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

by Deirdre Mask

New York’s streets have largely been named or numbered since the nineteenth century with some street names, like Stuyvesant and the Bowery, dating from when Manhattan was little more than a Dutch trading station. And yet, I’ll say it again: in some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.

Here, I learned for the first time that billions of people don’t have reliable 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. But this is not just a problem in the developing world. Soon, I learned that parts of the rural United States don’t have street addresses either.

The street he lives on had never had a name, and he had never had a house number. Like most residents of McDowell County, he had to pick up his mail at the post office. When he first tried to order a computer, the woman from Gateway asked him for his address. “You have to live on a street,” she told him. “You have to be somewhere.” She called the power company and put a representative on a three-way call to confirm Johnston’s location. Sometimes deliverymen found him, but sometimes they didn’t. He often had to drive to Welch (pop. 1,715), about four miles away, to meet a new UPS driver.

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.

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.

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. This is particularly true in slum areas. “A citizen is not an anonymous entity lost in the urban jungle and known only by his relatives and co-workers; he has an established identity,”

Establishing a centralized place to register births and deaths would dramatically improve the public health of the nation.

In 1837, as the compiler of abstracts for the Register Office, Farr strayed beyond his job duties, asking physicians to record careful descriptions of each patient’s cause of death. He had become obsessed with the ways the English were living and dying, compiling data on causes of death and occupation to search for patterns that might improve the public’s health. For the first time, anyone could know exactly how people died in London. Without the how, Farr knew very well, you couldn’t investigate the why. “Diseases are more easily prevented than cured,” he wrote, “and the first step to their prevention is the discovery of their causes.” These fine-grained statistics were possible because of street addresses. London had long been carefully mapped, but regular house numbers were still fairly new. In 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.

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.

When cholera broke out in Haiti, the Haitian government invited Piarroux to come and investigate. Like any good epidemiologist, he began to look for the source. And all fingers were pointing to a surprising culprit: the United Nations.

residents told them that the UN’s pipes had leaked into a tributary of the Artibonite River, the main water source for hundreds of thousands of people. Associated Press journalist Jonathan Katz found his own damning evidence. A UN press release had claimed that seven septic tanks serviced the base and were emptied by a private contractor. But when Katz arrived at the camp, locals took him to see the reeking tanks. Katz saw a broken PVC pipe coming from inside the camp that was leaking black fluids toward the river.

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. Cholera ravaged Haiti until February 4, 2019,

His great-great-great-granddaughter, the artist Harriet Russell, carried on the trick, sending herself and friends 130 letters from Glasgow with addresses hidden in recipes, hand-drawn cartoons, a color-blindness test, an eye chart, and connect the dots puzzles. One letter required postal workers to solve a crossword; another puzzle was delivered to the correct address with the message “Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre.” One hundred twenty out of the 130 letters she sent arrived safely.

New street names were all the more confusing because street signs were taken down and booksellers burned city maps as a precaution in case of a German invasion. (Nor did people like giving directions to outsiders; Englishwoman Jean Crossley wrote in her war memoir that “if anyone asked the way one wondered whether one ought, as a patriotic duty, to misdirect them.”)

But maybe even our official street names describe us better than we think they do. Economist Daniel Oto-Peralías examined street name data in Spain and in Great Britain. In Spain, he found that people who lived in towns with many religious streets really were more religious. In Great Britain, people who lived in areas with a larger percentage of streets containing the word “church” or “chapel” in the name were more likely to identify as Christian. And in Scotland, he found that people who live in places with street names like “London Road” or “Royal Street” felt less Scottish. We can only speculate as to causation: Do

After a successful campaign in 2009, the residents of Butt Hole Road now live on Archers Way.

And Bell End turned out to be a name that tied Rowley Regis to its medieval roots. While the local council suggested the name came from a local mine, a Bell End resident born in 1919 supplied another reason, sent via her daughter’s Facebook account. One of King John’s lodges at the end of the road, she wrote, had a bell-shaped knocker on the door. So: Bell End. King John, signer of the Magna Carta, began his reign in 1199, more than eight hundred years before I spoke with Linda. “The buildings are gone,” she told me, “but the names will stay forever.”

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.

In 1763, Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, who would become her co-regent, lost the Seven Years War, which involved every kingdom of Europe. This time weddings could not fasten the empire together. Maria Theresa tried to win back the rich province of Silesia—today, a region of Poland—from her archenemy, Frederick II of Prussia. But her exhausted troops came home empty-handed. Maria Theresa was devastated. If she hadn’t always been pregnant, she said—she had eight children during her wars with Prussia alone—she would have joined in the battle herself. MARIA THERESA She needed more soldiers. The Habsburg Empire was still governed by a feudal system. Landlords, who controlled the families who worked on their land, were largely responsible for military recruitment. Unsurprisingly, they held back the strong and hardworking for themselves, and sent the rest to fight. In theory, Maria Theresa reigned over an empire full of hearty young men, but what use were they if she had no way to find them? 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. She struck on an answer: house numbers. By numbering each door and listing its occupants, the military could strip away the...

In the Czech Republic, each house has two numbers, one for directional purposes, and one for government registration. In Florence, houses have different numbers for residential and business purposes. But what is the right way to number houses? 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.

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).

alone; in England in the 1700s, for example, 90 percent of men had one of only eight names: John, Edward, William, Henry, Charles, James, Richard, Robert.

So rulers began to demand permanent last names, yet another sign of the lengthening reach of the state.

Notaries in fifteenth-century Marseilles simply devised their own ways to describe the identities of the people they recorded. “The use of the address, the practice of attaching identity to residence is,” he concludes, “a condition of modernity.” The state had to understand its society, to identify its subjects, before it could do anything to shape it. Before house numbers, the dark, shuttered houses and the unmapped streets hid the population away. In books, we read words; in cities, we read street names and house numbers. Before they addressed houses, governments were blind to who their people were. House numbers gave them eyes.

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

Destroying their house numbers was, for the powerless, akin to taking back their humanity. When men gouged out their teeth or cut off their thumbs to avoid military service, they were exercising the only power they had. Violence against themselves, violence against the house was, as 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.

Prussia allowed Jews to be citizens in 1812, in exchange for taking fixed surnames. 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.

Numbered streets are largely an American phenomenon. Today, every American city with more than a half million people has numerical street names. (Most have lettered streets, too.) According to census data, Second Street is the most common street name in America (some towns use Main instead of First Street), and seven out of the ten of the most common street names in America are numbers. But as geographer Jani Vuolteenaho has described, in Europe, numbers rarely appear on street signs. In Madrid, in 1931, in what is now called the Second Spanish Republic, someone sensibly suggested using numbers to avoid conflict over what to rename the streets. The city council dismissed the idea outright, explaining that numbered streets were not in the “the traditional Spanish spirit” that honored citizens “by giving their names to cities and villages.” Even today, across Europe, instructions about street naming often include a rule rejecting the use of numbers. Estonia, Vuolteenaho points out, has banned them by law.

Quakers declined to use most of the names of the month in the Gregorian calendar because of their pagan origins; rather than January, February, for example, they said First Month, Second Month. (The months September through December, which were named after Latin numbers, were okay.) The same was true of the days of the week; Sunday School, for example, was “First Day School.” In this fashion, Penn prescribed numbers as names for streets running north–south—Second Street, Third Street, Fourth Street—matching the rational, straight lines of the grid. AN EARLY MAP OF PHILADELPHIA And so, William Penn, one of the earliest urban planners in America, also introduced numbered streets to America’s cities.

An ancient city in Pakistan, Mohenjo Daro, had a grid, as did the Greek city of Miletus. Grids, Marcuse points out, also used in Spanish settlements in the Americas and French cities in Africa, provided “a uniform layout that could easily be established in the conquering country and imposed on the colony some distance away.” But in North America, it was Penn who popularized the grid as a tool of urban planning for different, and more peaceful, reasons.

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. To do so, Jefferson, too, turned to the grid. America’s new plains, lakes, mountains, and deserts were all to be mapped in a largely identical way. (Of course, the lands weren’t really new: the government would spend much of the next century pushing Native Americans out of the grid’s way.) The Land Ordinance of 1785, inspired by Jefferson’s ideas, instructed surveyors to draw lines running north and south at right angles, dividing the territory into thirty-six square mile townships. Lots were numbered, and the need for speed and efficiency meant that the streets were often numbered as well.

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.

The absence of street names makes navigation challenging, even for people from Japan. To help people find their way, Tokyo is dotted with kōban, small buildings staffed with police officers familiar with the area and armed with detailed maps and thick directories. The fax machine persisted in Japan long after it had died out elsewhere in part because of the fondness for—and necessity of—sending maps.

Japanese has three different kinds of scripts, but the bulk of written Japanese uses kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese. Kanji are logograms—each character represents a word or idea. Though the character’s shape may provide a clue to its meaning, for the most part kanji simply have to be memorized; they cannot be “sounded out.” And kanji are not written on lines. Instead, Emiko told Barrie how in Japan their paper did not have lines but dozens of square boxes. (The paper is called genkō yōshi, and is still used in Japanese schools today.) Each kanji acted independently; each was perfectly understandable on its own, unlike English letters, which make no sense unless they are put together in lines and read from left to right to make words. (English words must also be properly spaced—“redone” is entirely different from “red one.”) Even

Shelton, an expert in urban design, began to connect the differences in writing systems with the ways Westerners and the Japanese see their cities. Those who learned to write in English, Shelton reasoned, were trained to see lines. So Westerners fixated on streets—lines—and insisted on naming them. But in Japan, the streets themselves, as one commentator has said, “seem to have too little significance in the Japanese urban scheme of things to warrant the prestige that names confer.” The Japanese, Shelton theorized, focused on area—or blocks.

The sort of integrated city plan people are used to in places like New York and Paris is not a Japanese concept: such integration, Popham explains, is “a sort of beauty which the Japanese do not look to find.” Instead, they had an “attachment to particular buildings and spaces in the city, taken one at a time, with their particular qualities of composure, style, wit, or charm.” 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.”

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.” In this understanding, globalizing actually boosted, rather than detracted from, Korean national identity.

Early street names were often descriptive—Church Street, Market Road, Cemetery Lane. Bobby Sands was not only a street name—it was also a monument. Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate.

What they couldn’t convert, they could rename. And that included themselves. Before the Revolution, French forenames were largely restricted to Catholic control—which meant sticking to biblical and saints’ names. (The nobility could, as in most everything else, get away with more flair.) But in September of 1792, just one day after the National Convention of France unanimously voted to abolish the monarchy, French people were handed a new right: the right to name their children—and themselves—whatever they wanted.

Naturally, the revolutionary passion for inventive naming extended to the streets. Is it surprising? To name something is to assert power over it;

The French Revolution nevertheless sparked a trend for rebranding streets to show off a new ideology. Around the world, revolutionary governments kick off their regimes by changing the street names. Mexico City has more than five hundred streets named after Emiliano Zapata, the leader of its peasant revolution.

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; areas with a higher concentration of ethnic minorities largely have streets that sound more like those in Beijing than other areas. Street names became one more tool to keep the locals under control.

The streetscape would be ripe with symbolism—the Capitol, for example, was put on the hill, not the White House. Unlike in Britain, the president would not be king.

In fact, 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.

Today, Northern Ireland is largely peaceful—though the peace never feels fully secure—but Protestants and Catholics still largely live apart. “Peace walls,” some three miles long, still separate Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast, and more of these walls exist today than at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. About 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland still go to schools segregated by religion.

With the knowledge of Stalin, mostly Russian troops raped an estimated 1/3 of Berlin women and girls (fathering between 150,000 and 200,000 babies in Germany alone), spreading typhus, syphilis, and gonorrhea. 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. The German Communist Party combed through every street name and recommended 1,795 street name changes—out of an estimated 10,000 in Berlin. In theory, everyone agreed on the need for new names. But the differences in street-naming philosophies foreshadowed the wall that was soon to divide the city.

In 1938, the Nazis changed one of Berlin’s Judenstraßen in the Spandau neighborhood to Kinkelstraße, named after a nineteenth-century revolutionary. The street was returned to Judenstraße in a ceremony in which right-wing protesters reportedly jeered “Jews out” and “You Jews are to blame for everything.” This was in 2002,

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.”