The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal about Identity, Race, Wealth and Power

by Deirdre Mask

In some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.

The city council often focuses on honorary street names layered on top of the regular map.

most households in the world don’t have street addresses. Addresses, the UPU argues, are one of the cheapest ways to lift people out of poverty, facilitating access to credit, voting rights, and worldwide markets.

parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either.

Naming one street is hardly a challenge, but how do you go about naming thousands? When I met him, Nick Keller was the soft-spoken addressing coordinator for McDowell County. His office had initially hired a contractor in Vermont to do the addressing, but that effort collapsed and the company left behind hundreds of yellow slips of paper assigning addresses that Keller couldn’t connect to actual houses.

Addresses aren’t just for emergency services. They also exist so people can find you, police you, tax you, and try to sell you things you don’t need through the mail. West Virginians’ suspicions about the addressing project were remarkably similar to those of eighteenth-century Europeans who rebelled when governments slapped numbers on their doors—a

We didn’t put an offer on the house on Black Boy Lane. Maybe it was the dated kitchen, maybe we just weren’t ready to commit, or maybe it was the street name, after all. I’m African American; my ancestors were in the bellies of those ships. And the street’s name conjured up a time in America not so long ago when every black man, no matter how old, was known as “boy.” (I mean “not so long ago” literally.

Street names, I learned, are about identity, wealth, and, as in the Sonny Carson street example, race. But most of all they are about power—the power to name, the power to shape history, the power to decide who counts, who doesn’t, and why.

Instead, it is a complex story of how the Enlightenment project to name and number our streets has coincided with a revolution in how we lead our lives and how we shape our societies. We think of street addresses as purely functional and administrative tools, but they tell a grander narrative of how power has shifted and stretched over the centuries.

Subhashis is a project manager for Addressing the Unaddressed, an NGO whose sole mission is to give street addresses to every slum in India, starting in Kolkata.

He and his team had spent weeks there giving each home a GO Code, a nine-digit string of numbers and letters linked to the site’s GPS location. The string of numbers was a bit unwieldy, but naming the streets—or, even deciding what passed as a street in the serpentine and often dead-end lanes of the slums—was time-consuming and fraught with politics. For now, the number would have to do. The code was then printed on a blue and white placard and nailed to the front of each hut.

But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money, or receive a state pension.

More important, addresses are essential for your identity. Every Indian resident should have an Aadhaar card, a biometric, government-issued ID that gives everyone a unique twelve-digit number. Without the card, it is often impossible to get access to services like pregnancy support, pension provision, or even schooling for children.

every ten years, the government decided, the houses of Indians would have to be numbered, to ensure no one was counted twice. But permanent numbering of Calcutta proved nearly impossible. Part of the problem was that no one could agree on what a “house” was. What constituted a home in Britain—a house or self-contained apartment—simply did not translate in India. Each room might contain a different family, and so would be given a different number. But what about a room divided by a rush mat between two families?

As Harris and Lewis point out, the British relied on their loyal local leaders to lead, rather than actually going into the neighborhoods themselves. If an address is an identity, the British simply did not care who its Indian subjects were.

But the West Bengal government (until 2011, ruled by the longest-governing democratically elected Communist Party in the world) appeared to believe in a slum-free India and made it easier to justify clearing slums legally as getting rid of a “nuisance.” Why count a slum that should not—will not—be there? Mapping, addressing, and counting the slum dwellers was, to some, tantamount to giving them permission to stay.

watched a girl bathe carefully in an inky black lake that I was told sometimes spontaneously catches fire because of the chemicals from the dump. And yet, even those in Bhagar were better off than many, Subhashis told me. At least the dump gave them an income.

Organizations like the World Bank and the Universal Postal Union struck on an easier way. It wasn’t just that developing countries lacked cadastres—they also lacked street addresses. Addresses allowed cities to “begin at the beginning.” With street addresses, you could find residents, collect information, maintain infrastructure, and create maps of the city that everyone could use.

Researchers found a positive correlation between street addresses and income, and places with street addresses had lower levels of income inequality than places that did not. All this, for pennies a person.

inclusion is one of the secret weapons of street addresses. Employees at the World Bank soon found that addresses were helping to empower the people who lived there by helping them to feel a part of society.

But, of course, inside my hotel room, I realized I was never really lost. I was going to a place that had an address, a hotel that existed in the police officer’s directory, and I had an American passport to show him that I was, in fact, who I said I was. Those in the slums did not. (Slum dwellers struggle to get even an Indian passport—you need an address for that, too.)

1765, parliament had ordered that all houses be numbered, and the numbers painted conspicuously on the doors. So Farr’s General Register Office didn’t just know who had died; they knew where, as well. And it’s hard to emphasize enough just how important the “where” would become for public health. Addresses made pinpointing disease possible.

was a map of the Broad Street epidemic. The map had been developed for other purposes, but Snow had adapted it for his own use, carefully marking each death with a thick black line. Most of the foreboding black lines were stacked like checkers around the pump. The map made a spectacularly compelling argument for the pump as the source of the epidemic.

“Maps are how we organize our data,” Tom Koch, a world expert on disease mapping, told me from his study in Ontario. “They are how we take our ideas and place them in a workable argument.”

(Today, we know that treatment of cholera is straightforward, and primarily consists of rehydration and in some cases, antibiotics.) “Great, I win!” Ivan thought. But then he got a call like that every single week. The trouble was that Ivan didn’t know where his patients were. Even before the earthquake, good maps of Haiti were hard to find.

Today about 70 percent of the world is insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people. It’s no surprise that these places happen to be the poorest places on earth.

The UN only accepted blame grudgingly in 2016, more than six years after the first victims died. Genetic testing has confirmed that the disease found in Haiti was the same strain of cholera seen in South Asia.

After Ivan Gayton left Haiti, the idea of how maps could save lives followed him. Ivan had spent time working in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak. He found himself sending teams out on motorbikes, without much more than a vague idea of what would meet them. Tracking the disease was a miserable task.

Roman streets may not have had names, but Romans had many names for street. In English, we have avenues, boulevards, ways, and lanes, but I have only a hazy idea of how much they differ, if at all. How is a road really different from a street in the average American town? But the wonderfully fertile Latin vocabulary is much more specific. A pons—or bridge—was for traveling over water, yes, but archaeologist Alan Kaiser points out that it was also an appropriate spot for begging, fishing, and religious ceremonies. A forum was an open space suitable for trials, elections, political campaigns, banking, and street performances. A gradus, or flight of stairs, was an excellent spot for displaying an executed criminal’s body. An angiportum backed onto the rear entrances of houses

So for many Romans, getting around wasn’t the most important function of streets. (For some roads blocked to traffic, getting around wasn’t a function at all.)

Lynch sought to come up with a new vocabulary to describe cities. Ultimately, he distilled five components that make up an observer’s mental image of a city: paths; nodes; edges; landmarks; and districts.

“Despite a few remaining puzzles,” Lynch wrote, “it now seems unlikely that there is any mystic ‘instinct’ of way-finding. Rather there is a consistent use and organization of definite sensory cues from the external environment.” Classical scholars have mined Lynch’s vocabulary for understanding ancient Rome.

But what exactly are “mental maps”? And what is actually happening in our brains when we use them?

“The brain is just a lump of flesh and blood, and yet our memories feel like replayed movies, very graphic and dynamic.

So were the Romans—in their noisy, smelly, vivid, address-less environments—using more of their brains than we do? It’s hard to know. But there is evidence that our hippocampi are being hurt by the new digital technology.

Early street names were practical. In medieval England, names developed gradually, drawn from a nearby tree or river, the farm at the end of the road, the inn on the corner.

In the early days of the English postal system, the recipient, not the sender, paid for postage, often at extraordinary costs to the working classes. Prices varied according to distance and how many sheets of paper the letter used. Even the rich used a system of writing both horizontally and vertically on a single page to save paper. (Jane Austen was one such cross-writer.)

Now Hill offered the idea of a nationwide post where each letter’s postage, no matter how far it was to be sent, cost a single penny. Hill, always a teacher, emphasized the moral and intellectual advantages of cheap mail,

What had begun as an economic cause was now a deeply political one. Could the penny post help Britain avoid the revolutions of France and America? Catherine Golden, who has elegantly chronicled the rise of the penny post, writes that postal reformers “recognized that small measures of progress might ease the political unrest between the ‘the masters and the men,’

But the list would need updating entirely after the war; German bombs destroyed many London streets, erasing their names from the map.

Today, the post office estimates that the zip code saves over $9 billion a year by allowing for more accurate and efficient mailing services.

The invention of the house number is not a footnote to history, Tantner tells his readers, but a whole chapter within it. For him, that chapter begins in Vienna.

So, in 1770, the same year her youngest daughter Marie Antoinette was married at Versailles, Maria Theresa ordered a “conscription of souls,” an accounting of all military-eligible men in her territories. But soon she discovered another problem: she had no real way of counting people in the warrens of the villages. There was no way to distinguish between the homes.

Enter the Philadelphia system: odd numbers on one side of a street, even numbers on the other. An adviser to George Washington, Clement Biddle, devised this system in 1790 when Philadelphia was conducting a census.

In the 1990s, James Scott, a professor at Yale, sat down to write a book addressing a puzzling question: Why does the state hate people who move around? Nomads, gypsies, Irish Travelers, Bedouins, vagrants, homeless people, runaway slaves, all had been considered “a thorn in the side of states” who have tried and failed to pin them down. But the more Scott tried to write that book, the more he realized he should be writing a different one, about how the state came to nail down its people in the first place.

Before they addressed houses, governments were blind to who their people were. House numbers gave them eyes. But what would happen when the state could finally see?

The Enlightenment, whose purpose was to bring “light” from darkness, wanted the state to see its people—all of them.

Tantner writes, “all that was left in the face of the power of addressing wielded by the state.” If they couldn’t number you, if they couldn’t conscript you, if they couldn’t see you, they didn’t own you—you really were a free man.

sees a direct connection between these military reports from the empire and major government reforms Joseph II ordered, like ending serfdom and establishing free government education. As it turns out, Tanter found, the empire wasn’t just finding and numbering its people; it was also listening.

“These magnificent places are doomed,” the poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote, unsurprisingly gloomy, from his rented farmhouse uptown. “In some thirty years, every noble cliff will be a pier and the whole island will be densely desecrated by buildings of brick, with portentous facades of brownstone.” Much of Manhattan was still farmland.