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- What happens if (say, in the US, where all the even building address numbers are on the same side of the street, and all the odd numbers are on the opposite side) on a particular street, there exists house #2, and just south of that exists house #4, and south of that exists #6, and so on, , , and somebody comes along and builds a new house on that same street, but north of house #2? Does the city/county reassign everybody’s address number? I know that the developers try to plan to avoid these sorts of problems, but I’d be amazed if it never happened. - MC
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#2-1/2 is the norm in Souther California.
Oops! You meant before #2. A vacant lot on a corner is usually taken into account when the houses are initially numbered. Any house with #2 as its address would be expected to be on a corner. If not, then 0 is an option, but so is changing the name of the street below #2. The existing house could be 2 South Whatever Street. The house to the north would be #2 North Whatever Street.
I ran this question past a letter carrier friend of mine, and he says that when they have an extra house in the middle of the block for some reason, they usually number it something like 351-A, or 351 1/2. Also, he says that the situation you’re describing doesn’t usually come up, because the developers know ahead of time how many houses they’re going to have in a block, and they number them properly from the very beginning.
As long as you’re listening, he would also like to share the following Post Office joke with you (for what it’s worth):
How come it takes years after his death for a great man like Martin Luther King, Jr. to get streets named after him in cities all across the U.S., but Oliver North is famous for only one week, and poof! there’s a “North Street” in practically every city in the U.S.
Postal Service humor. :rolleyes: What can you do…At least it keeps him from cleaning his guns…
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
Good one! 
I know of a zero address!
0 Prince St., Alexandria, VA. It’s an Army surplus store called Full Metal Jacket.
The unit block of Old Town Alexandria is the one next to the Potomac River. Then someone built the building that houses FMJ over the river on wood pilings. It probably had a normal address like 101 The Strand, but I have a feeling FMJ had it changed to 0 Prince St.
Wrong thinking is punished, right thinking is just as swiftly rewarded. You’ll find it an effective combination.
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- Yea, that’s pretty funny for sure! Any joke a postman makes is alright with me! I just love postmen, they’re such a great bunch! What would the world do without them? It’s about time that everybody realize how much we owe to postmen! ::backing away slowly:: - MC
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My town (and most around here, as far as I know) numbers buildings based on the distance from a certain end of the street. There are 5 criteria for my town (which I’ll spare you) for deciding the exact number, but the gist of it is that the numbers get higher the farther away from the middle of town you are. Anyways, back to the point.
When the street is laid out, there has to be an “end” to it somewhere. An imaginary line is drawn from this end down the centerline of the street. Right angles are drawn to this line, from where the front door to the house is (I don’t know how they decide that one, but it is after the house is built). Where the centerline and the right-angle-front-door line meet is the distance from the end of the street.
Now, take that distance, and divide by 10. Thats your house number (odd/even being decided by the 5 criteria I alluded to above). Lets say my house was 195 Main St (which is isn’t), I would live between 1945’ and 1954’ from the east end of Main St. Cul-de-sacs are numbered going around the circle at the end. Kind of convoluted, but the system works pretty well.
But, to answer your question (I was getting around to it eventually), you would have to build a building on a lot which must have 150’ of frontage (by zoning bylaws), in a 10’ wide space, to get the numbering problem. Otherwise, you’d get your basic, same old number.
Jeremy…
Nobody ever calls me after they’ve done something smart.
There is a tea bar in Harvard Square at Zero Brattle St. http://www.tealuxe.com
The storefront seems to have been there a while. It is the only place I know of with a zero address, even in a city with as little reason to its streets as Boston (or Cambridge, actually).
I used to live in the beach area in southern Los Angeles County. A former relative-by-marriage lived in a house closer to a corner than Number 800; it turned out to be “800A.”
I have a book written by comedian/announcer Gary Owens The (What to Do While You’re Holding the) Phone Book– in which he tinkered with the text in Yellow Pages entries, so that he listed the address of the “Ace Ungrateful Biped Co.” as “0 W. Las Tunas Drive, San Gabriel.”
“If you drive an automobile, please drive carefully–because I walk in my sleep.”–Victor Borge
I worked for the city zoning and planning office in Berkeley for a while.
Numbers are applied for by the builder and approved by bureaucrats.
Some of each are smarter than others.
It’s usually easy to get any unique number approved, and sometimes they get out of sequence here because of that.
A homeowner will convert his oversize separate garage into a rear “Granny-keeper”.
Then, say his house is number 200 and 198 and 204 are taken, so the new house gets 202.
Sounds OK until you realize the street is now numbered 198…202…200…204 because the access for Granny is on the wrong side.
Some bureacrats just do what he wants, logic be damned, and some try to get him to swap numbers with Granny, and some try to get him to make Granny use 200-1/2, 200A, or 200B, or even 201 if that’s available. Dumb, yes, but numbering isn’t all that exact anyway, which you realize when trying to decide when
crescent-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs should change from ascending to descending.
Even if it’s done wrong by the original builder, it’s easy to change later, and some smarter people do. You just need all affected people to agree.
Plus any one bureaucrat.
There’s a house in Glenwood Arkansas with the address of 0 Confidential. I would love to buy the house simply because of its address.
Montreal has several streets on which the house numbers are prefixed by a zero (“0”). The zero address in the city’s original numbering system started northwards at the Lachine Canal, but eventually some were extended south of the canal to the St Lawrence river. So the numbering starts at “01” at the river. At least one street was renamed south of the canal, so its leading zeros are superfluous. Here are two houses numbered 0729 and 0731: Google Maps
I have seen a handful of addresses that are, for example, 2500 Main Street. So something or other does happen occasionally to upset the normal numbering system.
Such addresses would tend to start at 100 or 1000 and go up 100 every principle street, which is why finding a 0 address hard in my neck of the woods. 2 -igit addresses are basically unheard of here, so there’s no way to get all the way down to zero. Even 3-digit addresses are rare in anything constructed in the last half-century, and I think 5-digits are getting to be more common than 4 these days.
Also note that this thread is almost old enough to drink in the US.
I was thinking about that same building after noticing this thread had been bumped and I found a PDF from April of 2008. It was 200 The Strand until sometime in 1968.
https://www.alexandriava.gov/uploadedfiles/historic/info/history/WaterfrontHistory0Prince.pdf
At one time where I was born the house number was assigined by the post office. The address of house that I was born at in 1947 was Box 131 route 4, city. If a huose was built in between 130 and 131 it bacame 131 1/2. When another house was built it would become 131 3/4 after a number of years the numbers would get kida of messed up. Then the post office would renumber all the houses on the different routes. My dad lived with his home havig to cange its address several times. In the 50s the post office changed the numbering system. I believe sthey used the county line as the starting poing and going south the numbers increased, The Ranches address did not change again until about 2000. The mail was changed from coming from the Watsonville Post Office to the Aromas Post office. So the city was changed. On problem about 1/2 South of the ranch the homes are served by the Salinas Post Office. The numbers are based on a different center point. So some where on the hill the numbers change and can be confusing to county depthy Sharrifs.
From 1990 to 1999 I lived in a rural ranchland area in San Luis Obispo County, CA. All the properties on my road had TWO addresses. Apparently, as best I could figure, the Post Office assigned addresses to all the properties, but also the County assigned addresses to all the properties, and they didn’t coordinate their assignments.
I never knew which address I should use, but it never mattered to me because I chose to get all my mail at a P. O. box.
In 2008 I bought a house in a development which had been built sometime in the mid-1980’s. It’s a duplex and is numbered 106, with the other half of the duplex numbered 108. However, on the mailbox post under the brass numbers 106 you can see traces of an earlier number 104. The first house on the street is numbered 100, and is not half of a duplex, unlike all the other houses on the street. Out of curiosity I once did a search of the property records for the area, and number 100 is shown as being constructed at about the same time as the rest of the houses. I’m guessing that when the development was being planned house numbers were assigned to the duplexes and then someone decided there was room for a single building, so all the units were renumbered.
But apparently when this was done the original units had already been sold and were inhabited, because I occasionally got mail with the name of the woman who lived in the other half of my duplex but with the house number 106. When I asked her about this, she said that when she bought the place it was numbered 106, and she’d never changed her mailing address on some of her accounts. I’m assuming that the previous owner of my unit just passed the mail on to her, as I was now doing. I did suggest that she might want to correct this, but she just nodded, took her mail, and closed her door.
Bellevue seems to do numbering based on the city wide grid, so if you lived on NE 8th St between 123rd Ave NE and 124th Ave NE your address could look something like 12345 NE 8th St. I think you’d need to subdivide into very small parcels of land for it to be a problem coming up with in-between numbers.
It’s very common for houses to have numbers with five digits in my neighborhood. I was about to say we’re quite far east of the “zero” street, but looking at the map the north-south avenues start somewhere in the 70s and just go up as you go east. Weird. So the smallest house number you can have if you’re on one of the west-east streets is somewhere around 7000. I’m curious about the history of that now.
Main Street is the “zero” street in the west-east direction and goes through my neighborhood, so you can get a nice small number if you’re close to it on a parallel street.
Wow. On rereading this post is a lot more boring than I’d hoped 
Oh well, it’s on topic so it stays!