The TD Garden in Boston claims to have the address of 100 Legends Way. There is no Legends Way. The Garden is on Causeway Street. Are there any other buildings that claim fake addresses?
Legends Way appears to be the name of the driveway where you pull in. Plenty of business do that so they can be “1 [business name] Way”. It’s pretty common. I would also assume it’s the legal name of the street not a fake name. Google Maps etc had no problem finding it.
http://www.tdgarden.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PedestrianTrafficFlow-Map.pdf
In fact, I just went to street view and I can see a regular stop light mounted sign that says Legends Hwy. Why the Way/Hwy discrepancy, I don’t know, but the sign is right where it should be.
How easy is it to get one’s driveway recognized as a legal street? Is this something that is typically easy and can be done by filing a few pages of paperwork at the local courthouse, or is it a very complex process involving a lot of proce$$ing and appeal$ and having a friend in an important place?
In other words, if I want to name my driveway “1 Hail Robert_Columbia He’s Awesome Let Us Sacrifice Virgins Unto His Holy Name Way” and then make the DMV put that on my driver’s license, how hard is that?
There was a book publisher (I can’t recall the name right now - maybe Warner Books) that had offices at 666 Fifth Ave. in NYC.
Their religious book line was in the same building, but had an address on one of the cross streets. Technically it was incorrect, but the post office allowed it.
Looking around online, it’s very much a YMMV thing, at least WRT having a (usually private) road renamed. Fees very, sometimes a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand. I’m saw one jurisdiction that required the road to serve at least 4 people (WAG, if it served less than that, it’s a different process not that they can’t do it?).
Different requirements for permission from neighbors/city.
Different requirements for what the street can be called.
On top of all that, I didn’t see anything about having the city recognize your own private “driveway” as something. However, approach them and offer to build a 100-200 million dollar stadium that you’ll fill on a regular basis and they’ll probably put up a sign for you and give you whatever address you want.
My own town’s rules (looked up now) say the to-be-named road has to serve at least five residences. No mention of private roads for a business or if five individually leased offices in a corporate center count or whatever.
The two tallest buildings in Missouri are One Kansas City Place (in K.C.) and One Metropolitan Square (in St. Louis.)
One Kansas City Place actually has a “real” street address, but the address for One Metropolitan Square is “One Metropolitan Square.” I doubt if anyone in St. Louis could tell you where Metropolitan Square is, other than it’s “where the tall building is downtown.” It appears that most of the businesses in the building actually use that address, although some use the the street address of 211 N. Broadway.
These are the kinds of judgment calls us mapmakers have to make all the time: is something a private road or merely a shared driveway? Because of E-911, in most places nowadays, there’s a county addressing official, and cities often have their own bureaucrat in charge of assigning addresses. So there’s likely to be an official computerized record these days, which wasn’t the case 20 years ago.
Whether a vanity address will be allowed for a big project is one of the things negotiated between the developer and local planning officials, and sometimes even an existing public street gets renamed to make the developer happy. That’s how Chicago’s Sherman Street became Financial Place. AFAIK, the USPS is not especially concerned or involved, so long as street names aren’t duplicative or confusing.
Walmarts are often located at 1 Walmart Way, or some similar format. Same thing with hospitals frequently being at 1 Hospital Drive.:rolleyes:
I don’t know if it’s still there or not, but there used to be an auto assembly plant outside of Cincinnatti whose address was on Four Wheel Drive.
Apple Corporation’s address is 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, Ca.
Aerial photo of Cupertino with street names marked. Apple campus is at the bottom.
There is a more serious issue with vanity addresses: When someone calls 911 for help, operators or responders may be confused by the address.
A 1987 high rise fire in Chicago where a woman was killed made national headlines. She called 911 for help and gave the vanity address of the building. A review of the tapes after the fact made it sound like the dispatcher was confused about her location. There was also a question about whether the police and fire address data bases were in sync. After the fact, city spokesman said the dispatcher was just double-checking and wasn’t confused, but questions still lingered.
Not far from me is the Scientology international headquarters, and they somehow convinced the City Council to change the name of one block of Berendo St.–a public block of a public street–to “L.Ron Hubbard Way.” Only half of the houses there are owned by Scientology, so the rest were forced to change the name of the street in their personal address to that clown’s name. I can’t believe they got away with that.
The former HQ of French’s Mustard in Rochester, NY was located at the mythical “1 Mustard St.”
I once worked at a college whose official address included a street that wasn’t accessible directly from the campus. You had to drive to practically the other side of the campus to get to a gate where you could get in. The street number was fictional.
If you use GPS to try and get to it, you’re close but no cigar.
At another college, we’d frequently run into service/delivery people who insisted on getting a full street address for our building. Which didn’t have a street address. Just a building name. So we’d make up something. But that was before GPS. If you tried that now it wouldn’t go well.
They recently were updating addresses here for 911 use, eliminating the “RD #” addresses as well as duplicate street names. A guy I know was scolded for his “Easy Street” street sign on his driveway and told it had to be removed.
It’s not mythical, but it is, like “Legends Way” in the OP, short. It only exists for the purpose of letting business be there. But it’s an irresistible story, which I’ve told on the Board before.
The Taylor family of Keuka Lake in upstate New York made Taylor Wines for several years, and eventually sold the business to Coca Cola, which still operates it. Walter S. Taylor started up Bully Hill, Vineyards to make smaller batches of wine the old-fashioned way, and using mostly native-grown New York State grapes for it. He put it out with his own painted "Bully Hill Labels. In small print, it said “Wiliam S. Taylor” at the bottom.
Coca Cola took him to court, claiming that they bought the name “Taylor”, and he couldn’t use it. They won.
So Taylor started putting out his wine in bottles with labels that had the name “Taylor” covered up with black rectangle, or with a Question Mark in place of “Taylor”. His own portrait on the label he replaced with a picture of himself as a Cyclops, with a single eye.
Coke took him back to court, claiming that he was making a mockery of the ruling. Which he was. He started putting a picture of a goat on the label, with the legend “They may have gotten my name, but they didn’t get my goat.” They still put out the wine with the goat label.
Finally, in a stroke of brilliance, he had the short street his winery was on renamed “Greyton H. Taylor Boulevard” (GHT was his grandfather, who started the first Taylor vineyard on Keuka Lake). This let him legitimately put the name “Taylor” on the labels without violating any law, since it was in the address.
https://www.bullyhillvineyards.com/about/heritage/
Goat Label
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV00kSidXHfQAwGFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0N2Noc21lBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=Bully+Hill+wines&fr=yfp-t-201&fr2=piv-web#id=26&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Feverydaydrinkers.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F01%2Flove-my-goat.gif&action=click
Space Shuttle Red Wine. Note the address at the bottom of the label
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV00kSidXHfQAwGFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0N2Noc21lBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=Bully+Hill+wines&fr=yfp-t-201&fr2=piv-web#id=80&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia-cache-ec0.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F05%2Fb5%2F0c%2F05b50cf851d15bcd2de6c9110ea9f9a3.jpg&action=click
I haven’t seen many that don’t show up on maps like google maps.
There is sometimes a difference in how they show up in property records. My state has three different databases for real estate records, but apartments aren’t usually listed. Sometimes there is a difference between how public and private streets appear in a database, but usually it is stuff restricted to things like snow/trash removal. In my area public streets generally have green street signs while private are usually blue or brown.
I know businesses on side streets to fifth avenue in Manhattan that use a 5th avenue address, but they will usually give you two addresses.
I get frustrated when I can’t locate something in GPS - IMHO - if you want people to visit your business - they should be listing an address (I don’t mind if it’s an additional one) that will be close enough that a reasonable person can find the business when at that location per GPS. I realize sometimes that isn’t possible
Similarly, one company I used to work for, Cognex (which makes Machine Vision systems – particularly software) has the road leading into it off of MA route 9 labeled “Vision Drive”.
Therre is a residential building on Vision Drive, and one of the company buildings has sublet space to other businesses, but for all practical purposes “Vision Drive” is basically Cognex’ driveway.