Use of CITY in addresses.

I recall watching a Brady Bunch episode where Jan receives a locket with no return address.

On the address it says something like

Jan Brady
1243 Clinton Way
City

And one of the kids remarks when the address says CITY it means it was mailed from the same city it is going to. In otherwords if you live in Los Angeles and you post a letter to Los Angeles from Los Angeles you can just write CITY on it and save time.

I have NEVER heard of this being done. Was it a common practice years ago?

Yes. I remember in ‘lil ol’ Bangor Maine my Mom addressing her in-city mail with that “City”–this was 1950s

Really? I would have thought for sure it was just a TV thing, like the 555 telephone exchange. Did the Brady’s ever specify what city they lived in?

I remember being able to do this when only a PlanChild, but this was in the early days of ZIP code. I’m guessing now, with machines reading the addresses, and the sorting sometimes not even taking place in the “city” of origin - esp. for small towns - this won’t work anymore.

Altho’ the “555” theory is pretty good.

I used to live in Washington, DC

A lot of people there address in-city mail to DC, 200…

There us no Anythingelse, DC.

The Brady’s never mentioned what city was on that letter. They just addressed it CITY. NO zip code or state. That was the reasoning behind the use of CITY.

Since Zip Codes were in effect since like 1964 (I was born then and never recall a time not using them) it seemed like something made up for tv

I’ve seen old used picture postcards, now sold as antiques, that are addressed in that manner:

Jan Brady
1243 Clinton Way
City

Yes, it literally said “City”. I’ll bet that whether or not this works now depends on the graces of your local post office. My wife says that one of her co-workers routinely addresses mail in this fashion (though she uses a zip code), and that it works, at least in our Colorado city of ~100,000. Come to think of it, the postal workers these days probably ignore the city designation altogether and just go by the zip code.

I don’t know when exactly this happened, but I’m sure it was a few decades ago. A member (age ~68) of a mailing list I participate in once said that his grandfather once received a letter from overseas addressed to

Isserlis
England

(Isserlis being his grandfather’s surname.) The letter was delivered correctly.

I have also seen “City” on old postcards.

FWIW, I just watched The Maltese Falcon the other night and Sam Spade mailed himself something and addressed it to CITY.

This seems to be answered, so may I hijack it?

Is it true that in Canada you can mail a letter like this:

Joe Schmo
123
R1X 2Y2

and it would get there? The postal code contains all the information except the house number and person’s name?

That Maltese Falcon example was a good one. It was common in the 30s and 40s to address letters that way. Each post office did its own mail processing, so if they saw CITY, they’d know where it goes.

A lot of P.O. procedures have changed over the years. For instance, you used to be able to get a cent off postage if you didn’t seal the envelope.

I’d think that that would work in the US as well. Why not try it?

I remember once, the Letters To The Editor section of MAD Magazine printed an envelope they had received which had no address at all except for the ZIP code and a picture of Alfred E Newman.

My WAG is that the Post Office does whatever they can to deliver every piece of mail they get. I’ll bet they’re usually pretty frustrated by bad handwriting, misspellings, and the like. Things like that MAD letter probably either give them a good laugh for the day, or just make it worse, depending on the mood that they started with.

But is there only one Isserlis in all of England? It came from overseas, and didn’t even list a county, let alone the city. Wow, I’m impressed.

Joe: The answer is yes, and probably much quicker than the same thing in the US. That is because in Canada, a single postal code (of the form A1A 1A1) applies to a city block (or unit of similar size), instead of to an entire city or neighbourhood.

I get annoyed when a website asks me for my “zip or postal code”, because my postal code gives someone so much more information than a US zip code. A much more equivalent thing would be to ask for just the first two or three figures of my postal code.

Here is more detailed information on Canadian postal codes:

Canada Postal Guide - Postal Code

In the UK postcodes are the same format as in Canada. They were designed to be accurate to within 100 residences, but in practice they’re accurate to within 6 residences (I used to work for the post office). You can indeed use a postcode and house number (in remote areas, you don’t even need that) and pretty much guarantee delivery.

But a post worker who saw “1243 Clinton Way” & knew that’s an address for their city would thus know its their city too.

An uncle of mine once addressed a letter with nothing but the caricature of the recipient (another uncle) and the town. It got there.

IIRC during the civil war era it was faddish to come up with devious addresses like this:

Hill
John
Ton, Mass

Which meant John Underhill, Overton, Massachusetts…(get it?)

My US 9-digit zipcode refers to my house. Unless they assign MrsMicco and MiniMicco their own zip codes, you can’t get much more specific than that. My friends routinely leave off the city name (because they can’t spell it) or mangle it to make fun of where I live, and mail still arrives promptly.

I must be very old. I remember it being common practice to leave out the ZIP code, whether you were sending to the same city or not. My own city used to have special mailboxes specifically designated for “within the city” delivery –if you put something in it by about 12:00, it was guaranteed to be delivered that day. I haven’t noticed them in here in the big city in the past few years but my mom’s town of pop. 35,000 still has them.

Speaking of the efficiency of the USPS, I know they get lots of jokes heaped upon them but I thought I’d mention the letter I recently received at my office. It was postmarked Paris, France, and had no return address. It was mailed to me in this format:

M. Bunny
123 Atlantic Avenue
USA

No company name, no city, no ZIP. And it got to me (although it took about 2 months). I have no idea how the PO figured that one out.

There may have been, at that time. It’s an unusual name, don’t you think?

The post office probably gets pretty good at deciphering nonstandard addresses. Anybody remember when Games magazine used to have an “Envelope of the Month”? They would get letters addressed in rebus, Morse code, cryptograms, and all kinds of wacky stuff. IIRC, they once asked the local USPS (in NYC, mind you!) how they did it – and the answer was, “We just send all the weird stuff to you.”

My local post office is no slouch either. Around here, many rural roads are “county roads,” so you have County Road B, County Road DM, and so on. So a lot of rural addresses, like mine, are of the form “W1234 County Road X.” People who send me mail are always bungling this – mostly because: (1) They think that leading W (or N, sometimes) means West or North. Well, technically, yes, but it’s not a section of the road. There’s no “East County Road YY” (or South). It’s just a letter that’s part of the house number. And (2) they have no idea what the letter at the end means, because they read the address as “XXX County Rd.” with some extra stuff at the end, as if “County” were the name of the road. No, all the roads around her are County Roads. The letter tells which one it is.

So anyway, one time I received a letter that had my last name mangled, and the street address was “1234 W. Country Road.” Wrong name, no ID as to which County Road, and it got here. I went down to the post office and told them I was impressed.

A friend lives in a small town in northern NH, and he’s quite the character. If you send a letter with only the 5 digit ZIP the local post office knows to send it to him. All strange mail with that ZIP alone go to Nelson. He claims to have the shortest address in the US, 5 digits.

I’ve sent him postcards from Thailand with the address:

12345 USA

and they were delivered no problem. I know he got a coconut delivered that way as well.