What about the plethora of “Peachtrees” in Atlanta? How does the Post Office figure those out?
And in Los Angeles County, you’ll find 131st Place nestled between 131st Street and 132nd Street. There are a lot of those Place/Street pairings. USPS doesn’t seem to have a problem with those.
I’d like to hear the expert opinion of a mail carrier that has two paralell streets with the same name (131st Street and 131st Place for example).
We have several streets like that in Long Beach, CA, and I’ve noticed that these streets never have any addresses in common. The 300 block of 72nd Street, for example, will be numbered 300, 305, 310, 315, etc., while 72nd Way will be numbered 301, 306, 311, 316, etc. The individual carriers, I’m sure, are aware of the particular patterns that occur on their routes.
i think the expert opinion of a mail carrier would sound something like this…
BANG! B-BANG BANG!!!
But seriously, as a former pizza delivery driver, i hope to have a front seat in hell when all of those drunk street namers die. In Bryan TX, we many streets that are interrupted, and others that would actually slide down another road so that to go down the street, you’d have to make a right and a left on another street.
shiner bock
I have to raise a complaint about Cecil’s reply on this one. Calle and camino are not words from a foreign language. El Camino Real in California predates all the “Main” streets and “Elm” street and “Broadways.”
Can we stop calling Spanish a foreign language? Tanks.
While we’re pcking nits…
Any language other than English that I refer to in English conversation or text (like what you’re reading here) is for all practical puposes a foreign one. It doesn’t really matter where you are, does it?
You can say “English is a foreign language” in Swahili, in Buckingham Palace, London, England and still be accurate.
If you think Bryan, TX sucks, try Boston. In most of New England, the houses are consecutively numbered and there’s no
block numbers at all. Streets change names without warning.
In New York, you’ve got to know which bourough or neighborhood the address is in
(Brooklynites usually just say they’re in Brooklyn, but Queens residents usually give the name of the neighborhood, like Flushing),
as there’s actually duplicate street names between the different bouroughs.
Rockford, IL has block numbers like Chicago, but the idjits decided to make the meandering Rock River the east/west diving line…what’s the 1500 block on one street, if you go a few streets south, is the 1800 block.
Bloomington, IL, doesn’t like to give letters to different doors on duplexes, so they’ve got fractions. Each door gets a fraction, so you’ve got numbers like 1508 1/8 W Taylor St.
England often has no street numbers at all, you might see an address like this:
“Joe Blow Ltd, Big Bullocks House, East Humpstead, West Sussex”. Finding the place means finding someone in East Humpstead who knows where Big Bullocks House is.
But Hong Kong has to take the cake, the addresses are vertical as well as
horizontal…there’s nearly as much elevator mileage in Hong Kong as street mileage.
So you get addresses like this:
“Wan Chang Ltd Room 7, Flat G,
Royal Hong Kong Building, Generous Chinese Bureaucrats Estates, 11 Fuk Wing St
Eastern Prefecture, Kowloon, Hong Kong”
(There really is a Fuk Wing street in Hong Kong). I’ve actually seen worse from Malaysia, where our database (despite me giving multiple address fields and generous field lengths, just for this kind of contingency) couldn’t handle it, and being in Malay, I had no idea how or if I could abbreviate it.
The person who mentioned extra confusion in the Great Northwest doesn’t know the half of it. For some perverse reason, Seattle starts out with the basic NY-style “east-west Streets, north-south Avenues” but complicates it by dividing the city into a three-by-three array (instead of the normal two-by-two) with regard to qualifying street names. This results in seemingly arbitrary but really critical distinctions between e.g. 15th Ave. East and East 15th St. (The fact that these examples are frequently abbreviated by natives into “15th East” and “East 15th” doesn’t help matters much.)
Generally, the rule is that streets have directional prefixes (e.g. NW Market Street) and avenues have directional suffixes (e.g. 15th Avenue NW). The directions include not only the universal quarters (NW, NE, etc.) but also the cardinal points (N, S, E, and W) because of the extra divisions.
Roads that meander (between hills and water, many streets tend not to run too far in a straight line) may be considered either streets or avenues depending (apparently) on the whim of the city’s engineering department.
The borders between the various divisions would require several more pages to describe.
Here in Kalispell MT we have an interesting situation. We have streets heading E-W, and Avenues heading N-S, pretty much uniform. However, the north side of town has streets named for states (California, Washington, etc) running E-W, although the avenues stay the same. However, addresses are EN or WN, as opposed to the fairly standard (NE/NW). The PO tried to get it changed at some point, but it never happened.
I don’t know how it happened, but it is kind of interesting.