town
https://www.codepublishing.com/CA/Fremont/html/Fremont15/Fremont1555.html
I live in a house with a four digit number, but it is a relatively short street with the smallest number about 5 blocks away and only 1,000 lower than mine.
I’m from Queens, and my address was 53-41, which meant that the lower avenue I lived near was 53rd.
In midtown Manhattan street numbering starts with 5th avenue, with 100 numbers per block, and they go up as you go towards the East River (East) and the Hudson (West). Numbering for buildings on avenues go from their beginning and when I was a messenger (long before GPS) I had a map with a table showing where the first number on each avenue for each cross street.
And around Boston street names often change as you change towns, so good luck figuring out where anything is.
The first time I was in Paris, France I was astonished to find street names changed as you moved down them. And not like miles later but every few blocks…maybe not even that much (not kidding…it seemed they sometimes changed part-way down a block).
Mystifying. I was looking for a restaurant and was within a few blocks and had loads of trouble finding it on my own (not knowing the area and before good cell phone navigation).
After eyes unglaze from wall of text… what is a block?
The land between two intersections of road. Usually a grid so there is a N/S and E/W boundary. That is a block.
Like this:
The OP will most certainly NOT be clicking on that link as I already have a headache thinking about all the other posts in this thread. Fuck’s sake, how do you lot in the US find ANYWHERE?? And my heart goes out to the posties too. Geez.
Friend, I lived in Korea back when they used the most common Japanese addressing system, and I lived in Japan (near Tokyo) when, of course, Japan was still ussing that asinine system. And this was before we all had our personal navigation devices (cell phones). Finding an address with that stupid system was nothing short of a miracle.
You will find the same thing in most older European cities and towns. They started with a small settlement which, over centuries grew and swallowed up the surrounding villages. The whole area would be called Paris, London, Berlin, whatever, but within that, there will still be the old villages, with their own High Streets and characters.
As the cities grew, they would join up the roads, but the boundaries remain, so a single road may have several different names and each part will have its own numbering. It also means that four-digit numbers are not common. As well as this, as land comes under pressure, extra places get added in, and rows of houses get demolished (sometimes by the RAF or Luftwaffe) and replaced by a single commercial building.
All of this can make finding an address pretty difficult as I learned when delivering in Birmingham, England which is made up of over 150 separate neighbourhoods.
Ha ha ha ha… no.
Chicago is an outlier in having a rational and consistent grid system.
This is probably due in part to so much of the city burning down in 1871, to the extent that the street were re-drawn after scraping the debris off into Lake Michigan as landfill to extend the city a bit further east. Having a largely unobstructed, flat extent of land on which to lay out a city also helps.
As a result, Chicago addresses advertise their relative location to the zero point you mention, the State and Madison intersection. “900 North Michigan Avenue” is 9 blocks north of Madison, the street numbers having the pattern 9xx. “1200 North Michigan Avenue” is 12 blocks north. On the south side you’ll get more numbered streets, like “35th Street”, which is 35 blocks south of Madison. The city extends far south, so near the southern border of the city you find streets like 133 Street, where the houses on the roads running north and south will have five digit numbers on the pattern 133xx or 134xx depending on the exact block they’re on.
This is great if you’re in Chicago, but many of the nearby suburbs don’t re-number, they continue the Chicago grid. So, for example, one suburb immediately south of Chicago near where I live starts numbering with 138 Place, so their house numbers start at the north border of that city with 138xx and continue to go up. If there’s a home in that city with an address like 14120 (and it does have a 141st street) it’s not counting from anywhere in the city, it’s 141 blocks from Madison Street in Chicago.
Not only that, it extends into northwest Indiana. The next town over from mine has streets like “169th Street”, which is 169 blocks south of a street in another state. Although by this time the actual numbers of buildings are starting to deviate from the Chicago number system (I have friends living just south of 169th Street but their house number is only four digits, although house numbers in the town just east of them are 5 digits on the Chicago grid system). It’s only when you get to Gary, Indiana that the Chicago grid stops, to be replaced by the Gary grid which starts counting from the south shore of Lake Michigan.
As another feature of being re-drawn post Chicago Fire, the Chicago street system is aligned with the compass pretty closely. Leading to the phenomena of “Chicagohenge” when sunrise and sunset line up with the street grid on March 20 and September 25th (only slightly off the equinoxes).
The Burnham Plan came more than 30 years after the Great Chicago Fire which resulted in a re-drawing of the map of Chicago, Prior to that the streets were much more narrow and chaotic as at the start there wasn’t nearly as much planning for Chicago as you might assume from the current map of the city.
Also:
And that, too, is an artifact of the Great Chicago Fire - these exceptions and oddities occur outside the boundaries of the fire but within the city limits of the time. Go further out and they disappear because areas built up after 1871 used the new grid system rather than needing to adapt whatever came before.
Why do you think we invented GPS?
Prior to that - map reading was a skill taught in schools. I remember having to demonstrate use of paper maps at 8 and 9 years old.
Off topic:
It is threads like these that make the SDMB great. I learned something.
Carry on…
In our neighborhood (200 ish houses) odds and evens are different sides of the street for two parallel streets. So here there doesn’t seem to be any standard at all, Town, County or State.
The street I live on is the U-shaped spine of the neighborhood with about one half of the houses on each leg of the U. The odd numbers are on the outside of the U, the even numbers on the inside. There are two other u-shaped loops that come off this spine. They have the odd numbers on the inside of the loops.
Neighborhood was developed and built out 1948-60. The (now) arterial road that the neighborhood is connected to existed in the 18th century.
Dunno why but odds to the east (as in Chicago) bugs me a little. I just think it should be to the west.
Why? I have no reason whatsoever for that feeling. Just seems more “right” for some reason. I know it does not matter. Just my feels.
It helped me with remembering. As a kid I used my own mnemonic that Indiana is odd (no offense, Indianians) and Indiana is SE of us, so those were the odd sides of the street. I would often forget which side of an east-west street was odd, as I lived on a north-south street, so obviously from my own address I knew which side was odd and which even. That little mental note would always help me, though it’s long since been unnecessary.
Another interesting thing you will find is that in those parts from Madison to 31st, or rather Cermak to 31st, where the addresses don’t run 800 to the mile, there are occasionally street numbers skipped, as the size of the city blocks there are not 1/10 or 1/9 of a mile, as you might expect an area with 1000 and 900 addresses to the mile respectively. For example, good portions of Chicago don’t have a 17th street, and when they do, it’s situated in a place that would usually be labeled as a 16th Place (half block offset from 16th Street.) The other street often skipped is 29th. In Little Village, for example, the blocks run the stardard 1/8 of the mile (from what I can tell), but a block south of 28th and Pulaski is 30th and Pulaski. There’s no 29th.
They were messing with you. That’s a common urban legend that gaijin tell newcomers.
The actual truth isn’t much better. Neighborhoods are also named (like cities and towns, but on a smaller scale). Then the neighborhood is often divided into a few sections, which are numbered, then each block is numbered, and then the houses are numbered around the block.
So you can get an address such as Sakamoto 3-14-5. That is house address five, Block 14 in Section 3 of Sakamoto.
Note that the street isn’t named, and the address doesn’t point to a street. Larger streets have names, but the addresses follow the blocks rather than the streets.
Knowing the address of a particular house may not tell you anything about the address of the house across the street. While the blocks numbers sort of have patterns, you may be crossways in the neighborhood. Or, instead of Sakamoto, you may be in an entirely different address.
Before smart phones with GPS, you would carry detailed maps of the city if you were trying to find someplace you hadn’t been before, or your friend would draw you a map.