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.

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.

Researchers found a positive correlation between street addresses and income, and places with street addresses had lower levels of income inequality than places that did not.

When I visited Pompeii, the ancient city sealed in volcanic ash, I noticed the atmosphere was often hushed, as if we were walking over a graveyard. In a sense, of course, we were. But Pompeii once teemed with people, people with emotions, appetites, and regrets. We forget that life was inside every grave, though now we only see death.

“If you think about the brain as a muscle, then certain activities, like learning maps of London’s streets, are like bodybuilding,” one of the main authors of the paper, Hugo Spiers, has said, “and all we can really say from our new findings is that you’re not working out these particular bits of the brain when you’re relying on SatNav.”

(Zip stands for “zoning improvement plan.”)

(I was delighted, however, to read of a street in Scotland with a Costco and an Ikea recently named Costkea Way.)

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.

Maria Theresa’s orders had been specific; red numbers for Vienna, black for everywhere else. The numbers must be Arabic numerals—1, 2, 3, rather than the Roman i, ii, iii. Only the homes of Jewish people, whom Maria Theresa despised, were assigned Roman numerals.

Prussia allowed Jews to be citizens in 1812, in exchange for taking fixed surnames. An edict of 1833 required all Jews, not just those who were nationalized, to take surnames from a list the government chose for them, like Rubenstein and Bernstein. But soon after, in 1845, 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. As historian Dietz Bering has said, “the Jews, for whom in 1812 the gates of the legal ghetto had been opened only half-heartedly and not even completely, were to be imprisoned again in another ghetto: one of names.”

Manhattan once boasted more plant species than Yosemite, more birds than the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and more ecological communities than Yellowstone, ecologist Eric Sanderson has explained.

Even more interestingly, it seems we don’t just use different parts of our brain to read different languages; the languages we read may also influence the way we think.

To be global leaders, the school’s headteacher writes, students have “to know first who they are and what they inherited, our source of pride and dignity.”