[QUOTE=stuyguy]
If you want to see the sometimes wacky results of NYC’s Borough-centric addressing system, travel the borderline between Brooklyn and Queens. The border-defining streets will have one sequence of numbers on the Brooklyn side, and an utterly, utterly unrelated sequence on the Queens side!
[/QUOTE]
Kings and Queens are different counties (and used to be different cities as well). Totally separate street numbering happens all over the country when crossing county boundaries.
Northern Indiana here. An acquaintance of mine bought a parcel of land on a corner to build his new home. He went to the county offices to get his address, using his building blueprints to show the exact position of the house on the land. The county official (clerk?) told him his address would be 5304 County Road 23. Since he owned the property all the way to the corner, he asked if he could have the address 5300 County Road 23. The official said that they couldn’t do that, so he asked them to tell him exactly how many feet he needed to move the house in order to have that address. (For whatever reason, it was that important to him). The county officials got so frustrated, they finally gave in and gave him the 5300 as requested.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Kings and Queens are different counties (and used to be different cities as well). Totally separate street numbering happens all over the country when crossing county boundaries.
[/QUOTE]
I realize that, but the Brooklyn-Queens numbering difference is not a county-county thing like in other places; it’s a borough-borough thing.
It may seem like I’m splitting hairs – or picking a fight – but I would contend that there is a real difference here. Let me cite an example.
As you probably know, Manhattan Borough is coterminous with New York County these days – but that was not always the case. From 1898 (when NYC’s borough system was begun) to the end of 1913, the Borough of the Bronx was part of New York County. I would argue (though I can’t prove it this very moment) that during that period the Bronx and Manhattan Borough Presidents could assign addresses however they wished in their respective boroughs even though they shared the same county.
And this is not a unique example. Non-coterminous situations existed between Queens Borough and Queens County from 1898 to 1899 (when Nassau County was created), and for a brief time in the 1980s when Marble Hill’s borough/county status was successfully disputed in the courts. (A new law had to be passed in Albany to set that matter straight.)
Permit me one further nitpick, if you would. While Brooklyn (or Kings Co.) was at one time a separate city, Queens – County or Borough – never was. (True, Long Island City was a city, but that was only a tiny piece of Queens Borough/County.)
[QUOTE=Kevbo]
I was unfortunatly raised in Denver, as it has spoilt me for finding addresses. (and for having a sense of direction that does not rely on the mountains) One place better, though, is Salt Lake City, Utah and it’s Wasatch Valley 'burbs.. All addresses are given as two cartesian coordinates. East of West of State Street, and North or South of Temple (Ave?). There is no need at all to to give directions. As I recall each nominal block = 100 “address units” = 1/10 mile, so you can even use your odometer if there are no buildings or addresses posted.
[/QUOTE]
Salt Lake really is an easy place to find your way around.**
Minor nitpicks: Coordinates originate at the intersection of Main Street instead of State Street (State Street is 100 East, being the first street east of the center line), and South Temple, not just Temple***, and 100 address units generally equal one block (1/8 of a mile rather than 1/10).
Still, your description is quite right: If the address is something like 2175 South 700 East, then the place is between 21 and 22 blocks south of center, and 7 block east. Couldn’t be simpler, really.
A couple of more tidbits about SLC addresses.
For all streets that are named instead of just numbered, if the street name contains the word “Street” (e.g. McClelland Street) then that street runs north and south. If the street name contains the word “Avenue” (e.g. First Avenue) then that street runs east and west. (Unfortunately the other names like lane, court, road, etc., are not as standardized.)
If you are facing away from the center of town, even number addresses are on your right side, odd numbers on the left.
** At least, the older parts are, where the streets are all straight, and aligned strictly north/south or east/west. Many of the newer subdivisions have roads that curve all over the place, and sometimes even double-back on themselves, and are not always clearly numbered. But those are the minority overall.
*** The LDS Temple grounds takes up one square block at the center of town. There are three “temple” streets, North Temple, South Temple, and West Temple, and these run (not surprisingly) along the north, south, and west side of the temple grounds. Main Street is positioned to run along the east side of the temple grounds, and is the north/south center line for addresses, so there is no East Temple street.
[QUOTE=chowder]
If there is a substantial gap between, for example, 13 and the next house then what happens is that the local authorities determine how many DWELLING houses could fit into that gap.
[/QUOTE]
This doesn’t always happen, of course, and developers often manage to cram in houses where you wouldn’t think they could. One street near me has houses numbered, in sequence:
56 … 58 … 58A 58B 58C 58D 58E 58F 60A 60B 60C 60D 60E 60F … 62 … 64
No number 60 - I assume that was the number of the big house that was demolished and replaced with a row of a dozen shoeboxes!
[QUOTE=stuyguy]
Permit me one further nitpick, if you would. While Brooklyn (or Kings Co.) was at one time a separate city, Queens – County or Borough – never was. (True, Long Island City was a city, but that was only a tiny piece of Queens Borough/County.)
[/QUOTE]
I realize that New York City requires special rules regarding its special history. I was just saying that some anomalies may exist simply because of that special history.
But as to your nitpick, I meant that Brooklyn and Queens were once separate cities, not that Queens was separate from New York.
Not long ago, in my rural area, there were no street addresses. You got your mail thru the Rural Route system, so just addressing a letter to Bill Jones, RT 3 was sufficient.
Then, as populations grew and more summer residents were added, the county saw the need for a better way to assure that fire trucks would find a house in need of extinguishment, so they issued “fire numbers”, tiny green signs with digits only to place close to your driveway.
If you built a new house, you called up the town chairman and asked him to give you a number, so he would look at your neighbors’ numbers and pick one somewhere inbetween. As the properties were “infilled,” the lack of planning was revealed and some people had to settle for A or B or 1/2.
Then the county modernized about 5 years ago and created a position of Addressing Specialist, whose task was to straighten out the system, reassign numbers if necessary, and make it work for emergency services, which are now more than just fire trucks.
I believe the addressing specialist uses a guidebook of principles of some kind, but I don’t know where this comes from. He has not only changed some numbers, but also some road names. Almost every town had a Townline road at the borders and since cherry producing is a very big industry, we had a dozen Cherry Lanes. Also, the N/S/E/W system was made more regular and conforming to a master plan. To some, this seemed unecessary, since if Bagnall road existed only east of the dividing line, why rename it to East Bagnall when there was no West Bagnall?
Once an area is numbered correctly, the Post Office is notified so all databases match.
The biggest problem was circular roads that looped around, often in an irregular loop, and didn’t lend themselves well to a north-south & east-west numbering system. The specialist relented in at least one case and let them keep their old numbers that started at one end of the road and increased until the other end. As long as there are no cross-roads, this works fine.
But we still call our addresses “fire numbers”.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
But as to your nitpick, I meant that Brooklyn and Queens were once separate cities, not that Queens was separate from New York.
[/QUOTE]
I think my post may have been unclear. Sorry. The nit that I was picking was that Queens (in borough form or in county form) was never a city.
In NYS (and probably everywhere else), “city” is not a loosely defined term. A municipality is legally designated a city only when the legislature says so. NYC was a city since colonial times so I think it was sort of grandfathered in. Brooklyn legally became a city in 1834. Williamsburgh existed as a city for a year or two (circa 1854) before Brooklyn annexed it. I don’t remember exactly when it got its city charter, but Long Island City was also a city by the time of consolidation.
Queens, on the other hand, was never a city.
I once read that Tokyo uses an unwieldy system. Buildings are numbered on a street in the order that they are built. Whenever a new building goes up, it receives the next highest number regardless of its location. Driving down a street, you might see a sequence like 44, 120, 8, 15, 47.
Street addresses in Bangkok are mostly useless for practical purposes. Here, they come in two sets of numbers divided by a slash, such as 111/11. The first set of numbers is an entire lot numbered in the order in which a developer applied for a number for that lot; the second set is the number of a building inside that lot, numbered in the orer in which it was built. And these lots and buildings were seldom applied for built in in geographic side-by-side order. So numbers jump around. You always have to know what something is near. #10 might be a mile away from #11, with all sorts of numbers in between. Or not, they might be perfectly ordered. You just never can tell.
Spare a thought for Kathmandu, though. NO numbers! If you want to write someone a letter, you put their name and what square they’re near on the envelope. The postman has to know who it is and take it from there.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I once read that Tokyo uses an unwieldy system. Buildings are numbered on a street in the order that they are built. Whenever a new building goes up, it receives the next highest number regardless of its location. Driving down a street, you might see a sequence like 44, 120, 8, 15, 47.
[/QUOTE]
I heard that too. Which perplexed me because where I lived in South America, they had a perfectly logical and exact system. Streets ran north-south; avenues ran east west. If you live on 52 St., at the corner with 43 Ave, your address is determined by exactly how many meters your door is from the corner. So if your door is 22 meters from the corner, your address is St. 52 43-22.
Some rural US areas use the numbers to signify the distance. 100 means 1/10th of a mile. So if you are looking for 567 River Road, the house is a little more than 1/2 mile along the road. If the next house is 671, the house is another tenth mile further. The digits in the tens and ones places also mean something, feet I guess.
I came across something I hadn’t heard of before when I moved from Chicago to North Carolina last October. I’m renting a condo in a very new development (when I use Google Map the satellite photo shows dirt roads and the cleared land where my street and building are now located). There are only two buildings on my street, yet my building is labeled 400; when I walked around the development I found that every building has a different number, which seem to be roughly related to how far they are from the main street outside the development. In my building, each unit is numbered by what floor it’s on; 411, 412, etc on the first floor, 421, 422 etc, on the second floor, and 431, 432, etc on the third floor. My address is my unit number and the name of the street on which my building is located.
Oddly enough, when I got my NC state ID card, the DMV added “Building 400” to my address. When I asked about this, the woman told my that their computer was programmed to include the building number…but nobody else seems to use it.
[QUOTE=Colophon]
This doesn’t always happen, of course, and developers often manage to cram in houses where you wouldn’t think they could. One street near me has houses numbered, in sequence:
56 … 58 … 58A 58B 58C 58D 58E 58F 60A 60B 60C 60D 60E 60F … 62 … 64
No number 60 - I assume that was the number of the big house that was demolished and replaced with a row of a dozen shoeboxes!
[/QUOTE]
The reason there is no No.60 is down to the fact that when the original plans were submitted by the planners house 60 was still standing.
Later on it was more than likely determined that house 60 was structurally unsafe and was then scheduled for demolition.
Further plans were not submitted as they were not required to be. Because 60 existed when the originals were approved that number could not be used unless 60 was restored or renovated.