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

by Deirdre Mask

in some years, more than 40 percent of all local laws passed by the New York City Council have been street name changes.

Universal Postal Union.

The UPU coordinates the worldwide postal system.

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.

whether we might see our spaces differently if we didn’t have addresses.

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.

grander narrative of how power has shifted and stretched over the centuries.

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.

counting and naming the residents could shine a spotlight on the slums and allow them to get needed help.

driving forces behind poor economic growth in the developing world: insecure land ownership.

Street addresses boosted democracy,

Addressing the Unaddressed,

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.

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

how important the “where” would become for public health. Addresses made pinpointing disease possible.

Location and disease are inseparable for epidemiologists.

huge swathes of the world are insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people.

the cost of getting those socks out there and distributing them just isn’t worth the potential benefit. But with Missing Maps, they can actually participate in real, genuine fieldwork.

Ultimately, he distilled five components that make up an observer’s mental image of a city: paths; nodes; edges; landmarks; and districts.

mental map,”

our hippocampi are being hurt by the new digital technology.

Place and memory are deeply connected.

Names could tell a visitor where to find an ironmonger (Frying Pan Alley)

The Gropecunt Lane name wasn’t just descriptive; it was also informative.

What had begun as an economic cause was now a deeply political one. Could the penny post help Britain avoid the revolutions of France and America?

Letters with indecipherable addresses were forwarded to what was known as the Dead Letter Office, where “blind officers”

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

We can only speculate as to causation: Do you live on Church Street because you are religious and want to live near a church?

Perhaps we make the street names, and then the street names help make us.

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.

Before street names and numbers, businesses announced themselves with illustrated signs above their doors.

Philadelphia system: odd numbers on one side of a street, even numbers on the other.

process of making society legible,” Scott says, “it changed it radically.”

Most Europeans, for example, didn’t have permanent last names before the fourteenth century.

Assigning each house a number simultaneously advanced bedrock principles of the Enlightenment: rationality and equality.

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

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.

The new grid, with its right angles and plots of even sizes, made land easy to buy and sell.

New York was founded as an outpost of the Dutch West India Company for the sole purpose of making money.

New York played the handsome jock to nerdy Boston, its closest rival.

Numbered streets are a largely American phenomenon.

Penn set out to conduct his “holy experiment”

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. “Philadelphia,” taken from the Greek for “brotherly love,”

numbers as names for streets running north–south—

named the cross streets after “things that Spontaneously Grow in the country,”

But in North America, it was Penn who popularized the grid as a tool of urban planning

“No one will ever know how much the straight lines of the rectangular surveys contributed to the public peace during the Nineteenth Century,”

expected New York to be powerful and magnificent, but not beautiful.

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.