At least, not as far as the U.S. Postal Service is concerned. Mail to Manhattan addresses is addressed “New York, NY”; mail to the other outer boroughs (Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island) is addressed with the borough name. But for some reason, mail to Queens addresses is addressed according to the neighborhood – Flushing, Jamaica, Fresh Meadows, Corona, Hollis, etc. Why is that?
(N.B.: I know that you can also address mail in Manhattan to localized names, e.g., “Chinatown, NY 10013.” But this is both rare and nonstandard, and almost everywhere else in the country it makes the Postal Service downright cranky, whereas in Queens it’s apparently the rule.)
I had kind of thought that if you got the ZIP code right, the postal service didn’t mind much. But the whole Manhattan = “New York”, Brooklyn = “Brooklyn”, Queens = “Flushing or whatever” thing always did kind of weird me out. I mean, I figured if you should address Manhattan stuff to New York, then it was obviously because Manhattan is New York County, right? But Queens is Queens County, and one of the other ones is Kings County…? Basically, it just weirds me out. I’m going to stick to “Da Big Apple” on my labels.
Actually, the Postal Service is pretty particular about locality names. For instance, I recently lived in Albany, N.Y. When I say this, I mean I lived in Albany. Whereas an awful lot of people say they live in Albany, but they really live in the suburban towns of Guilderland or Colonie. It’s not because they want people to think they live in Albany – on the contrary, most of them try not to think at all about the horrible stuff that must go on within the city limits. Rather, the Postal Service has mandated that there is no “Guilderland, NY 12203” or “Colonie, NY 12205.” There is only “Albany.” If you address mail to “Guilderland,” the Postal Service will slap a yellow sticker over it with the “correct” address, that is, the one that says “Albany.”
My understanding is that what the Post Office really wants is the mail to be addressed, not to a city, but to a post office location. So if the nearest post office is in location X, then you address would be X, and not necessarily the name of the town or unincorporated area in which you live. Similarly, if there are several post offices in the same incorporated city, you could pick the name of the post office closest to you for your address, instead of the city name.
Nowadays, with the event of zipcodes, I imagine that the “city” name is only used in case the letter goes astray or the zipcode is invalid.
N.B. - “Nota Bene?”- It basically means “Note well” or “Pay attention here”
I don’t know why USPS doesn’t want to send mail to Queens. I would guess that there never was a “Queens” PO. All the stations probably just sprung up with the names of the smaller communities.
In Los Angeles, all the communities in the San Fernando Valley go buy the individual names of the neighborhoods and not “Los Angeles”. “Los Angeles” addresses exist only for about half of the city.,
Queens is divided up along Zip Code lines…the first three digits of a Zip Code indicate the central post office for the region, and, while Manhattan (100) and Brooklyn (112) get by with one, the area known as Queens required (maybe for efficient delivery purposes?) four: Long Island City (111), Flushing (113), Jamaica (114) and Far Rockaway (116).
“Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.
The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks.”
– Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
Hey, maybe someone can confirm a suspicion I had about Queens. Manhattan, of course, was originally the city of New York, and Brooklyn was also a city unto itself. Each was so large that it encompassed a whole county. Queens was also a county, but it was more suburban/rural.
Now, in New York, New Jersey and New England, towns exist as this weird intermediate level of government between counties and villages. There is no place within a county that is not part of either a city or a town; if you live in a village, that village lies within a town, and hamlets are named places within towns that have no independent local government – in other words, that are essentially unincorporated.
OK, last piece of the puzzle: Looking at ZIP code maps, it seems that any part of Queens which doesn’t have a more localized name is called either “Flushing” or “Jamaica.” The boundary between these two regions seems to slice Queens neatly in half.
Were Flushing and Jamaica originally towns within Queens County? Are they still, now that Queens is a borough of New York? Were there any other towns in Queens County, or just those two?
Well, I can now explain to my friend from Ozone Park why his mail sometimes has his address as being in Jamaica, which is nowhere near Ozone Park. Usually it says Ozone Park, though. The phenomenon of people in Queens associating themselves more with their neighboorhood probably has to do with the fact that Queens was only heavily settled far more recently than the other boroughs. The Post Office was therefore able to enforce its whims as people arrived.
Well, there were also the Eastern townships of Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, which were part of Queens county.
In effect, when Western Queens county joined NYC in 1898, the 3 eastern townships did not, and so for about a year until Nassau County was formed, more or less 2/3s of the original Queens County was in Queens County, but not in NYC (while Flushing and Jamaica were, along with various citys like Long Island City). So a suburban county (Nassau) was in effect carved out of Queens.
The reverse sort of happened in the Bronx, which was carved out of Westchester County.
Actually, the truth of the matter is YOU DO NOT NEED TO PUT THE CITY AND STATE ON YOUR MAIL!
The street address followed by the zip code is all you need to get the mail delivered.
This is asuming tht you put the zip code on corectly. The city and state designation is still a good idea because if you made a mistake or it is somehow illegible, it still have a good chance of being delivered.
I have tested this myself, and the mail goes just fine without it.
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Yes, the street address and zip code will get the mail delivered but it could be that if the zip code does not match the official city name, then the USPS is not happy.
I believe the zip+5 includes all the info, including street address, so you could just state the person’s name and the zip+5 without any address. This is easy enough to test.
For misterious reasons, the nearest post office is not always the one assigned to your address. My address is just a few blocks away from one office and yet I get the zip code of one much farther away where I have to pick up any mail.
In small towns like mine each Zip+4 number is unique to a single address. In larger cities, each zip+4 covers as many as about 10 or 15 households. There are only 10,000 4-digit numbers, but there are more than that many addresses in some zip codes.
