Wasn’t Georgetown originally a separate city, too?
Doesn’t Detroit number its “Mile” Roads based on the distance from the Detroit “river?”
The house I grew up in was built in 1952 on land that was formerly bean fields. Our development was shaped like three concentric Us with a straight street bisecting the U. At the bisection the streets changed to a different street name. It was confusing, but it was such a small overall area, you could just drive around for a few minutes to find the street you were looking for.
Interesting to me was that there was a block of houses along the southern edge of the MGM studios. They were built probably 20 or 30 years earlier, but our development just continued the same streets for several more blocks. I didn’t really notice it until I was in high school. Those older houses were so much more interesting than the house I grew up in.
Another factor in many American cities is that the house numbering scheme throws out the numbers 0 - 99. So if Main Street goes north and south, the address at the NW corner of First and Main might be either 101 W. 1st St or 101 N. Main St. Los Angeles changed over to this system in the late 19th century, but still has a couple of pockets of one- and two-digit addresses, most notably in the Venice neighborhood.
Interesting. Here in Chicago we go down to 1.
It’s the miles north of the traffic circle surrounding Campus Martius (near) where most of the radial streets meet, and Michigan Avenue goes straight west from there - and not too far east is the river (though it’s more to the southeast at that point). If you go a bit west and hit I-94, Michigan Avenue turns off this line on latitude and Ford Rd starts on the other side of I-94, so for most purposes, it’s the miles north of Ford Road, since that’s what actually runs along that line of latitude for most of the metro area.
Aw, so they lied to me!
You chose what sadly is the epitome of a typical block in most American cities… a parking lot. In fact most of your image seems to consist entirely of parking lots.
I wouldn’t call it a lie. Campus Martius isn’t far from the river. Maybe 2000 ft?
If it was the river being measured from, keep in mind that it doesn’t flow perfectly east to west at that latitude, so there’s some point where the river meets the land that’s on that latitude. There’s “Milliken State Park and Harbor” which I never heard of before at that point, so I doubt that’s what’s being measured from.
Right near Prescott, amirite?
Portland streets run 20 to the mile and it’s quite exact so knowing how many blocks needed to travel allows you to estimate distance quite easily. Numbered streets run north/south, named streets run east/west and the dividing streets are Burnside, Williams for the North Portland section but south of the divider of NoPo the Willamette River and I-5 is pretty much the de facto divider for east/west. I live on SE 122xx on a named street so I’m a little over six miles as the crow flies from the river, and at N/S numbering 55xx so I’m almost three miles south of Burnside. I came up with a mnemonic when I moved here, “The Northwest is an odd place” to remember that houses on the north and west sides of the streets are odd and the south and east houses have even numbers. Living in a city built on a grid is freaking awesome, you always know where you are. I grew up in Sacramento, which is a very typical “you can’t get there from here” type of place where the streets (outside of a very small section of downtown) are all higgledy piggledy, run around in circles and basically make no sense. It has a very few long straight roads with a bunch of developer laid out suburban curvy streets in between and it’s a damned nightmare to deliver in. Portland is dead easy, especially since nearby burbs like Gresham, Beaverton and Tigard pretty much keep the same numbering system as the main city.
I take it you’ve never been to Boston? It’s so, so much worse, there.
Yep. From your description, it sounds like I didn’t know how good I had it in Portland. I now live in San Francisco, where some neighborhoods have straight streets and some have streets that conform to the hills. But for every street, wherever the street starts, that’s house numbers 1 and 2. Also the city where there is never more than one street sign per intersection (sometimes zero street signs) even if it is covered with shrubbery or facing so that it can only be seen from one or two directions. Another address thing: the street signs have helpful numbers with arrows, like 100–> to show you that the next block is in the 100s. But the last block of any street just shows “End” instead of numbers, and you don’t know what the number range for that block is, unless you can see something on a building. My last complaint is how many houses have house numbers that are impossible to see or read from the street, or no house number at all. I figure if we’re ever invaded by anyone with a logical mind, we’ll just drive them crazy and they’ll leave in disgust.
Sure, but Boston has been there for a really long time and it jest grew, like Topsy, so its weirdness and convoluted road structure was an organic growth thing. Sacramento is the way it is because the city rolled over endlessly for developers and didn’t require them to put in the infrastructure to support the huge number of houses they shit out which created massive traffic messes and a really shitty urban environment. I expect quite a few city planners retired rich on kickbacks from shitty developers.
San Francisco is another city that grew chaotically and it’s handicapped by the geographical anomalies of the bay and mountain ridges and the ocean. Not to mention getting large swathes of it knocked down by earthquakes and fires and the like, also the creeping fault lines that screw things up. No excuse for the house numbers, though, that’s just weird. For the record, I hate getting around in SF something fierce, I’d rather navigate Los Angeles than deal with that mess.
Know what’s worse though? Tokyo. Freaking enormous, sprawls for miles, streets just plopped down any old where and at least back in the '60s, NO STREET SIGNS. WTF? I never did figure out how the people who lived there got around, I had to rely on memory and backtracking myself and when it all went pear shaped asking random strangers “Shinjuku, doko desu ka?” because if I could find the train station I could always get back home. Eleven years old, running around the biggest city on the planet, what the heck were my parents thinking?
From what I understand, in Tokyo, all locations are reckoned only relative to the nearest subway station. I read a story elsewhere on this board once, of a couple of friends spending a day on the town, and starting at one venue, walking a half-hour to a subway stop, taking the train to a different stop, and then walking a half-hour to a different venue… only to realize once they were there that they were right across the street from the first place.
Panama City has no subway. But IME from my years there it has similar practical geography.
Stuff that seems miles apart is around the corner from each other. And vice versa.
Even the dear departed and much esteemed @Colibri fell for the Panamanian space wormhole from time to time despite living there for decades.
I did, and still help do addressing for a county. Going down do 1, or starting at one is a very bad idea.
You ALWAYS need to leave room for other addresses. A property, even a small one could get subdivided. Then what do you do?
Yeah, you go to 1a and 1b. Or decimals and fractions. BUT that can really screw up other things.
There are town lots that where originally platted with 13 properties per lot. This was back in the 1800’s. Well, of course they got subdivided again, and again and again.
Always leave room.