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

by Deirdre Mask

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.

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. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” Kentucky representative Geoff Davis said, in 2008, about America’s nuclear arsenal. “That boy” was Barack Obama.)

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.

Some books are about how one small thing changed the world—the pencil or the toothpick, for example. This is not that kind of book. 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.

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.

And 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.

without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

Today, huge swaths of the world are 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. When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.” Often where epidemics break out, there are no maps either.

We can only speculate as to causation: Do you live on Church Street because you are religious and want to live near a church? Or do you become more religious because you live on Church Street? Perhaps we make the street names, and then the street names help make us.

House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you.

Most Europeans, for example, didn’t have permanent last names before the fourteenth century. (China’s Qin Dynasty had, however, been requiring last names since the fourth century B.C. “for the purposes of taxation, forced labor, and conscription.”) But in Europe, as Scott has described, people had a first name, and if something else was needed, they might add their occupation (Miller, Baker, Smith), where they lived (Hill, Brook), or perhaps the father’s given name or clan name (Johnson, Richardson).

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?

Assigning each house a number simultaneously advanced bedrock principles of the Enlightenment: rationality and equality. Cities should be easy to navigate, and people easy to find. Taxes could be collected, criminals found quickly. And a peasant’s home was numbered the same way as an aristocrat’s. The Enlightenment, whose purpose was to bring “light” from darkness, wanted the state to see its people—all of them.

Numbering is essentially dehumanizing. In the early days of house numbering, many felt their new house numbers denied them an essential dignity.

A Swiss memoirist visiting Austria was “horrified to see numbers on the houses which appear to us a symbol of the hand of the ruler determinedly taking possession of the private individual.” To explain it to me, Anton Tantner goofily thumped his chest. “I am not a number, I am a free man,” he cried, quoting the British spy show The Prisoner. He paused. “This is also a song by Iron Maiden.”

An edict of 1833 required all Jews, not just those who were nationalized, to take surnames from a list the government chose for them, like Rubenstein and Bernstein. But soon after, in 1845, Jews were legally confined to a closed list of surnames, names they could not change, setting them up for effortless identification later by the Nazis. As historian Dietz Bering has said, “the Jews, for whom in 1812 the gates of the legal ghetto had been opened only half-heartedly and not even completely, were to be imprisoned again in another ghetto: one of names.”

people soon relaxed their suspicions when they realized the benefits their house numbers brought them. Post got delivered; Mozart alone received mail at twelve different addresses in Vienna. The city was easier to navigate.

Over coffee, Tantner told me he 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.

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.

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.

A UK property website spokesman summed it up: “The saying goes that the three most important factors in buying a house are location, location, location; our research shows that even the road name you choose can make a difference to how much you can expect to pay when finding a property.”

From there, he played one part in creating the billionaire’s paradise that is Manhattan, a city unapologetic about pure, unbridled greed masquerading as luxury. (The four highest-paid hedge-fund managers made $3.5 million in 2017—per day.)

One new building boasts “en suite parking”—a separate elevator for your car.

In a way, today’s limestone-loving classes have gilded New York even more than Martha Bacon’s elite, with their costume balls and dinners at Delmonico’s, ever did. “Manhattan is theirs,” architecture critic Aaron Betsky has said. “We just get to admire it.” I wonder if there’s any need for vanity addresses anymore. Now, it seems to me, every street in Manhattan might as well be Park Avenue.

Almost immediately, she discovered that a lot of her assumptions about homelessness were wrong. She had thought that finding adequate shelter in New Haven would be the biggest problem. People on the Green did suffer from a lack of clean places to stay, especially during the bitter winters, and they also mentioned police harassment and deficient mental health treatment. But those problems paled in comparison to what they really needed. And what they really needed, they told her, was an address. 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.

But stereotypes of drug abuse and lawlessness remain. Homelessness is deeply stigmatizing. Erving Goffman, one of the twentieth century’s most influential sociologists, spent years thinking and writing about stigmas and those who live without social acceptance: the disabled, addicts, the mentally ill. He described stigma as a “spoiled identity.” Interviewed for a study on homelessness influenced by Goffman’s work, a young man said that the hardest thing about living on the street “has been getting used to the way people look down on street people. It’s real hard to feel good about yourself when almost everyone you see is looking down on you.” When ordinary participants in a study were shown images of homeless people, their brain activity suggested that they saw the homeless as “less than human, or dehumanized.”

I’d heard a lot about One Hyde Park, the site of the most expensive apartment sold in London, a £160 million penthouse. From the outside, it looks like an upmarket Hilton, but inside, it houses sauna rooms, an ozone swimming pool, a golf simulator, a squash court, room service, and personal panic rooms—all for the bargain price of £7,000 per square foot. One was advertised in 2019 for rent—at £40,000 a week. A majority of the apartments are used as second, third, or fourth homes, and they sit completely empty.

But today only a few recognize the incredible civic achievements of Edward Brennan, whose plan was implemented the same year Burnham’s was published. He often appears as a footnote in Chicago’s public history, his name preserved on the cityscape in an obscure two-block residential street named South Brennan Avenue and an honorary designation at State and Madison.

Burnham’s plan was not fully implemented, enthusiasm for some of his grand plans waning during the Depression. Brennan’s system for the streets, however, worked for everyone, especially working-class deliverymen and postal workers.

Sheldrick thought it was a problem he could tackle. With a mathematician friend, a fellow chess-player from Eton, he came up with an ingenious idea—divide the world into squares, 3 meters by 3 meters. Instead of using coordinates, they decided to use words, which are easier to remember than a string of numbers. Three words per square: 40,000 words, 64 trillion 3-word combinations. And so what3words was born. Every spot on the world’s surface now has its own what3words address. It’s easy to look up on the company’s website or on its free app.

I had expected to find those tackling the future of addressing to be more like the army of experts I’d interviewed—nerdy geographers, tweedy historians, and experienced bureaucrats. I hadn’t expected that addresses, too, would be revolutionized by the young, the hip, the technically advanced. And it’s not just what3words. Google has devised Plus Codes that use a string of numbers and letters to provide an address for any spot in the world. Plus Codes, which are derived from longitude and latitude coordinates, are about the length of a phone number. But the length can also be shortened when combined with a place name.

Finding people is a problem the Enlightenment was poised to solve, and yet it’s still a problem that so often defeats us today.

We don’t know what the near future is going to look like—technologically or politically. Change seems to come more outrageously every year. And the more things change, the more we feel the need to anchor ourselves to the past. Street addresses have become one way to remember.

digital addresses like what3words “don’t provide any link between our mental maps and addressing, and removing that link stops addressing being effective. There is no relationship between horse.town.faster and what I experience when I traverse through my world.” Digital addresses create a world in which we all exist as dots on a map, each our own island, named by a corporation.

Arguing about street names has become a way of arguing about fundamental issues in our society at a time when doing so sometimes feels impossible. How often are we called to take a stand and decide who we are as a community? We lose something of ourselves if we don’t keep up the relentless, argument-riddled, community-based work of mapping and naming the places where we live.