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

by Deirdre Mask

Until 1991, few people outside of West Virginia’s small cities had any street address at all.

Mapping, addressing, and counting the slum dwellers was, to some, tantamount to giving them permission to stay.

Ideally, countries would have cadastres, public databases that register the location, ownership, and value of land. A good cadastral system makes the buying and selling of land, as well as the collection of taxes, easy. When you buy a piece of land, you (and the government’s tax offices) can be sure that you—and you alone—own it. But the cadastral projects run by the World Bank frequently failed.

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.

A pons—or bridge—was for traveling over water, yes, but archaeologist Alan Kaiser points out that it was also an appropriate spot for begging, fishing, and religious ceremonies.

A gradus, or flight of stairs, was an excellent spot for displaying an executed criminal’s body. An angiportum backed onto the rear entrances of houses and, as Kaiser suggests, would have been the perfect place for, say, abandoning a baby or committing a murder. Prostitutes worked on viae, but aging, low-class ones could also be found on angiporta. When Catullus, a famously raunchy first-century poet, told his lover that she now hangs out in angiporta, he may, Kaiser points out, “have been suggesting she is not behaving as just a prostitute, but as an old broken-down prostitute.” And it’s no accident that “fornication” comes from fornix—the Latin word for “arch.” Even without a name to distinguish each one, it was useful to know your viae from your fora.

Imageable places are hard to get truly lost in. Think

“We may grimace when we hear people talk of ‘finding themselves,’” Nicholas Carr has explained in his book The Glass Cage. “But the figure of speech, however vain and shopworn, acknowledges our deeply held sense that who we are is tangled up in where we are.”

Today, the post office estimates that the zip code saves over $9 billion a year by allowing for more accurate and efficient mailing services.

Immigrants from different regions in China have their own Manhattan street names for the same street according to region and dialect.

The name of the road was more rude slang I wasn’t familiar with: Bell End. I thought it sounded elegant—the light trill of the word Bell paired with the serious and solid End. But in British, it apparently means the end of the penis. According to the local petition, children living on the road had been bullied because of their street name.

Without any trace of irony, the house number can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment, of that century obsessed, as it was, with order and classification.” 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.

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

When men gouged out their teeth or cut off their thumbs to avoid military service, they were exercising the only power they had.

He traveled to Japan, as one commentator has explained, “to relieve himself, for awhile at least, of the immense responsibility of being French.”

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.

To help people find their way, Tokyo is dotted with kōban, small buildings staffed with police officers familiar with the area and armed with detailed maps and thick directories.

Street names are, in a way, the perfect propaganda tool.

“Lost Cause,” the idea that the Civil War was fought over everything but slavery.

Pierre Nora, who has written extensively on collective memory in France, has argued that before the nineteenth century we didn’t need objects to remember the past. Memory was engrained in local cultures, habits, and customs. But as the great changes of the twentieth century seemed to speed up history, and as memory became more removed from everyday experience, we began to feel a powerful urge to hold memories not just in our minds but in specific things and places—like monuments and street names.

Racism was repackaged as empowerment.

the General Electric Pension Trust did. 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.

want a posh street, give it a posh name. It’s no accident that Central Park West is an expensive address; the name was specifically chosen to be expensive.

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

In New York, even addresses are for sale. The city allows a developer, for the bargain price of $11,000 (as of 2019), to apply to change the street address to something more attractive.