For many years I’ve wondered how the Venice district of L.A. was able to retain its old house numbering scheme, instead of falling into line like every other town that was annexed by the city. Palms, Hollywood, and many other places used to be independent communities that were eventually annexed by L.A. They all renumbered their addresses to match those of L.A…except for Venice. So Venice still has all of these quaint one- and two-digit addresses on its east and west running streets between the beach and Pacific Avenue, and the numbers go up as you move away from the beach. House numbers with less than three digits are otherwise unknown in L.A.
Continuing east, you usually reach addresses in the 900s or 1000s at or near Lincoln Boulevard. You cross that, then boom! now the addresses are five digits long and they decrease as you continue to move eastward.
What gives? You still see this sort of thing with towns that are independent entities, like El Segundo and Beverly Hills, but Venice is the only annexed town I can think of that was able to keep its old addresses. I’ve always been curious about this because addresses like 5 Market or 40 Westminster Court have an un-L.A.-like feel that is tantamount to the exotic.
I don’t know about California, but in Missouri, every county has an “addressing authority.” The county I live in has a stand alone office. The county north of me, the County 9-1-1 dispatch center is the authority. Each county can do it any way they want. My county for instance, likes to use 4 digits for county roads and state highways, but private roads get three digits. At the same time, if a private road has single digits, they won’t change them unless someone builds a new home on that street. When I built my house on a private road, they changed everyone’s address. The private road a half mile away still has single digits because no one has built a new home there for over 20 years.
Most of the people on the road had been there for 20 plus years. It didn’t go over well with them so I ended up buying new numbers for everyone’s mail boxes to make them feel better. Same county did not touch any addressing within city limits.
The county north of me went to a five digit grid system. They did 5 mile grid lines, started with 1000 in the north west grid and went east and south from there. In that county, you can look at someone’s address and figure out what part of the county they live in. Except for anyone within city limits, they left their addresses alone.
I don’t know if that answered your question or not, but if anything put in “X” county California addressing authority and see if anything comes up.
Los Angeles County doesn’t seem to have that. They might be able to make addressing rules for the unincorporated areas, but it doesn’t have that kind of control over the cities. Basically, when a city incorporates, they exempt themselves from County governance and make their own laws. In some cases, rather than having their own police force, they will contract with the county for law enforcement by the sheriff’s office. But the city determines what laws they want to have enforced. If a city were to do something outlandish, like legalizing heroin, they would surely get some blowback but it wouldn’t come from the County.
Because you can end up with duplicate addresses on the same street, but in different neighborhoods. Neighborhoods are usually irrelevant as far as addresses (and the post office) are concerned. “Oh, you want 2881 Oak Street on the OTHER side of town, just go down Oak Street for 15 miles and you’ll get there, but it’s still in the same city.” Some streets usually need to be renamed too if they’re the same name, but not actually the same street. “Oh sorry, this is Lincoln Avenue on the north side of town, that pizza is supposed to go to the Lincoln Avenue on the south side of town.” When they’re in different municipalities it’s no big deal.
Or even more problematic, duplicate streets. The system for determining unique addresses, at least in California, and as employed in the Thomas Bros. mapping system, was that any give thoroughfare–within a city–would have a unique name. (Street, way, drive, road, lane, etc. are all considered part of the name.) If a city annexes another city, or some other area, then they would have to change any duplicate names.
For address numbers, they could use N. / S. / E. / W., which is common in L. A. (E.g., 200 N. Vermont and 200 S. Vermont). But as for the OP, I’m sure the City of L.A. was perfectly within its right to make an exception for Venice. After all, those two-digit numbers have always been part of Venice’s “quaintness”–something to underscore its tourist appeal. There was nothing to prevent the city powers-that-be from keeping them as they were.
The Post Office doesn’t care what you call the neighborhood; they use ZIP codes. Change the municipality all you want, but the ZIP code doesn’t change, so duplicate addresses are impossible.
Why not? As far as I can tell, in theory, at least, it’s very possible to have duplicate addresses within a Zip code, if it spans across different cities. I doubt it happens much–if at all–but it’s possible. Only the name of the city in the address would distinguish the two addresses.
The post office doesn’t even want to have duplicate city names within the same state. So they don’t want more than one 1234 Maple Street in the same city either, regardless of the zip code. It’s true they don’t care about neighborhoods within a city but that’s the whole point of the OP’s question. Venice is just a neighborhood within Los Angeles (now), so as far as the post office and other administrative bodies are concerned it’s just a part of Los Angeles and nothing else.
Right. But in theory, there could be two cities in the same Zip code that–for whatever reason–both have a Maple Street, and both have 1234, unless there’s some kind of county-level agency to which they abide that tells them not to do that. They don’t even have to be the same physical street.
What the Postal Service can do is essentially dictate the city which is part of your mailing address, even if you don’t technically live in that city. For example, (just to stay in the area of Venice), the addresses along the thin strip of Washington Blvd. which is actually within Culver City use “Los Angeles” as their mailing address, because that is the city which is assigned to that Zip code. But that doesn’t really address the issue here.
Right, I don’t see two Maple Streets in the same zip code but different municipalities as an issue, but I bet the post office or county engineer or whoever may insist that they not have overlapping numbers.
Quite right. The postal service asks people not to use the name Brentwood when meaning the neighborhood in West L.A., because there is a municipality of that name in the bay area. You’d think their respective different zip codes would eliminate any confusion, but I suppose it’s always possible that some post office employee might just read “Brentwood” and throw the letter into the wrong bag.
To answer the original question: someone in city hall made the decision that it wasn’t worth the hassle to renumber Venice.
In 1926, when Venice was annexed to LA, this was still primarily a city decision. The Post Office Department didn’t exercise the same level of oversight it now does, and there was certainly no enhanced 911 or county rural addressing. Already sprawling Los Angeles, like New York, used district names such as Van Nuys, Hollywood, or Venice as part of the postal address, meaning no confusion would result from keeping Venice’s romantic numbering and names. Mail delivery was done from an office in Venice itself, or very close by, and renumbering/renaming would have made things more difficult rather than less. In Venice, it would have converted numbers like 18 Virginia into 13618 W. Virginia—for no good purpose at the time. I don’t know to what extent Venice numbering is congruent with Santa Monica’s, but that would have been much more logical when there were still eight miles of barren hills between Venice and Leimert Park or other builtup parts of LA proper.
New York has some similar areas where a district has in modern times been added to the beginning of ordinal streetnames that would otherwise be duplicates: Bay 10th St., Brighton 5th St., etc.
The US ZIP code scheme is actually 11 digits long (plus a checksum), divided into 5+4+2. The first 5 are the ZIP as most people memorize for their address; the next 4 narrow the address down to a single block and one side of the street; the last 2 are called Delivery Point, and represent the last 2 digits of the address. Of course this doesn’t fit all addresses and all cases (high-rise buildings are an exception), but this is the basic encoding procedure.
The first 5+4 are usually printed in Arabic numerals, but the DPT 2 digits are not. Nevertheless, all 11 digits, plus a single digit checksum, are encoded in the barcode.
11 digits is enough to describe a single address anywhere in the nation. So, no, there are no duplicate addresses anywhere, since all postal readers use the 11 digits, not the printed street, city, state. Sorting software even knows the “walk sequence” of each carrier’s route, and puts letters in the correct sequence for delivery without human intervention.
So even if there were multiple “123 Fake Street” addresses in a single city, each would have a distinct set of 11 digits, and there is no confusion.
Note: The above is drawn on my knowledge of the US postal barcode as of a few decades ago, when the only printed barcode was a one-dimensional string of bars. With the advent of more complex 2-dimensional codes, I don’t know what info is encoded, but I doubt if it is any less than the older code schemes.
True enough, and many if not most of the annexed communities still use their old names in addressing mail. But except for Venice they all changed their numbers. Palms is older than Venice, and was annexed earlier, and they changed their numbers and street names.
The annexed communities in the San Fernando Valley don’t even have 900 zip codes, but they all follow the L.A. numbering scheme.
That’s not how it works. The city name is completely redundant (which is a good thing) and does not distinguish between locations in a zip code. If a zip code has multiple approved names, they are all equally valid for all addresses in the zip code.
For example, “123 Fake St, Anytown NY 12345” and “123 Fake St, Whichville NY 12345” are identical mailing addresses.
A city in my county annexed a whole, mostly rural township in the 1990s. No addresses were changed, even though the city and county used different address grids, but new properties on the fringe of the main built-up area get city addresses even if they’re surrounded by county addresses. Going into town, on one street, there are addresses of 621, then 11745, then 361.
There’s no confusion once the 11 digits are put on the mailpiece, but there would be immense confusion as to which 11 digits to put on, unless it came from a mailer that did so in order to get a cheaper rate (and even then, would they know?).
Well, yes, obviously the complete zip code represents a single point of delivery, so obviously there are no duplicates in that sense. That’s about the process of delivering mail (when you have the complete number). That doesn’t prevent two street/number addresses which are the same from existing within the same municipal area, or initial 5-digit zone. How the post office encodes that into the complete number for purposes of delivery is a different matter.
Let me repeat: I’m not talking about the zip code, or how the mail arrives at an address. I’m talking about only the address itself. The post office can’t create a zip code until they know what the actual address is.