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

by Deirdre Mask

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.

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.

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.

Instead, the “miasma theory”—the belief that disease came from vapors, or smells, arising from decay—dominated among medical experts. (Hence “malaria” means “bad air” rather than “bad mosquitos.”)

The fear of tarnishing the UN’s already precarious reputation in Haiti had muzzled the epidemiological community. Piarroux struggled to publish his findings. The Lancet rejected his article without explanation, at the same time publishing an editorial entitled “As Cholera Returns to Haiti, Blame Is Unhelpful.” The Emerging Infectious Disease Journal eventually accepted the paper but had five reviewers—rather than the usual two or three—confirm its accuracy. The UN only accepted blame grudgingly in 2016, more than six years after the first victims died.

In the United States, the zip code was invented by Robert Moon, a Philadelphia postal employee. (Zip stands for “zoning improvement plan.”)

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.

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. Odds on one side, evens on the other takes much of the guesswork out of knowing how far a number is along a street. In Philadelphia, this system was revised in the nineteenth century to make house numbering even more logical, assigning one hundred numbers to each block, with the numbers shifting to the next hundred at the next block. Today, modern planners use careful calculations to ensure that our house numbers are rational—so rational that we barely even notice they are there.

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.

Manhattan once boasted more plant species than Yosemite, more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and more ecological communities than Yellowstone,

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.

Penn couldn’t name his own colony, but he could name the streets. Though it seems that Holme wanted to name some of the streets after people (including himself), Penn rejected the idea as immodest. His alternative idea was probably inspired by Quaker practice. 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.

And so, William Penn, one of the earliest urban planners in America, also introduced numbered streets to America’s cities. He named the cross streets after “things that Spontaneously Grow in the country,” launching another fashion of tree names like Cherry and Chestnut Streets.

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.

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.”

Modern street names do more than describe; they commemorate.

To name something is to assert power over it; that’s why God lets Adam name all the animals in Eden (and eventually, problematically) Eve, as well.

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; 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.

George Washington, who would give the capital city its name (though, apparently, he always called it Federal City) chose Pierre L’Enfant to design the city. L’Enfant was born in Paris, and studied art and architecture in France but had volunteered, like thousands of his compatriots, in the American revolutionary army.

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.

Washington, DC’s street names are maniacally rational. Numbered streets run east to west, and lettered streets (A, B, C) north and south. (After W Street, the pattern starts again, with each name now two syllables—Adams, Bryant, etc.—and then at the end, restarting with three-syllable street names, Allison, Buchanan, etc.) The diagonal avenues that break up the grid were named for the states in the Union (fifteen of them, then), with the longest avenues given the names of the three largest states at the time, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Now every state in America has a street name in DC.

As Jews disappeared from Germany, they were also disappearing from the street signs.

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. The Nazis understood this best of all.

Unsurprisingly, losing the war didn’t change Forrest’s mind about black people, and he soon became the KKK’s first grand wizard.

A street name is a kind of monument, too; in the South, more than a thousand streets bear the names of Confederate leaders.

It wasn’t that the North and South left the suffering of black people out of the Civil War narrative; instead they made that suffering its foundation.

For others, keeping the Civil War history on the signs was a way of clinging to a heritage they believed was romantic—it was part of their collective memory, a heritage they felt they could admire while still rejecting the evils of slavery.

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.) Nearly nine hundred streets in the United States are named after Martin Luther King Jr. There are MLK streets in Senegal, Israel, Zambia, South Africa, France, and Australia, too.

In the United States, a proposal to name a street after King has sometimes ignited a race war. A 1993, in Americus, Georgia, a white fire official said he supported naming half of a street for King, so long as the o...

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

As I write, the St. Louis suburb of Ladue, which is 87 percent white, has a median household income of $203,250. About seven miles away, the zip code around MLK Drive is 94 percent black, and the neighborhood’s median income is about $27,608.

“It’s ironic,” Professor Derek Alderman, a geographer who frequently writes about MLK streets, told me, “that we have attached the name of one of the most famous civil rights leaders of our time to the streets that speak to the very need to continue the civil rights movement.”

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.

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.

The Constitutional Court is comprised of black judges who had suffered under apartheid, and white judges, who presumably benefited, even if they hadn’t supported it. But amazingly, she saw no real pattern in the ways they voted. They did not split along political lines, the way justices often do on the American Supreme Court. Somehow, the judges had found ways to bridge their histories, and the court had over the years ruled unanimously to abolish capital punishment and uphold the right to gay marriage.

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. One black South African election official told me how growing up he had a cousin who had an address—which made him seem very “glamorous.”

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.

Trump said the building had fifty-two floors when it only had forty-four; he had invented a new math that determined how many floors his buildings would have if each floor had “average” ceiling height. The fact that the extra floors don’t actually exist didn’t seem to matter. Trump’s math has since become common among New York developers.

Street names were an early tool for gentrification.

New York City regulations limit building heights, but developers can buy the air rights from a nearby site that is not using its allowance.

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 Longacre Square in 1904 when The New York Times moved there.)

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.

“No matter where you are in Manhattan, you’re always a block from hell.”

Like Manhattan, New Haven is a grid city. Founded by Puritans escaping persecution, the new settlement was based not on Philadelphia, but on the ideal city of the Levites, as described in Numbers 35:1–6. The Puritans neatly laid the streets in a four-by-four grid, the dimensions taken from Ezekiel 45:2, with its central meetinghouse copied from Exodus 26.

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.

Lots of people claim to want to go off grid forever, to seek out their own version of #vanlife. But the people Sarah interviewed desperately wanted to be on the grid with all that the grid entails: homes, bills, bank accounts—in essence, everything required for modern life. 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.”

in no state in America today can anyone afford a two-bedroom apartment on a minimum-wage salary.