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

by Deirdre Mask

Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It’s made up of two ideas—“the past” and “the process of coming to terms or coping.” It’s a word that is very German, and is often used to describe the nation’s reckoning with its Nazi past and the German division during the Cold War. But its meaning is universal. We all have the need to confront the past, memorialize it, struggle with it, do something with it.

But Young’s vision for Liberia was never realized. He ran out of money after a 1926 hurricane decimated Hollywood. Black residents lived in substandard housing, often in crowded tents. And soon after, Young’s street names were mysteriously changed throughout the city. In Liberia, three streets named to honor cities with robust black communities—Louisville, Macon, and Savannah—were renamed after Confederate generals who had fought to keep blacks enslaved.

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.” As Michael Newton has described, on his way out of the hearing, a journalist stopped Forrest. “With a wink, the grand wizard told him, ‘I lied like a gentleman.’”

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; Pennsylvania, another Union State, has two. A district in Alaska, along the Bering Sea in an area that is 95 percent Alaska Native, was until recently named after Wade Hampton, one of the South’s largest slaveholders, a lieutenant of the Confederate cavalry, and later, governor of South Carolina. So it’s not just about the vanquished honoring their heroes. America seemed to want to celebrate the Confederacy even though the Confederates had fought to destroy America itself.

During Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War, many Northerners looked down on the former rebels with the expected enmity of former foes, and they were often optimistic about the future of African Americans. But that changed, as historian Nina Silber has written, when, “increasingly, northern whites bowed to the racial pressures of reunion.” Northerners began to “overlook the history of American slavery, and came to view the southern blacks as a strange and foreign population,” while at the same time adopting a tender attitude toward the idea of Southern manliness. These changing attitudes eased Northerners into accepting Jim Crow as one of their own.

has argued that before the nineteenth century we didn’t need objects to remember the past. 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. We want our lives to be predictable, and predictability requires a “narrative link” between the present and the past that reassures us that everything is as it should be. We salt away our memories, bronze them in parks, and tattoo them on street signs to try to force our future societies to be more like our past ones.

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. As the novelist Milan Kundera has said, “The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

The growth of the Civil War monuments peaked twice: first, in the early twentieth century, when Jim Crow laws were being made, and then again in the 1950s and ’60s when the laws were being challenged.

Commissioner Biederman told me he decided to walk Lee, Hood, and Forrest streets, trying to drum up support for the street name changes. One white family told him how they didn’t want the names to change, and that their neighbor, a black man, didn’t want them to change either. Their neighbor was just across the street, and they called him over to talk. He told Biederman how he worked two jobs and didn’t have the time to change his address on his ID and bills. But after Biederman said goodbye and walked away, the black neighbor came back to find him, and shook his hand vigorously. “Thank you for all you’re doing here,” he told him. He just hadn’t wanted to make any trouble with his neighbors.

It’s not a coincidence that you will find most Confederate-named streets and most streets honoring Martin Luther King in the South, where the majority of the nation’s black people still live. When King died in 1968, black communities clamored to change their streets to his name. (It took Haarlem, in the Netherlands, only a week to name a street after him; one appeared in Mainz, West Germany, in three weeks. Still, an MLK street didn’t appear in Atlanta, MLK’s birthplace, for eight years.)

Segregation meant that African Americans often lived in their own neighborhoods, so MLK streets quickly became associated with black communities.

St. Louis, still one of the most segregated cities in America, was, Gordon argues, the product of racial restrictions and failed city policies that isolated and marginalized 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.”

But another study found that statistically MLK streets weren’t any economically worse off than other Main Streets in the United States. There are more gift shops than bail bondsmen on MLK streets, more insurance companies than liquor stores. But does it really matter if the reputation is deserved? It might just be that MLK streets will always be perceived as bad, no matter how nice they are now, or how nice they will become. Never mind that many MLK streets run through commercial districts and college towns, pass through posh white neighborhoods, or circle government capitals. For many people, a street named after Martin Luther King can only be a black street. And for them, a black street will always be a bad street. No parks, no boutiques, no evidence to the contrary will ever make them feel any differently.

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.

Vanity addresses seem like a cheap way to increase the value of real estate, but they can cost more than money. 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.

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.

The lack of a home address was crushing people’s chances of ever getting a home again.