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

by Deirdre Mask

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 we walk around the city, we draw our mental maps with paths (the streets, walkways), nodes (a junction or crossing), edges (a river, a railway track), landmarks (a taco shop, a distant mountain), and districts (Soho, downtown).

But a successful post needed an effective addressing system. And duplicate names, poorly numbered streets, and a public unfamiliar with what an address should even look like made the job of a delivery man harder than it had to be. In 1884, James Wilson Hyde had worked in the post office for twenty-five years, “the best, perhaps of his life,” he wrote. In his history of the Royal Mail, he described some badly addressed letters. Here’s one: “My dear Ant Sue as lives in the Cottage by the Wood near the New Forest.” And another: “This for the young girl that wears spectacles, who minds two babies.” And my favorite: To my sister Jean, Up the Canongate, Down a Close, Edinburgh. She has a wooden leg.

Mandela once told a story to a reporter to explain the difference between the English in South Africa and the Afrikaner, one he said had been passed down by his elders. If a black man came to the door of an English family and asked for food, Mandela said, the woman of the house might invite him in and then give him a slice of toast so thin “the sun could shine through it” and a weak cup of tea. But if he went to the home of an Afrikaner instead, the woman of the house would shout at him for trying to come in through the front door, and tell him to meet her in the back. She would never invite him inside, but she would hand over thick-sliced bread covered in peanut butter and jam, a jug of hot, sweet coffee, and a bag of leftovers to take home to his family.