Where I work, we do a lot of business with people from Utah, and I have noticed a peculiar system for their address there. Everything goes by the system of:
Where did this peculiar system come from?
You have never been to Washington DC have you? That system is not uncommon but I do not know where it was used first.
Sounds like a perfectly reasonable system to me - scales well for one, and I’m pretty sure it’s more popular than you think. Edmonton here works (more or less) on a similar street/ave system of cartesian co-ordinates. Calgary has unfortunately taken this to an extreme with their 4 quadrant system that confuses me, but that’s up to them.
I just looked up Regina, and have to say that if I ever had to meet anyone at the corner of 1st Ave North and Forget St., they outta forget about it themselves. 
Regina uses the (apparently) Napoleonic system for numbering their houses. Odds on one side, Evens on the other, and each block being a different series of hundreds…
FREX - I used to live on 400 block McIntosh, just a few blocks away from the aforementioned 1st Ave N and Forget St.
I just find the Utah system unusual, because there aren’t even street names in most cases.
When Brigham Young arrived in Salt Lake City, he set out the location for the Salt Lake City LDS Temple and made that the center of town. The streets that run beside the temple on each side are named South Temple, North Temple, East Temple and West Temple. each block to the east was given a name… 100 West, 200 West, 300 West, etc. The same for the other directions.
When you say the streets don’t have a name, that’s not correct. The name is 100 West, 100 East, etc. It is a logical, organized system. Very easy to find addresses.
There is an old area in SLC just north of downtown that is called “the Avenues”. Streets running north/south are named A Street, B Street, C Street, etc. The streets running east/west are named 1st Ave, 2nd Ave, 3rd Ave., etc.
A few streets have been given additional names. I’ve lived on Morning Star Drive and Foothill Blvd for example.
The other cities through out Utah continued the tradition for naming street that was established in SLC.
I love Salt Lake City addresses. They’re given in coordinate system fashion (other cities may be laid out in regular grids, but they don’t have two-part addresses, with East/West and North/South).
Moreover, it’s very regular. One hundred numbers to the block in both directions (outside of the letter-labeled Avenues in the NorthEast, referred to above). Even numbers on the South Side of the East-West streets. Everything is labeled outwards from Temple Square, which thus becomes the Center of Everything.
My old address was 740 East 300 South, so it was almost halfway down the block, on the south side, of Third South, and old 1920’s apartment building that still bears the name “Spencer-Stewart”.
The numbering scheme continues, without change, through several SLC suburbs to the south.
The streets are also admirably wide. My only complaint is that the rain gutters are way too damned deep. SLC doesn’t need speed bumps.
Manhattan in NYC is roughly similar, East-West, but only roughly. It’s about 100 numbers per block between the Avenues. Numbers running north and souyth don’t make much sense. They used to sell guide books listing the house numbers by block in Manhattan. It’s 8 blocks north and south = 1 mile, but the dimensions aren’t the same East-West. (In SLC, the blocks are square).
So what happens with the blocks directly south/north/east/west of the Temple? Would the line of blocks directly south of the Temple, for example, lie between the southward continuations of East Temple and West Temple? Would their numbers be in the zeroes, east and west?
It’s been years, but I believe that “zero” is at East Temple and South Temple, so between East Temple and West Temple the numbers run 0-100.
Except that “East Temple” was renamed to “Main Street” many years ago.
This system is generally followed in most American cities.
Nashville changed all street names on the suggestion of a small girl’s letter after visting the city. It uses the same system although it uses street names for the second coordinate.
The X axis is the Cumberland River with Streets to the East and Avenues to the west. The Y axis is broken up into Main, Broadway, and West End with South Avenues and South Streets to the south and …
“740 East 300 South, so it was almost halfway down the block, on the south side, of Third South”.
In Nashville this would be 740 Third Street South.