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

by Deirdre Mask

Numbered streets are a peculiarly American phenomenon. Today, every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. (Most have lettered streets, too.) Second Street is the most common street name in America

Fast-forward to 1784, when Thomas Jefferson, having already drafted the Declaration of Independence, was faced with another seemingly impossible task—what to do with all the undeveloped land to the west that was now officially American. The new government was land rich but cash poor. Selling the land meant surveying it and dividing it into tidy parcels that could be described, bought, and sold from afar easily.

Many critics have called grids ugly and plain, without the beauty of Paris’s boulevards or charm of London’s winding lanes. But the design was never supposed to be pretty.

(Only a small number of major streets are named.) Instead of naming its streets, Tokyo numbers its blocks. Streets are simply the spaces between the blocks. And buildings in Tokyo are, for the most part, numbered not in geographical order, but according to when they were built.

Navigating the city then becomes an entirely different experience. In Tokyo, Barthes wrote fondly, you must “orient yourself not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience.” You could only repeat that same journey if you memorized it. To “visit a place for the first time,” he wrote, “is thereby to begin to write it: the address not being written, it must establish its own writing.”

“Globalization must be underpinned by Koreanization,” President Kim once said. “We cannot be global citizens without a good understanding of our own culture and tradition. Globalization in the proper sense of the word means that we should march out into the world on the strength of our unique culture and traditional values.”

other people had plastered over other old Churchill Street signs in the same way. He could tell that someone had tried to peel them off—a corner would be missing—but the glue was too strong. A few months later, he knew they’d won, he’s said, when he heard a woman hop in a taxi and say, “Take me to Bobby Sands Street.”

Bobby Sands—a poet, a martyr, a mortal enemy of the British— fit the Iranian narrative perfectly. An Iranian ambassador purportedly exchanged gifts with the Sands family. A newspaper reported that Irish visitors to Iran were greeted at Tehran airport’s passport control with an uncharacteristic smile, a raised fist, and the greeting: “Bobby Sands, no food. Welcome to Iran.”

The French Revolution nevertheless sparked a trend for rebranding streets to show off a new ideology.

China has used street names as a tool to keep ethnic minority regions in check, as political scientist Jonathan Hassid has described. You would expect places that have their own languages and cultures to have more variation in street names, but Hassid found that the opposite is largely true;

five streets immortalize Sands in France, along with a few others around the world. And yet, for all the outrage of the Irish petitioners about Bobby Sands Street in Tehran, no street commemorates Sands in Ireland, north or south.

Bobby Sands didn’t settle, and his revolution failed in its main objective; as least as I write, the northern six counties of Ireland remain in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There is no Bobby Sands Street in Ireland because today’s Ireland is not Bobby Sands’s.

The Jew Streets were instead old, descriptive names—Church Street was where the church was, Jew Street was where the Jews lived. They had been changed during the Nazi era, and then changed back after the war as a sign of respect.

As Jewish street names changed, the map of where Jewish people were free to travel changed as well. The Jewish Daily Bulletin reported in September 1933 that “the municipality of Rothenberg which recently renamed its principal square Hitlerplatz, has decided that no Jew may set foot in the square that bears the sacred name of Hitler.”

Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool. Saying them requires no thought or consideration, and, better yet, you are forced to use them every time you give directions, write your letters, or apply for virtually anything at all. The state can literally put words in your mouth.

Even though the postwar German population was now smaller than before, four times as many people were dying per day after the war than during it. And yet, on the first agenda of the first meeting of the new borough mayors of Berlin, on May 24, 1945, was street names.

But for the most part, the West was simply weary of denazification. The Nazi street names reverted to their previous names. West Berlin’s streets after the war often sounded as if the war had never happened. But the Soviet forces in the East weren’t just interested in denazifying; they demanded revolution. Street names were a way of showing what East Germany had decided this new world order would look like.

Their inability to translate between the names in their hometown left them “speechless,” Christiane wrote. “We cannot talk about places that we have no common name

Berlin has one of the most tumultuous histories of any city in the world, leaping from the Prussians to the Weimar Era to the Nazis to the Cold War in less than a century. Street names have, as Dirk Verheyen puts it, “been both substance and metaphor of Berlin’s struggle with identity.”

Unsurprisingly, losing the war didn’t change Forrest’s mind about black people, and he soon became the KKK’s first grand wizard. Forrest defended the Klan in Congress in 1871, arguing that negroes were being “insolent” and ladies were “ravished.” The KKK had simply been formed to “protect the weak.”

None of this history is remotely secret. None of this history is even much contested anymore. And it’s why, Israel told me, Forrest Street particularly bothered him. I had to agree. I couldn’t understand why anyone in modern America would want to commemorate him.

A street name is a kind of monument, too; in the South, more than a thousand streets bear the names of Confederate leaders. But it’s not just the South. Streets on an army base in Brooklyn are named after Generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Ohio, a Union State, has three streets named after Confederate generals;

Memory was engrained in local cultures, habits, and customs. But as the great changes of the twentieth century seemed to speed up history, and as memory became more removed from everyday experience, we began to feel a powerful urge to hold memories not just in our minds but in specific things and places—like monuments and street names.

So memorializing the past is just another way of wishing about the present. The trouble is that we don’t always share the same memories. And not everyone has an equal opportunity to enshrine their group’s memory on the landscape.

“If you’re new to the area and want to find the African American community,” Lamont Griffiths, who runs a barbershop on MLK Boulevard in downtown Raleigh, told a reporter, “all you have to do is ask: Where’s the Martin Luther King Junior Street?”

St. Louis’s black community. Newspapers listed properties for African Americans under a separate section—“for colored.” The “colored” sections of the city shrank, cramming multiple generations into single-family homes. A 1948 real estate manual warned of home buyers likely to instigate blight, lumping together into one category boot-leggers, call girls, and “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live amongst whites.”

St. Louis’s MLK’s decline is real, and it’s one reason why MLK streets have become a code name for a certain kind of urban, black decline. This is why so many protesting businesspeople say with a straight face that the name is “bad for business.”

Under apartheid, many of the street names were in the Afrikaans language, or honored Afrikaners, whose government had largely designed and implemented apartheid. The government hadn’t even bothered to give many of the nonwhite areas street names at all; even today, thousands of streets are unnamed in the country.

Pre-apartheid South Africa does not look that different from the country today; in fact, by some measures, South Africa is the most unequal nation in the world. Just a tenth of the population, nearly all white, owns 90 percent of the nation’s wealth. The net worth of 80 percent of South Africans (mostly black) is zero. Geographically, economically, and emotionally, it is almost as if apartheid never ended.

Britain would not accept apartheid. People began to call it the “Wind of Change” speech. A better name might have been “End of Empire.” Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister of South Africa, hadn’t been warned of what Macmillan was going to say,

Far from weakening apartheid, Macmillan’s speech seemed to have strengthened it. About a month after his speech, police killed sixty-nine Africans protesting peacefully against the pass law in the township of Sharpeville. The government banned all protests and criminalized anti-apartheid groups like the Pan Africanist Congress and the African National Congress.

The next year, white South Africans voted to sever ties with the Commonwealth. Verwoerd Airport, Verwoerd Hospital, Verwoerd schools, and of course Verwoerd streets, spread across the country. On the night of the speech, Macmillan wrote in his diary. “I had to comfort those of British descent; inspire the Liberals; satisfy Home Opinion; and yet keep on good terms—at least outwardly—with the strange caucus of Afrikaner politicians who now control this vast country.”

when South Africa won the World Cup on home turf, Mandela presented the trophy wearing the team’s jersey and hailed the springbok, a kind of antelope and long-standing Afrikaner symbol. He dined with Verwoerd’s widow eating koeksisters, a braided doughnut covered in a sticky sauce, in the all-white town where she lived. They spoke, naturally, in Afrikaans.

Under Mandela’s presidency, surprisingly few apartheid-era names were changed. The government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead of trials, to provide an opportunity for confession without punishment, and testimony without fear. But Mandela sometimes opposed the renaming of streets, airports, and monuments associated with the Afrikaners who imprisoned him.

“How do we remember and say the past happened,” she asked, “without looking as if we are celebrating our past?”

But the first definition of “lost” in the Oxford English Dictionary is not navigational. Instead, “lost” refers to something “that has perished or been destroyed; ruined, esp. morally or spiritually; (of the soul) damned.” It wasn’t that the Afrikaners couldn’t find their way home; maybe they couldn’t find their way home. They “have lost their bearings,”

But black South Africans have been lost much longer. In Potchefstroom itself, almost all of the black population live in a township, with the whites living in the city—an informal segregation not so different from apartheid. Today, unsurprisingly, many believe that the revolution in South Africa has barely begun.

“The use of Afrikaans has unintentionally become a facilitator of ethnic or cultural separation and racial tension.” Continuing teaching in Afrikaans would “leave the results of white supremacy not being redressed but kept alive and well.”

The new building’s address wasn’t exactly a lie, but it wasn’t the original one the city had issued. Instead, Trump’s development company had asked the city to change the building’s address from 15 Columbus Circle to 1 Central Park West. (Columbus Circle was then little more than a polluted traffic magnet.)

You don’t need the best location, just the best deal. “Just as you can create leverage, you can enhance a location, through promotion and through psychology.” But this kind of real estate “psychology” wasn’t a new idea. By the time Trump began to develop his first buildings in the 1970s, New Yorkers had already been bullshitting street names for more than a hundred years.

In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive. (Cashier’s check or money order only, please.) The city’s self-named vanity address program is an unusually forthright acknowledgment that addresses—rather than just locations—can be sold to the highest bidder.

No one would describe 11 Times Square as being anywhere close to Times Square. (Times Square is itself a kind of vanity address, having been renamed from Long-acre Square in 1904 when The New York Times moved there.)

Police and firemen might struggle to find a building with a Fifth Avenue address that is not actually on Fifth Avenue (one problem Manhattan and rural West Virginia share). In Chicago, where a similar program allowed developers to manipulate addresses, thirty-one-year-old Nancy Clay died in an office fire when firefighters didn’t realize that One Illinois Center was actually on the less grandly named East Wacker Drive.

It’s not just the street’s first name that matters. In the UK, addresses ending in “Street” fetched less than half of those that ended with “Lane.”

Disturbingly, houses on roads named “King” or “Prince” were also worth more than those on “Queen” or “Princess.”

Homes on streets containing “Lake” are worth about 16 percent more than the national median, probably because, yes, they are near a picturesque lake. The evil genius of Manhattan’s vanity addresses is that you don’t even need the actual lake to get the Lake Street address.

During the Gilded Age, so named by Mark Twain for the thin veneer of gold painted over the nation’s severe social problems, wealthy New Yorkers began to move farther uptown, away from the crowds and the cholera. America lacked the hereditary aristocracy of Europe, so New York found itself creating its own elite criteria.

Right before Trump opened that new building on Central Park West, he’d been through hard times, too. His companies had already declared bankruptcy twice. He’d had a very public affair and divorce. But it was as if it hardly mattered. His building at 1 Central Park West helped cement his role in the New York luxury condo market,

By definition, homeless people don’t have homes. But an address is not a home. An address, today, is an identity; it’s a way for society to check that you are not just a person but the person you say you are. How many times have I been asked to show proof of address to register a child in school, to vote, to open a new account? It’s not for the bank manager to come and meet me at the door. In the modern world, in short, you are your address.

Most of all, they wanted jobs, and jobs required addresses. One man told her, “I used to work but now I don’t have an address.” Sarah discovered evidence showing many homeless people are especially hard workers because they are so grateful for the work.