If I want to send someone in Brooklyn a letter, the third line of the address on the envelope will read “Brooklyn, NY…” If I want to send a letter to someone in Manhattan, the third line will read “New York, NY…” Yet, if I send a letter to Queens, I’ve gotta know if they are in Far Rockaway, Jamaica, Flushing, etc. I presume that if I wrote “Queens, NY” it would eventually get there, but, for the most part, the “city” in the address is identified by the neighborhood, rather than by the borough. Why is Queens different?
It is such because the residents there don’t want to have their ritzy neighborhoods be associated with the grittier, parts of town. For example, a rich person who lives just off Bell Boulevard would prefer to call the neighborhood he resides in as “Bayside” rather than have it called the main postal area, “Flushing”. There is a huge disparity of real estate values among different regions of Queens. Also, I believe, when Queens county was annexed by New York, the county consisted of the several towns that were never combined into one until the annexation. Imagine if the rest of Long Island was annexed by New York. The individual towns would still want to retain its identity in some form or another. So it is such in Queens.
In the other boroughs, the address is designated by borough. The area known as Brooklyn had a lot of different towns at one time which were annexed into one, just before the merging of Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Bronx was almost always considered to consist of one area: the delta of the Bronx River that was settled by the Bronck family way back. The various neighborhoods in Manhattan Island have never had definite borders. Sometimes, the most famous neighborhoods consited of only one street. Neighborhoods merge into one another regularly, and new ones are formed, the newest ones being Silicon Alley, Battery Park City and Noho (Lower East Side north of Houston Street).
If you were a rich person living a block off Bell Boulevard, would you rather say you live in “Bayside”, or “Flushing”? Ritzy neighborhoods think they are like the Hamptons, and don’t care to give up their rich neighborhood names to a more generic one like “Queens”, or, heavens forbid, the regional zip code names of Long Island City, Flushing, or Jamaica.
After reading the other thread, i’m still not clear if the Post Office has an official policy about what you can and cannot put in the City/State field. My understanding was that they only look at the ZIP code, and that the city/state info was there for redundancy. Any postal workers out there?
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“Mankind is at its best when it is most free.” – Dante Alighieri
I suspect that SirRay in the linked thread has hit the root of the answer, namely that from 1898 to 1899 (before they created Nassau County) there were two Queens:
Queens Borough = roughly (but not exactly) today’s Queens borough/county
Queens County = today’s Queens borough/county + today’s Nassau County
So, to specify only “Queens” on an address would be too inexact. After all, Queens County held all of Queens Borough plus all the towns and villages up to the Suffolk line (about 2/3 of Long Island). They probably thought it best to stick with the old town anf village names.
Years ago when I was sending more snail mail than email I tried to find the limits of what could be passed off as a “city and state” in an otherwise valid address (hey, it was amusing at the time). I did not find what that limit is.
As long as my mail had a valid street address and zip code it made it. Fake cities, fake states, random text, no text at all… it didn’t matter. The zip code’s the thing. As long as it had the zip, it made it.
Consider: you can rent a box in your local post office and get a nine digit zip code. The first five digits identify the post office, the next four digits the specific box in that post office.
I hereby offer any takers the wager of $10 that a standard business envelope bearing only a nine digit zip and proper postage will indeed be delivered to that exact mailbox from any other destination served by the U.S. Postal Service. It doesn’t need a name, P.O. Box number, city, or state, just the nine digit zip.
Also, and I could be wrong, but wasn’t Brooklyn a city (2nd largest city in the U.S. at the time, I thought…) for a long time before the union of the 5 boroughs (whereas Queens consisted of a bunch of separate villages and towns)? Therefore, it would make sense that you were sending mail to the city of Brooklyn, but needed to designate to which town you were sending mail in the county of Queens.
Toad, Brooklyn was the 3rd or 4th largest (estimates vary) city in the USA before the 1898 consolidation.
True, Queens Co. was more disjointed than Brooklyn, but until only a few years before joining w/ NYC in 1898, Kings County was disjointed too.
In 1898 Queens Co. consisted of one city (Long Island City) and a bunch of towns/villages.
Kings County had started as towns/villages too. Through the 1800’s one of them, Brooklyn, grew into a city, which soon began to annex the other five Kings Co. towns/villages. In 1896 – only a couple of years before consolidation w/ NYC – it gobbled up the last one, Flatlands, thereby making Brooklyn City coterminous with Kings County.
There’s another current thread called something like “NYC geography question” that covers some of this. You might want to check it out.
As the others said, you could almost certainly have your letter delivered as long as you had the right ZIP code. I could probably mail something to my apt. by writing “New York, NY 11103” just as easily as “Astoria, NY 11103” or “Long Island City, NY 11103” or simply “11103.” It’s just convention, I’m guessing.
Yep. When I was moving back to Toronto from Stony Brook, NY, I had to write many, many letters to day care centres to get information on where D18 Jr. was going to go. To save time, ss a return address, all I put was:
XX Whatever Street
11790
Several of the day cares had closed, and sure enough, I got my letters returned to me.
It’s just an artifact, really. When Greater New York was formed in 1898, “New York, New York” meant only Manhattan (and, briefly, chunks of what’s now the Bronx). To keep the mail from descending into total chaos, the Post Office retained all of the old designations even though they no longer had a legal meaning. When Zip Codes arrived in the 1960s, there wasn’t any reason to keep the old town names, but by that time everyone had been using them for generations.
What’s frustrating is trying to use MapQuest or MapBlast for Queens when you know the street address but not the zip code or town name of where you’re going. I have no idea what system they use, but I’ve found that entering simply “Queens, New York” won’t get you very far.
It’s just an artifact, really. When Greater New York was formed in 1898, “New York, New York” meant only Manhattan (and, briefly, chunks of what’s now the Bronx). To keep the mail from descending into total chaos, the Post Office retained all of the old designations even though they no longer had a legal meaning. When Zip Codes arrived in the 1960s, there wasn’t any reason to keep the old town names, but by that time everyone had been using them for generations.
What’s frustrating is trying to use MapQuest or MapBlast for Queens when you know the street address but not the zip code or town name of where you’re going. I have no idea what system they use, but I’ve found that entering simply “Queens, New York” won’t get you very far. **
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Are you are looking for directions in Queens or for the Town/Zip Code? A good tool to use if you are lost in Queens is the Street Address. A Queens address will consist of two hyphenated numbers (ex: 67-14) followed by the Street/Ave etc (ex: 125 St). The first number (67) refers to the cross street. This address is perpendicular to 67th ave/lane/rd etc. Since they are all grouped together it dosen’t matter which one you initally look for. The second number (14) is the house number associated with the "67"s. Once you are in the "67"s while on 125th Street you can just follow the numerical order. Did that make sense? Oh, if you have a name street (Queens Blvd) then it will not be as easy. It works better with numbers.
I don’t know why Queens, NY doesn’t work but you may try Flushing and Long Island City as starting points. Or you can use the white pages on the internet and type in the address. If the person isn’t listed it may give you addresses that are near by.
While the incorporation of towns into Queens borough and then the city may be the origin of the practice, I’m certain that the reason that it has persisted is the desire to have a “nicer” address, as has been noted.
As a former Bronxite, I am certain this is the reason that some residents of that fair borough use Riverdale and Woodlawn in their addresses.
Oh, if you have a name street (Queens Blvd) then it will not be as easy. It works better with numbers.
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Bingo! We have a winner. Yeah, named streets just don’t work. Eventually I was able to figure things out - what I was looking for was a newly-opened Target (right above the subway! We love that!), and finally cobbled together enough information to make it work. I think it all started because Mapquest didn’t know what “Elmhurst” was.