As an ignorant Australian who has never been to New York, I’m needing some help. What’s up when addresses are given simply as “its on 53rd and 7th” or “39th and Vine”? Here in Aus, if I gave my address as “Pitt and 5th”, anyone trying to find me would be left standing on a corner. So what’s up? Are street numbers obsolete? Does this happen in other big US cities???
“An enemy of my enemy is my friend, Grasshopper”
It’s really a supplement to an actual address, not (usually) in lieu of the address itself. It’s used to give someone an idea of the general location of an address.
If I live at 688 Seventh Avenue (for example), and I was giving someone coming into NYC directions on how to get there, telling them just that address wouldn’t help much. Seventh Avenue runs nearly the length of Manhattan, and the best entrance to the island for one address on Seventh isn’t necessarily the best for a different address. If I tell people that I live on Seventh “between 45th and 46th,” they’ll be able to look on a map and discover that I am in the vicinity of Times Square. Then they can plan the best route in (say the Midtown tunnel instead of the Triboro or Brooklyn bridges). Once they get themselves to that area, they’ll need to know my actual street address to find my particular building.
It’s also a helpful tool for locating notable buildings. If I want to go to the Main Post Office, all I need to know is that it’s “34th and 8th” (or whatever), and by getting myself to that corner, I ought to be able to find it-- it’s the big one with all the steps and columns-- without needing to know the exact address.
This same system can (and does) work in any large city with sequentially numbered (or lettered) streets. It’s not as practical where the streets have unique names, since telling someone that you’re on “Pitt and 5th” doesn’t help if the person doesn’t intuitively know where “Pitt” is.
I think that part of it with Manhattan addresses is the way the streets and avenues are set up. The avenues are all main thorofares and fairly widely spaced, with 1/5 mile or so between some of them, though this varies. The streets, on the other hand, are for the most part (with some exceptions like 42nd and 57th Streets), quite narrow and closely spaced, with 20 streets in a mile.
Because of this, if you say a store is on 53rd and Seventh, any New Yorker would know that the store is on Seventh Avenue on or near the corner of 53rd Street. From that, it’s usually quite easy to find the store, because you only have to look up and down Seventh Avenue for about 100 feet in each direction and should be able to see it.
Nurlman sayeth:
So, do you live in the Bertelsmann Building (in which I sit as I type this) or across the street in the Mariott Marquis Hotel?
(picture the smiley of your choice here)
I think it’s a lot easier to find a place if you are given cross streets and then told exactly which building to look for. Especially in New York. Especially if the address is on Broadway.
Nah. I’m strictly B & T. (For those outside the metro area, that’s “bridge and tunnel,” a.k.a. the great unwashed masses that live outside of Manhattan and must make their way in via the designated crossings.) I have only a passing knowledge of NYC geography, and just picked the numbers in my post out of thin air.
I did once go to visit a friend in the Garment District but forgot whether her cross-streets were in the 30’s or 40’s. I guessed 40’s, and wound up having to drive through the neon Sodom that is Times Square. Ugh. It’s enough to put you off of the Big Apple for good.
Well, as a two year resident of Chicago, which like NYC is a “planned city,” I learned quickly most addresses are given this way for the ease of getting close to where one lives. Chicago, for all one may say about it, is phenominally easy to navigate because of the grid pattern of the streets, much the same New York (though Lower Manhatten is still confusing, once the number streets start it becomes very ordered). If, in Chicago, I say I live near the corner of Racine and Addison (I don’t, but lets say I did) I would know I am looking for an address near 3600 N. Racine or 1200 W. Addison. In a city that’s 25 miles by 15 miles, its useful to have some kind of order. If you’ve ever tried to find an address in an unplanned city (Boston comes to mind) you know how impossible it is, even WITH directions. In places like NYC, Chicago, Cleveland, etc. with regular grid patterns, it is easier to find an address once you know about which corner one can look to find it.
As in many very old U.S. cities, buildings in downtown Manhattan and along the avenues start at 1 at one end of the thoroughfare and just keep plodding upward with no skips and no starting over at a new multiple of 100 when you cross a street. Thus there is no single pair of cross streets between which you can always expect to find “the 1600 block.” Since the street names behave more predictably than the addresses, it only makes sense to give directions by intersections.
Midtown and uptown, addresses on east-west streets are more reliable.
Also: you can usually (but not always) find the intersecting street on a Manhattan address based on the building number. There’s an algorithm you can use to determine this.
By removing the last number, dividing by two and adding another number which is “assigned” according to the avenue, you can find the intersecting east-west street. These “assigned” numbers can be found in the front of Manhattan phone books.
Thanx all
Another point which nobody mentioned yet is that people in NY tend to travel by foot or subway, not by car.
So, if you are looking for an address, it is not just a matter of driving for another mile or two. You’ve gotta walk, and if you’re running late, that is no fun.
Also, you might take different subways to reach destinations that are just a few blocks apart.
Plus, when New Yorkers casually tell each other where they live, they usually give the cross-streets, because there is a ton of variation between and within neighborhoods. 72nd and Columbus and 81st and Riverside are both on the Upper West Side, but they are very different from each other.
This is mostly true for Chicago but they throw a few curve balls at you to keep you honest (Clark, Elston, Clyborn come to mind…they all run on an angle).
Since Chicago mostly has street names as opposed to numbers it can still be confusing for a visitor. However, ever street sign as a number on it denoting if your at (let’s say) 500 North or 3200 West. For Chicago the 0-0 intersection is State and Madison in downtown Chicago. All streets are measured as north, west, east or south of that point. It also gives you an idea of distance as every 800 (or 8 blocks) is roughly a mile.
Um, lest you think this is limited to planned cities or cities with sequentially numbered streets, I live in Montreal which is neither, and it’s still easier to find someone with their cross-street to go on. Preferably also their metro stop.
I’d like any New York Doper to explain this to me:
I read about the eccentric Collyer brothers, who were found dead in their house in Harlem in the late 1940s; the report to the Police/Fire Department said “There’s a man dead at 2078 Fifth Avenue.” As I understand it, this address is close to 207th Street, not 20th Street. Besides, in the USPS ZIP Code Directories, addresses in New York boroughs are given with hyphens, so that the Collyers’ house, for example, would appear in that directory as “207-8” Fifth Avenue." Why does New York do it this way? How would one distinguish the Collyers’ address from “2078,” meaning on 5th Avenue between 20th and 21st Street, since the addresses don’t normally include the hyphens? (And while we’re at it, how would Archie Bunker’s address–704 Hauser Street, Astoria, in Queens–be rendered in such a directory?)
2078 doesn’t have a relationship to the cross-street 20th or 21st (see Alphagene’s note on the alogorithm above). It seems to me that friends in Queens, B’klyn, etc., would say “2 0 7 dash 8” when reciting their address. My impression is also that hyphenated addresses are used when it is a large apartment building spanning a larger part of the block, 704 Hauser would be 704 (single house?); 704-6 might be a possibility for a larger building.
Actually, Queens addressing is quite different from the other 4 boroughs’.
Almost all streets are numeric, and so all addresses are of the form XXX-YY ZZZ, where XXX is the nearest cross street, YY is the house number in that group of block(s) and ZZZ is the actual street the building is on.
Hence:
135-12 222nd St. (my childhood address in Laurelton), was near 135th Ave. (to the North) on 222nd St. (not the 12th. house though, actually the 2nd house South).
Named streets such as Grand Ave. or Myrtle Ave. act the same way, but then you use the closest numeric cross street.
Note: Streets generally run North-South, Avenues (and Roads and Drives) East-West. Also note, Roads can be interspersed with Avenues and Drives so you have (in Cambria Heights) 132nd Ave., and then 1 block south of that 132nd Rd., before you then get to 133th. Ave.
I’m a lifelong New Yorker and I still cannot figure out Queens. When looking at the xxx-yy configuration, how do you know whether it’s 135th Street, 135th Road, 135th Lane and so on down the line. Sometimes the streets will run something like this: 135th Street, 130th Road, 136th Street, 131 Lane.
When looking for logic, the last place I expect to find it is in Queens (hence all the Guliani fans).
Well, not to beat this to death too much, in general the addressing scheme works well about 80-85% of the time.
Of course, that other 15%-20%…
First, Queens in general resembles kind of a fluffy T, with LIC, Woodside, Corona, etc. one arm (West Arm), Bayside, Bellrose, Little Neck the other arm, The Van Wyck defining the middle corridor (with a lot more of Queens East of it (Jamaica, St. Albans, Queens Village, than west of it (Howard Beach, Woodhaven, Ozone Park). And then, at the bottom Broad Channel and Rockaway. Of course there are various topographical, historical, and development forces at work preventing the imposition of a uniform grid system.
Keeping in mind that, in general, Street Numbers (not house numbers) increase East to West (From 2nd [I think] in LIC to 271st in Glen Oaks), and Avenues Numbers increase from North to South (I think 166th Ave is the highest, in Howard Beach).
1.) Its true, as I said above, that Roads and Drives are often (but not necessarily) interspersed with Avenues. Usually Avenues are the northmost, followed by Roads and then Drives. To keep things interesting, very sporadically Places are interspersed with Streets - I think this was an infill kind of thing (“Well, here’s 170th St. and here’s 171th St. What are we gonna call the new street between them?”)
2.) Where everything gets kinda scrunched together (e.g. Copper Ave. in Glendale), the roads take the name of the streets they are (or match most closely - sometimes they skip a number of blocks) in more open areas.
3.) Rockaway has its own street system: Called Beach (e.g. Beach 101th St.), it increases East to West (Far Rockaway to Rockaway Park).
4.) Areas with mostly named streets (Hollis Hills) use the cross address of the closest numbered street. This is sometimes a bit of a stretch, but few places in Queens are really far from a numbered street.
Well, that doesn’t seem to clear up too much, but as I said the system works for about 80% of the addresses.