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.

Emergency services have rallied for more formal ways of finding people. Close your eyes and try to explain where your house is without using your address. Now try it again, but this time pretend you’re having a stroke. Paramedics rushed to a house in West Virginia described as having chickens out front, only to see that every house had chickens out front.

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.

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.

An Oxford resident complained that he finds his street name most awkward when he is sitting with “official people,” and they ask, “you know, where do you live?” His answer? “Crotch Crescent.”

To my sister Jean, Up the Canongate, Down a Close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg.

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.

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

Penn set out to conduct his “holy experiment” in the Americas. He wanted to call his densely forested colony “Sylvania,” after the Latin word for woods, but the king insisted over his objections that he add “Penn” to the name—in honor of Penn’s father.

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.

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.

Most heart-wrenching were the Judenpfade (“Jews’ paths”) or Judenwege (“Jews’ lanes”), Hansel-and-Gretel-like wooded paths beaten in a time when Jews were not allowed to walk through the city but had to go around it.

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.

Philosopher Henri Lefebvre has said that “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential.” If Mandela didn’t want to change names because he didn’t want to make it too obvious a revolution had happened—well, in that respect, he might have succeeded too well.

Trump’s face went from orange to red.

If the project ever kicked off on a grander scale, someone in the city who lost their home might have an address at One Hyde Park, too. I liked the subversive nature of it, the idea that a homeless person could have the Knightsbridge address a billionaire had paid so lavishly for. Why not give it to someone who can use it? The home may be empty, but an address never need be.