I grew up on eastern Long Island, near the town of Greenport, NY.
Now, I’m in Schenectady. About 40 minutes drive from here, there’s another town called Greenport, NY.
In the days before zip codes, I’m sure mail to one got misdirected. The Long Island version often used “Greenport, LI, NY” to differentiate, but the “LI” wasn’t official.
I’m wondering if there are any other examples of this.
Happens sometimes with Cortland and Cortlandt in NY. The town of Cortlandt in northern Westchester used to need mail addressed to Peekskill. Mail addressed to Cortlandt used to end up in Cortland if the zip was wrong or missing. The post office agreed to accept Cortlandt Manor as a postal address for the town but people then leave off the ‘Manor’ part causing problems. I guess not everybody notices the extra T on the end.
Just to keep it a problem, I used to live at 22 Old Locust Ave. there. One block away was 22 Locust Ave. And because of the way the Bear Mt. Parkway cut through the roads a lot of people believed that section of Locust Ave. was Old Locust Ave. So one day, I am waiting for the first Express Mail delivery sent to the Peekskill Post Office. I call them to see if it’s been received and they tell me the Postmaster himself is going to deliver this historic letter. Take a guess. Yep, he went to the wrong street and I had to go down to the post office and pick it up myself.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but:
Washington, DC is divided into 4 quadrants. The same street names are used in each quadrant, differentiated only by a “NW,” “NE,” “SW,” or “SE” at the end, so it’s extremely important you get that part of the address correct, or you may end up driving to 3 wrong addresses before getting to your intended destination.
Also, many of the immediate suburbs in Maryland use the same street names, compounding the potential confusion.
If it’s confusing addresses you’re looking for, albeit in one city, come to Atlanta. There are 71 roads here with the word “Peachtree” in the name.
Something like it: Hamilton College is in Clinton, NY. Colgate University is in Hamilton, NY.
The two towns are about 20 miles apart.
Parents who want to visit Hamilton College often end up looking at Colgate.
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You want confusing addresses?
The city of Olathe, Kansas, has at least two different street naming and house numbering conventions. (I think there were three, but I can’t remember what affect the old Olathe Naval Station boundaries had on the city.)
First, there was the original town, with an eastern boundary of Mur-Len Road. All house numbers from the center of the city to the eastern limit have 4 digits. Streets east of the city center are called “East [whatever]”, and those west of the city center are called “West [whatever]”, much as you would expect. The streets within the boundaries of the original town are all named (Birch, Elm, Lee, Santa Fe, etc.)
As the city grew past the original eastern boundary, they adopted the Kansas City, Missouri, numbering system for the newly-incorporated areas, which starts up by the Missouri River (1st Street, 2nd Street, etc.) and moves south, for about 70 or 80 miles. (Olathe is 24 miles southwest of KC.) Houses in Olathe that are in the KC numbering system have 5 digits.
To further complicate matters, streets within the original Olathe city boundaries are all named, whereas most streets within the newer areas are only numbered. So, from the center of Olathe to Mur-Len road, a street will have a name, but on the other side of the road, the street is numbered. For example, west of Mur-Len, one of the main east-west drags through town is called “Santa Fe”, and east of Mur-Len, it is called “135th Street”.
However, because Olathe is west of KC, by the time the addresses hit Olathe, they are designated as “West [whatever]”.
Some time in the mid-to-late 1980s, the southern boundary of Olathe was acknowledge to be 151st Street, but it never had a name, since during the original days of Olathe, it was just prairie and farmland.
We lived near the intersection of 15st Street and Mur-Len, on the west side of Mur-Len. Our address was something along the lines of “1234 East 151st Terrace”. However, the addresses in the neighborhood across Mur-Len are “15123 West 151st Terrace”.
We got tired of trying to explain to the pizza place that, yes, our “East” address was west of the “West” addresses, and ended up just running out and getting our own pizza.
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Not a town, but a friend lived in a small village in England that shared a name with a RAF base in the same county. Her post used to be accidentally delivered there sometimes.
Within about 15 miles of the town I live in there are two Normantons (and a Normanton-on-Trent), two Thorpes, two Caythorpes, two Staplefords, two Stragglethorpes, an Elton and an Elston, and various name variants like North Scarle and South Scarle and Eagle Hall, Eagle Barnsdale, Eagle Moor and Eagle.
That’s why we have postcodes.
Ohio has 25 Liberty Townships, and a Liberty City. Zip codes are important.
We used to also have a Union Township and Union City, but the township changed its name to West Chester Township some time back.
And these cities and townships are not anywhere near each other.
Some years ago, I studied a California map, looking for examples of this. I found several. One that I remember is Greenfield. There were some others. Also, sometimes there are communities with very similar names – e.g., Agua Caliente and Agua Caliente Springs. IIRC there were a few others that I found too.
ETA: Okay, so how did things like this work in the days of yore, AZC (Ante Zip Codes)?
Pennsylvania seems to have quite a few. When passing through I often get the feeling that I’m driving in circles. There are two Brownstowns, two Centerfields, two Edgewoods, two Fairfields, two Farmingtons, two Fredericksburgs, two Green Trees, two Hanovers, two Highland Parks, two Lynnwoods, two Morrisvilles, two Newtowns, two Pleasant Hillses, two Smithfields, and two Whitehalls.
That’s not even counting towns with nearly identical names like Bareville and Baresville or Glen Moore and Glenmoore.
Before the ZIP code was introduced in 1963, cities were divided into postal zones. Each zone had a number, inserted between the city and state. For example, I live in Tucson, AZ, and my ZIP code is 85704. Before the ZIP code, the city and state in the address would have read Tucson 4, Ariz. (This was also before two-letter abbreviations for states were standardized.)
Los Angeles was the same way. Los Angeles 66 became 90066.
There is also Claremont, California which is a city East of Los Angeles and Clairemont which is a large neighborhood/district in San Diego.
These confusing addresses are just amateur hour. The Costa Ricans know how to do this properly. There are generally no street addresses in Costa Rica at all. An “address” will consist of something like: The yellow house 75 meters past the football field by the large Guanacaste tree.
We live near a former town. Got dissolved during the Depression. The name persists for our area but isn’t used by the Post Office. There is an actual town with the same name elsewhere in the state.
What’s the problem?
Stupid online maps! They run something based on IP address or whatever to find the name of our area and then insist on showing a map of the other place. Nice to know what the weather is there and what restaurants they have, not.
I lived for a couple of years in Oak Grove, Missouri – there are four of those listed as entities in Wikipedia.
There are three towns in New Jersey all named Washington in completely different parts of the state. I knew someone who lived in one and he said his mail gets messed up all the time. That was years ago so maybe it is better now but it seems easy to make a mistake.
This only causes problems with the mail when people don’t follow the rules. The proper city name on mail is whatever the post office says it is, regardless of what you feel it should be called. If you only use the USPS-approved city names, there are (as far as I know) no duplicates within a state.
Never mind, I found one. The Zip Codes for two of the three Oakwoods in Ohio have “Oakwood” as an acceptable city name (although it’s only the default name for one of them).