Try finding an address in Japan sometimes. Some of those streets don’t have names or numbers. I figured out the Latitude and Longitude for a friends apartment and linked it in Google Maps and told her to use that for directions. Frankly lat-long isn’t a bad idea most places.
I have heard that houses on some streets are numbered according to when they were built! So there is no rhyme or reason to it. My son, who is in Japan, says he has great admiration for the Japanese Postal Service, who manage to get the mail delivered despite the confusion.
I’ve often thought that most architects these days are more concerned with what their buildings look like from above than from ground level. Presumably the models look great from a distance in the aerial view, but they totally forget to make entrances easy to find, or include any human-scale design elements that actually make them attractive if you’re standing in front of the building.
Or try down where I live (Mexico). Most of the larger cities used to be a collection of small towns, each of which had their own street names, so when the villages grew and merged sections of the extended major avenues kept their old names. So now you come to a traffic circle and the street you’re on goes off in a different direction and changes its name. Only most major streets were renamed after the Revolution, except when they weren’t, and the house numbers start over from 1 at every name change, except when they don’t. And the house numbers aren’t necessarily consecutive, except sometimes they are. And a lot of streets have both the old (before 1920) and new names and numbers on the identifying signs, except when there aren’t any signs, which is most of the time.
On the other hand, you can pretty much make up your own address if you want to. I didn’t much like the idea of living on Loma del Varnis (Varnish Hill) , which was the street’s official name) so when I built my house I had a plaque made that said Familia Mapache, #77 Loma Oaxal (Hill Where the Huaje Tree Grows) and 77 for good luck. So now it’s Loma Oaxal on official maps, except when it isn’t, and most of the neighbors (who built after me) have plaques with the same street name, except for the ones that kept the old name.
Makes sense? Didn’t think so.
Actually I think the numbers apply to the whole neighborhood, but some new neighborhoods use a different scheme.
The road I grew up on as a kid had no numbers. My address was River Road RR#2. We didn’t even zip codes when I was a kid.
Oh hell - try finding street numbers in ANY business area - it’s next-to-impossible. Seriously, if 10% of businesses had visible street numbers, I’d be shocked.
The thing the OP cites, at least the number is there, if not easily found.
I am reminded of the street number for my condo complex: The numerals are placed fairly high on one of the complex’s buildings, on a blank wall that faces the street. All well and good, but when I initially moved into the complex, there was a big tree growing directly in front of the numerals. Brilliant! :smack:
Fortunately the tree was removed a few years ago.
I could go on forever about this. Street names and house numbers were always a weird interest of mine, and it drives me nuts when cities don’t label them or they assign them weirdly.
I’ve seen some buildings (including my own apartment building) that put the number on the door. So if you’re going by and the door happens to be open, you can’t see the number. But at least there is a number. I’m in Seattle now where most buildings do have the number posted (although sometimes you have to hunt for it), but back in Buffalo, good luck. Maybe half of the houses would have a number posted at all there.
Also, when little pretentious parts of town insist on having their own bizarro numbering scheme separate from that of the city around them. Most of the Seattle metro area, city and suburbs, uses a single street and house numbering system counting from Seattle, which has its own little oddities but works well overall. And then some parts of the suburbs (Renton, I’m looking at you) use their own whacko system that doesn’t match up. Like you’re on 116th Avenue, then cross into one of these suburbs and suddenly it’s 8th Avenue. I even saw a street in Renton where every house had two addresses, one for the weird Renton system and another for the Seattle metro area’s system.
I mean, I can understand this kind of thing where two (at least formerly) distinct metro areas come together, since each one will understandably want to number from its own city. But if you’re firmly in the Seattle area, and people in your town work and play in Seattle, and people in Seattle work and play in your town, and you’re surrounded by other suburbs of Seattle that all use the standard address scheme, you really should align your numbering system to the rest of the metro area, IMO. Having 4 or 5 digits in your address won’t kill you. It didn’t kill the next suburb over.
What’s really inexcusable is the whole vanity address thing above. Yeah, every business wants their address to be something like 1, and the street in front to be named after them. But that wreaks havoc with navigating the city, since such addresses rarely fall into the municipal numbering schemes.
Also, I’ve seen a few housing developments that use wacky nonsensical systems, especially back in NY and NJ. One we lived in only used odd numbers, on both sides of the street but in slightly different ranges (like 5000s vs. 5100s). So you see 5023 and you’re looking for 5139, and you figure “ok, at least I’m looking at the right side of the road”. Oops, you’re not. Or when they don’t bother with odds and evens at all and they just do like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on one side, and 100, 99, 98, 97, 96 on the other and meet in the middle.
I think that’s it for house numbers. Now on to street names.
I like Seattle’s street signs. At least their newer ones. They’re big and green and high up where you expect street signs to be, and both streets are named at the same point such that the sign is parallel to the street it names. They’re printed in easy-to-read reflective letters utilizing both upper and lower case (I find this easier to read than ALL CAPS). They even have auxiliary information, like whether something is a “St” or an “Ave” (which tends to be important in Seattle; there’s a place nearby with 3 thoroughfares named Olive Something), directions like “E” for east or “SW” for southwest, and the block number of the perpendicular street. Seattle is a city that cares that its citizens know where they are and how to get to where they need to be.
Not so in some places I’ve lived.
Some places will only name the less important of the two streets at a given intersection. I guess they figure that everyone knows the name of the big street. It’s extremely confusing when you’re new to an area, or when more than one road does this. If you’re lost, the name of the road you’re on is just as important as the names of the roads you’re crossing. The rural part of Michigan where I spent my teenage years would make street signs out of wood with the name stencilled or even hand-painted on. They showed no consistency in design or location, were often hard to read by day and nearly impossible at night, and didn’t stand up well to the weather.
Actually, wooden street signs are a bad idea overall. They don’t stand up well to the elements, they’re hard to read, and everyone’s used to the metal signs. You wouldn’t carve a STOP or ONE WAY sign out of wood, so don’t do it with street-name signs either.
The worst were in (again) New Jersey. They were wooden, but they were also posts in the ground maybe 3-4 feet high, with the street name spelled vertically down the pole. Good luck finding those if you’re new to the area. Much less reading them, especially if there’s a car or snow or pedestrians in front of the sign.
I grew up in what we referred to as “Greater Miami”, meaning Dade County (now Miami-Dade County), which included both unincorporated areas and a number of cities, one of which was the City of Miami. It’s a sizeable chunk of real estate, not quite 2,000 square miles of land area, but it has a very rational system of addressing. It can get away with this because the place is, well, ahh, topographically challenged. Flat as a billiard table. No messy hills, mountains, ravines, etc. to trouble you.
There are main arteries, laid out north to south and east to west along the section and half-section lines. Between and parallel to them are smaller roads, forming a grid of X and Y coordinates. One north-south avenue and one east-west street are the designated zero-lines, or axes in the grid, dividing the entire county into four quadrants NE, NW, SE and SW. And yes, avenues, places and courts run north-south while streets, terraces, and lanes run east-west. Even building numbers are rational and sequential, starting with the building closest to the ‘zero point’ and increasing with distance from it. And even named streets also have a number (Miller Road is SW 56 Street).
All addresses take the form of (cross-road number {can be 0, 1, 2, or 3 digits long})(building number {will always be 2 digits}) – quadrant – (road number of the road the building faces)
If an address is, say, 12345 SW 67 Avenue, you parse it as follows:
Building is on a north-south road called 67 Avenue (avenues run north-south), in the SW quadrant of the county. This avenue will be to the west of any avenue with a number smaller than 67, and east of any avenue larger than 67. The ‘123’ indicates that the closest lower numbered cross street will be 123 Street. (You know to think “street” since one axis is given as an avenue, so the other axis must be a street.) The building should be 45/100ths of the way from 123 Street to 124 Street. If you actually go along 67 Avenue from 123 Street toward 124 Street (you will be moving north to south), the building will be on your left, since odd numbers (12345 is an odd number) are on the east or north side (depending on which orientation the roadway has, north to south or east to west) and even numbers are on the west or south side. (Remember “O-N-E” for Odd on the North or East.)
In outlying parts of the county we see addresses like 28755 SW 197 Avenue. Remember, the building number is always the last 2 digits of the first designator, and the cross-street/avenue is whatever else precedes those 2 digits. So you’d say this address as “Two eighty-seven, fifty five, South West a hundred ninety-seventh avenue”. This indicates that it’s way out near 287th Street on 197th Avenue. In downtown, close to the zero-line axes, addresses may be short (122 SE 2 Street {near 1st Avenue on 2nd Street}, or 415 NW 5 Avenue {near 4th Street on 4th Avenue}). Anyone who can form a mental grid superimposed on the county can find any address, anywhere, day or night, with little trouble. Easy peasy.
Except! Some cities within the county have opted out of the numbering system. The City of Hialeah has its own system, also a rational grid, but having nothing to do with the county’s grid. To parse Hialeah addresses it helps to just memorize the fact that “NW 103 Street” in county numbers translates to “W 49 Street” in Hialeah numbers, while Palm Avenue, Hialeah’s “zero avenue” and the front of Hialeah Racecourse, corresponds to NW 52 Avenue in county numbering. Once you get into Hialeah you can find your way around, but it gets confusing all along the edges of town where one street corner has Hialeah street signs and the opposite corner has county signs with totally different numbers.
The City of Miami Springs also has its own numbering, and it’s significantly problematic. Major sections of town use named streets with no rhyme or reason and no associated numbers. They aren’t even in alphabetical order. You just have to memorize the locations of the various names, or stumble around endlessly, seeking enlightenment. (Pre – Google Earth, of course.) The only saving grace is that few people, other than residents, have any occasion to visit the city.
And then there’s Coral Gables. Designed by George Merrick as one of the first planned communities during the land boom of the twenties, it has a number of idiosyncratic features. One is the layout, which isn’t a grid at all but instead includes meandering curving roadways interspersed with sections more mathematically structured. Names predominate over numbers, without any organizational scheme. Many streets use names coined by Merrick but others, randomly it seems, use county designators instead. Plus the street signs, designed for esthetics rather than utility, are low (less than 18 inches high) concrete slabs, painted off-white, with black painted numbers less than 2 inches tall. Hard enough to read in the daytime, at night these can only be useful to snakes or the occasional crawling drunk. In the old days, before GPS handhelds, delivery people serving Coral Gables could be recognized by the trial cut scars on their wrists. Pizza deliverers (me for one) could earn major tips by managing to find the customer before the pie was stone cold or the people opted to just go out for dinner instead of waiting any longer. I think even residents left trails of bread crumbs or paint spots just to find their way home in the dark. Those with the temerity to leave home at all, that is.
So, OP, I feel your pain.
LIAR!
There’s Mt. Trashmore!
(Hi, I used to live in Miami)
I’m a home health care nurse, and I endorse this message.
Look, not to put too fine a point on it, but if you have someone in your home disabled/ill enough to qualify for home health care, you kinda want the ambulance to be able to find you quickly. Just in case. GPS only gets them so close.
The building I work in has no number on the outside of the building. Or signage. It’s just a big beige block. If you Google Map the address it identifies the building, but if you’re just following a paper map, you’re shit out of luck.
The company I work for is bad this way as well. Internally all the buildings have a letter designation. A, B etc. These letter designations do not appear on the buildings.
Indeed there is! But if we’re counting man made features like the towering landfill you mention, we’ll have to count the old courthouse downtown and all the newer skyline elements.
Still, even with natural features I exaggerated. Slightly. There are ‘cliffs’ along South Bayshore Drive (actually remains of an ancient shoreline, limestone compressed by wave action, now left behind by a changing sea level) almost 6 feet high in places.
And of course there’s Rock Reef Pass, which boasts a truly nose-bleed elevation 
[QUOTE=runner pat]
The town of Carmel, Ca has no numbers on any building.
[/QUOTE]
Close, but not quite. The city of Carmel has normal addresses. What you’re thinking of is Carmel By-the-Sea, which is a curious hamlet where streets have names as you’d expect and many buildings and homes have names as well.
As a result, you might be trying to find a business as Bob’s Diner on Mission, Main 3 SE of Second, which means it’s on the east side of Main and three doors/lots south of Second, or even by physical description - Green Trim and Red Door on Shell. At least the whole town is only about a square mile, so the search area is mercifully small.
Utter madness to the uninitiated, but the local FedEx and UPS drivers have no problems. The Post Office has an even neater solution - residential streets have no sidewalks, so the Post Office said “No delivery for you!” and everyone has to go to the Post Office for their mail.
Aha! I see your ploy! Trying to hide your house numbers so the ZOMBIES can’t find you huh?
But since I’m already here…Another ex-pizza delivery slob.
The best part of this job is people who order a pizza - at night, you know, when it’s DARK out - and fail to turn on their outside lights!!! And you inform them (politely, so as not to endanger your tip) that this would be a good idea and they stand there looking at you with drool running out the side of their mouths. These are invariably the people who will call back in saying the pizza is cold, trying to scam a freebie, cuz the driver had to go around the block five times…<eye twitch>
Having just had to try and find a little office located somewhere in a sprawling multi-block by multi-block light industrial business park where the leasing company name didn’t match the name of the leasee building sign and no one bothered to post any building numbers…slow appreciative clap
Hi from boring midwest city with clearly marked, logical numbering. 1234 3rd St. is twelve blocks from the center of town, between 2nd and 4th, on the even side of the street.
Yawn.
Funny that this thread should pop up again because I just had this problem again yesterday. I had to visit two buildings and neither of them had any markings whatsoever on the outside. It was like the NSA was based there.
Another thing: Roads / streets / avenues with nearly identical names. This happened yesterday too. Turn right on King Street. No, wait… that was King AVENUE, which crosses King Street.
Uh, Renton isn’t exactly little and it definitely isn’t a part of Seattle, seeing as how it’s on the other side of Lake Washington and all that. I always thought it was odd that the streets numbered from Seattle to the mountains even tho I was born there and lived there until I was 35. It’s like Seattle thinks its supposed to run the whole area and to heck with the citizens and city councils of Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland and OMG Mercer Island want to do. Perhaps the rich folks there have managed to break free of Seattle’s street numbers since I left?
We have that problem here - within one mile there is an East Ourstreet, a West Ourstreet and an Ourstreet plain. Even the USPS gets it messed up.