Why do universities hide their street addresses?

[Beware_of_Doug]

Purchase College
State University of New York
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10…10…0 frig it, I forget the zip code. And I’m a full time (commuter) student.

BTW, the Purchase campus is a pretty damn big place to be covered by a single address. But that’s how you get in, off Anderson Hill Road, immediately opposite Pepsico World HQ.

[Chronos]

The building I’m currently in is at the corner of Grant Street and 6th Avenue. But Montana Hall, where most of the administrative offices are housed, is about at the location where Garfield Street and 9th Avenue would intersect, if they intersected (they don’t). Montana Hall is about equally distant from Grant St. to the south, College St. to the north, 6th Avenue to the east, and 11th Avenue to the west… What sort of street address could you give it? Montana State University, 600-1300 West College, Harrison, Cleveland, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, and Grant Streets?

[Wendell_Wagner]

Hippy Hollow writes:

> RGVChicano, welcome, and I think you’re referring to Jester Center, which was
> at its time of construction the largest residence hall in the US. However, it has
> the same zip code as most of UT - 78705.

Really? When I was at the University of Texas, thirty years ago, I was told that Jester Center is one and a half zip codes. In other words, most of it was one zip code, while a piece of it shared a zip code with several smaller dorms.

[Pushkin]

@Johnny L.A.

My house has a sign on it from a previous owner that says ‘Hillcrest’. If someone addressed a letter to ‘Hillcrest House’ there’s no way it would be delivered

I’ve noticed an awful lot of addresses in the Republic of Ireland have a vague area or house name like that and no actual road or street at all never mind number. I assume that they’re in the middle of nowhere and the postman would be hard pressed to find the wrong house even if he wanted to.

[Wendell_Wagner]

It’s fairly common in the U.K. (and perhaps in Ireland too) for a house to be given a name. Sometimes the name is the only way the house is referred to, so there’s no street number. The names are things like The Cottage, Rose Cottage, The Bungalow, The Laurels, Mill House, and The Orchard.

[Hippy_Hollow]

@Wendell Wagner

Really? When I was at the University of Texas, thirty years ago, I was told that Jester Center is one and a half zip codes. In other words, most of it was one zip code, while a piece of it shared a zip code with several smaller dorms.

Nah, it’s an urban myth, like the one saying that Jester was designed by the architect who built the maximum security prison at Huntsvile. There may be one or two voting precincts in there, though, which is pretty impressive.

[panamajack]

@Chronos

The building I’m currently in is at the corner of Grant Street and 6th Avenue. But Montana Hall, where most of the administrative offices are housed, is about at the location where Garfield Street and 9th Avenue would intersect, if they intersected (they don’t). Montana Hall is about equally distant from Grant St. to the south, College St. to the north, 6th Avenue to the east, and 11th Avenue to the west… What sort of street address could you give it? Montana State University, 600-1300 West College, Harrison, Cleveland, Arthur, Garfield, Hayes, and Grant Streets?

Where I went (UC Davis) they eventually adopted a non-existent single address so that mail systems that required an address might reach them, or “morons” don’t get confused. “One Shields Avenue” is what is used, even though Shields Avenue only exists on campus, where no street numbers are used. Even places like the Primate Research Center, 4 miles west of campus, get this address. (The Medical Center, about 20 miles away in Sacramento, does have its own address, though.)

Do the other addresses used by Universities follow this trend - a single address that doesn’t necessarily correspond to a building?

[Crusoe]

It’s fairly common in the U.K. (and perhaps in Ireland too) for a house to be given a name. Sometimes the name is the only way the house is referred to, so there’s no street number. The names are things like The Cottage, Rose Cottage, The Bungalow, The Laurels, Mill House, and The Orchard.

Bear in mind also that - in the UK at least - postcodes can identify an address down to “within 80 properties (with an average of 14 properties per postal code)” (Wikipedia), so a postman familiar with his or her route shouldn’t have trouble delivering much in a given postcode.

[Catamount]

@Harriet the Spry

Never underestimate the capacity of universities to see themselves as the center of the universe.

Speaking for the large universities in North Carolina, street address isn’t terribly relevant. The universities are so large that one single street address just doesn’t make sense. If they make the head administration building “100 Main Street” or whatever, odds are the place you want to go is at least a 10 minute walk from there anyway, and you probably parked your car 10 minutes in the other direction.

Mail is delivered centrally to the university (which has its own zip code), then to university PO boxes for each department. As long as the post office knows where the university mail service is, that’s all taken care of.

And that doesn’t even cover universities that have a medical school. ECU, for example, is located between two streets in the center of town (with a couple of minor streets going through campus). The medical school is over at the hospital five miles away, which is much larger and encompasses many more streets. Best way to get your mail delivered to either one is to know which building you’re sending it to. To make matters even more fun, the main campus shares the same ZIP Code as Greenville proper while the med school has the rural ZIP.

[Terminus_Est]

@SpazCat

And that doesn’t even cover universities that have a medical school. ECU, for example, is located between two streets in the center of town (with a couple of minor streets going through campus). The medical school is over at the hospital five miles away, which is much larger and encompasses many more streets. Best way to get your mail delivered to either one is to know which building you’re sending it to. To make matters even more fun, the main campus shares the same ZIP Code as Greenville proper while the med school has the rural ZIP.

The Cornell medical school is more than 200 miles away in New York City. It’s got its own street address. There are some other units in NYC, each with their own street address. This includes the Graduate School of Medical Studies, which is distinct from the Graduate School on the main campus. There’s also the branch of the medical school in Qatar. Other locations include:
[ul]
[li]Shoals Marine Lab in Maine[/li][li]The agricultural experiment station in Geneva, NY[/li][li]The radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico[/li][li]The Cornell in Washington (DC) program[/li][li]Cornell in Rome[/li][/ul]