When I lived in Chicago folks seemed very aware of it and used it to navigate, although perhaps they were so used to it they didn’t think of it the way a newcomer would. “Where is that?” “Oh, around 1800 North.” or “Where on Sheridan?” “2000 West”. And any thing with an East in the address will be in the Loop or further south, East addresses don’t exist on the North Side because of the way the lakeshore is shaped.
That might be because Archer Avenue pre-dates the city and goes it’s own way. It’s supposedly an old Native trail. I’ve also heard that all the major diagonals in Chicago are those, although I haven’t done the research to be prove or disprove that statement. Although they might have reached the Loop area at one time that’s another thing that marks the limits of the Great Chicago Fire and the re-drawing of city streets afterward, which was done on a much stricter grid system than the original layout of the city center.
Yeah, the actual geographic center of Chicago today is somewhere around 31st and Western. There’s commemorated officially as such on a sign at 37th and Honore, right in from of St. Andrew Lutheran Church.
That’s the story. The area in question is between Cicero and 55th. It’s a transition point between the NS grid Archer follows until then and the EW grid it joins at 55th. So numbers have to be smoothly squeezed into there, and that’s where it falls off the grid. I don’t know if any of the several other diagonals in the city do this. I feel like they all just either follow NS or EW numbering. They could have kept Archer on a EW grid for addresses if they wanted to – I don’t see any reason why not (like there’s not a NS stretch of street). I’m assuming it originally was numbered NS and as the city expanded outward, they had to change part of it to an EW grid where Archer straightens out to an EW road towards Harlem.
So, it’s more or less common knowledge, then? I must not have asked the right people or asked in the right way. In any case, I guess it’s not all that surprising, because I probably asked fewer than 10 people over three or four years, which isn’t much of a sample size. For example, those I asked at work might have lived and/or been born in the suburbs.
ETA: Too bad the SDMB wasn’t around back then. It’s funny, because I followed Cecil’s column in The Reader during those years.
Yeah, it’s a bit difficult for me to know how you wouldn’t come across this information if, for example, you worked in the Loop or traveled to addresses in the Loop, where you can easily be on either side of the EW or NS dividers. I would think at some point you’d be like, oh, 10 E is on this side of State, and 10 W is on this side (or something similar.) Same with Madison. Like I’m sure most Chicagoans have a rough idea of where 1200N is (Division Street) and 1200S is (Roosevelt), but don’t they notice where the flipping point of NS is?
I dunno. Maybe the people I deal with are more geographically inclined.
At nearly all my jobs in the city, I worked on the premises (factories, warehouses, etc.) and I didn’t have a car, so I relied on public transport. There was one job whose duties included delivery, so I was actually driving, but the job itself and nearly all the destinations were in the suburbs. Also, I had very few friends and didn’t get out much. More importantly, though: I can be remarkably unobservant.
Yeah, the next step is memorizing the grid coordinates for the mile markers like Ashland (1600W) and Belmont (3200N) and then half-mile markers like MLK (400E) or Division (1200N). Then you’re starting to get good with the grid system. As a South Sider, it ets a little tricky for me with the North Side EW streets, as we just number most of ours here.
Well… almost all of the suburbs, the close in ones at least, also follow the Chicago grid system. As I mentioned up thread, this even extends into the neighboring state of Indiana.
I think it’s more that the natives have so absorbed the grid system they no longer consciously think much about it.
One complication in Cleveland is that the Y axis of the coordinate system is Ontario Boulevard, which runs right through the middle of Public Square, but “East Side” and “West Side” refer to which side of the Cuyahoga River you’re on (a bit west of Public Square). The few avenues that cross the river all change names at the bridge (so, for instance, an address of 5001 Detroit would be on the west side, and an address of 5001 Superior would be on the east side), but there’s still that little bit that’s west of Ontario but east of the river, and so you need addresses like “900 West Superior” to distinguish from “900 Superior” that’s on the other side of downtown.
EDIT: Oh, and we don’t have an X axis street for addresses. On any north-south street, numbers start at the lake, and increase as you go south. Since the shape of the lakeshore isn’t a straight line, this means that address on cross streets at any given avenue won’t all be the same.
I had a friend who was a drunk and uneducated grunt (great guy) who seemed to have a complete map of Chicago in his head. You know how London Black Taxi drivers have to take that insane test? The Knowledge? Well, he never took that but I swear if there was one for Chicago he could ace it. It was kinda spooky.
I asked him how he knew all that and he’d just shrug and claim he didn’t really know. He never worked at it much.
Some people just have that knack. One of my brothers is really good at having a mental map of the city but not close to what my friend had.
Here’s a good night time aerial pic of Greater Saint Louis at the top of this wiki:
It’s worth clicking through to see the full screen version of the pic; NASA did good.
The City proper is the densely lit fan-shaped area on the left = west side of the Mississippi river which meanders a bit but runs basically north/south right along there.
Simplifying mightily …
The apex of the fan is original downtown, where the Arch is, etc. That’s 0/0 for addresses. From there major arteries fan out radially running anywhere from due south, to SSW, to SW, to WSW, due west, WNW, NW, all the way around to NNW. They’re all consistently numbered 0 at downtown and increasing going away from there.
As you move farther from downtown and the major radials get too far apart, minor radials are inserted running farther out from there. Although there’s no consistency on where the various minor radials start at least they’re numbered consistently with their adjacent majors. Double-minor radials appear in a few places where the distance to downtown is great enough that the minor radials get too far apart.
A series of concentric arcing arteries are next, running 90-ish degrees to each radial they cross. Each with what amounts to insane numbering I won’t try to describe.
Last of all a series of grids are dumped into the gaps between radial & concentric arteries. Some of the grids are pretty extensive, which means lots of increasingly weird angle intersections with the radials and concentrics. Then once the angles get too weird, the grid realigns to track parallel to a particular radial and as you move away from that radial the angles get weirder & weirder again. Lather rinse repeat around almost a hemi-circle.
Of course the terrain is mildly hilly, and all this was built between about 1830 and 1930, so nothing was really planned and the radials aren’t all that physically straight even though they’re conceptually straight. And the concentrics aren’t all that smoothly curved, even though they’re conceptually just arcs of a circle. So, like Cleveland’s lakeshore-based numbering, each intersection of radial and concentric has its own idiosyncratic address that gives only a general hint about what the numbers at the next one will be.
It’s a fun place to learn to get around in. And that’s before all of suburbia got built up around it from 1930 through to today. Which suburbia continues the fan-shape for a few more miles then eventually more or less gridifies along conventional NESW alignments, net of the rolling terrain. Giving the overall city the look of an eastbound jellyfish trailing its glowing tentacles to the west.
Ignore the part to the east of the river. That’s Illinois, about which polite St. Louis company does not speak.
Once you leave the St. Louis City limits and enter St. Louis County, the east-west numbering system continues from the Mississippi (or to be exact, First Street/Leonor Sullivan Blvd. along the riverfront) but the north-south axis shifts from Market Street in the City to Ladue Road in the County. That is, except for the communities that already had their own numbering system set up before the county-wide plan went into effect. Except, of course, for major arterials that run through multiple communities, for which the Post Office demanded they conform to the County system.
I had a customer who lived at 12345 Jay Lane. The houses on either side were in sequence with each other. 64 Jay Lane, 12345 Jay Lane, 68 Jay Lane.
12345 was the lot number assigned by the town. The town is looking to replace sequential numbers with lpot numbers as existing houses are replaced by McMansions,
When I lived the Chicago area in the 80s and 90s, either someone told me about or I figured it out pretty quickly. I think most people were aware of it.
My son recently moved from Chicago proper to southern Cook County. I was astonished to learn that the Halstead that runs through his community is the same Halstead that runs through Chicago, and the 18-thousand something street numbers are also calculated from Madison.
Indeed; I’m in western Cook County, and the street numbers here (I’m at 3100 south and 9000 west) are based off of the Madison and State grid zero-point.
That even happened in the planned city of Washington DC. This will sound surprising to anyone who’s seen the orderly layout of streets in the four quadrants, in alphabetical order as well as numeric. But the Mount Pleasant neighborhood was started as a separate settlement back when the city of Washington was much smaller and most of the District consisted of Washington County and Arlington County. Nowadays all the District is coterminous with the city of Washington.
So Mount Pleasant has its own street grid. I have an intuitive understanding of how to quickly pinpoint any location in DC from its address, thanks to Monsieur L’Enfant’s plan. But every time I enter Mount Pleasant, I get lost! Every single time. My whole sense of direction vanishes there like one of those vortexes or something.
It’s funny, because I followed Cecil’s column in The Reader during those years.